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.Unlike TheSleeper Wakes, which ultimately demands Amy s homecoming as ameans of bringing anticipated closure to the passing plot, Passing ren-ders the status of such homecoming a primary site of interrogation.Accordingly, Larsen initiates the narrative proper with Irene s receiptof Clare s letter announcing Clare s desire to reinitiate contact with Negro society (a beginning that renders it necessary for the reader togo back in time through Irene s memory of their first reunion in Chi-cago).As a result, the focus of Larsen s text is not the development ofan individual subjectivity through an act that ultimately must be repudi-ated, but the very status of racial community. The notion of community tacitly alludes to the other distinguishingcharacteristic of Passing: namely, its ingenious triangulation of the pass-ing plot.Unlike both Johnson s and Fauset s texts, Larsen s novella ex-plores the volatile relationship between two female protagonists, bothof whom pass for white and both of whom see class privilege as a keyto their survival as women within a patriarchal society.Primarily such astrategy of triangulation enables Larsen to filter her narrative throughthe watchful eyes of Irene, who is liable to wonder at the status of her 48 Crossing the Linefriend s sudden yearning for my own people (182).In effect, therefore,Passing is able to translate the various anxieties associated with racialpassing through the character of Irene, who voices them in the form ofher own ambivalent censure of Clare s frank disclosure that she passes inorder to acquire the wealth and social status that painfully eluded her ingirlhood.Ambivalence, in fact, becomes a major theme of the novella,as Irene attempts (although with little success) to reconcile her fasci-nation with and attraction to Clare with her discomfort at the variouscompromising positions that she feels compelled to assume in order tosafeguard Clare s secret.Irene aptly sums up this ambivalent economy ofaversion and desire which could well describe the critical reception ofmodernist fictions of passing in a discussion with her husband Brian: It s funny about passing. We disapprove of it and at the same time con-doneit.It excites our contempt andyet werather admireit.Weshyawayfrom it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it (185 86).As Irene s remark hints, the notion of race loyalty constitutes animportant basis of Irene s critique of Clare s passing, and thus of herability to establish herself as superior to her friend.A self-fashioned race woman, Irene distinguishes between her own occasional pass-ing, which she justifies as a means of circumventing racial segregation,and Clare s seemingly more opportunistic and deceitful (because per-manent) commitment to passing in her marriage.The difference be-tween herself and Clare, as Irene imagines it, is that whereas Clare isprimarily interested in crossing the line as a means of self-advancement,Irene s interests lie in working to secure the happiness of others, notmerely her husband and her two young sons, but the race as a whole.Repeatedly the text contrasts Irene s perception of Clare s having way (a phrase that encompasses Clare s knack for acquiring things as well asthe possibility that she is having her way with Irene s husband) withher own philanthropic work on behalf of the Negro Welfare League,a racial uplift organization modeled after the naacp and the NationalUrban League.Additionally, the discourse of racial uplift provides Irenea ready vocabulary for establishing the authenticity of her self througha series of racialized oppositions to Clare.According to Irene, she andClare are strangers.Strangers in their desires and ambitions.Strangerseven in their racial consciousness.Between them the barrier was just ashigh, just as broad, and just as firm as if in Clare did not run that strainof black blood (192). Racial Negotiations in Passing Narratives 49In order thus to see Clare as a stranger, however, Irene must also natu-ralize both her own passing and her status as a classed and gendered sub-ject.Larsen hints at how Irene s censuring of Clare hinges on her abilityto sustain a privileged relation to domesticity and to properly domesti-cated female sexuality.Notwithstanding her work for the Negro Wel-fare League, for example, Irene seems wholly unconcerned with the wel-fare of her black maid Zulena, and she exploits the fact of her marriageto Brian and the presence of their two young sons as a means of castingClare s sexuality as flaunting, a shade too provocative, and not safe. While she protests that Clare s passing irks her because it seems predi-cated on a blatant desire for gain, in fact Clare s rapid ascent up the classladder violates Irene s middle-class belief in fair play and her tacit com-mitment to the American Dream of prosperity as a reward for sacrifice,self-discipline, and hard work.Like Amy in The Sleeper Wakes butunlike Brian, who harbors a dislike and disgust for his profession andhis country (187), Irene is loath to give up her attachment to a nationalnarrative.Such trust in her own entitlement allows Irene to overlook the factthat for Clare, passing provides a relatively sure ticket away from the do-mestic sphere of her white aunts, who exploit her as a source of house-hold labor, and into the ranks of the upper class.In Clare s narrative,however, it is precisely their disparate class locations as children, not anyfundamental difference in their race consciousness, that primarily dis-tinguishes her passing from Irene s. You can t know, she tells Irene, how, when I used to go over to the south side, I used almost to hate allof you.You had all the things I wanted and never had had.It made meall the more determined to get them, and others (159)
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