It’s like when you try and get magnets together they’re just going to repel each other away. I think it’s actually really important that these two women are so alike and so similar, and I think that’s a big reason why this static exists between them. We see oftentimes it is a mixture of self-loathing and seeing the traits in yourself and the people around you not coming out in the way you have sort of ordered them in your head. Kaitlyn Greenidge: I think that’s where Larsen’s novel is so true to life, where those deep resentments come from.
But she is also dealing with colorism for her children, and she’s also dealing with a marriage that has a lot of scorn inside it. She thinks that Claire shouldn’t be allowed to come back, and she thinks that Claire should be considered permanently afraid of having a darker-skinned child. She’s playing by all these rules that she sees Claire breaking, but she’s not really getting the advantages she believes she would get from staying on her side of the color line, socially.
She is actually passing in many of the scenes where she encounters Claire in the beginning of the book, but she doesn’t think of herself as doing that in a transgressive way, because she has these rules that are kind of arbitrary-she’ll only do it if she’s buying something but she won’t pass socially, and that’s meaningful to her in a way that the rest of the book doesn’t really support, the idea that that’s an important distinction.īut I think a lot of her rage comes from the fact that her life isn’t that different than Claire’s. In today’s episode, Nichols and Newman continue their discussion of Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance classic Passing with guest Kaitlyn Greenidge, focusing on friendship between Black women, female transgression and anger, and the novel’s relationship to Toni Morrison’s Sula.Ĭatherine Nichols: I thought that a lot of Irene’s anger was interesting because she is supposedly not transgressing in this way, even though she admits in the text itself that she passes regularly, for theater tickets and things like that. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols choose one book for each year of the 20th century, and-along with special guests-will take a deep dive into a hundred years of literature. Welcome to part two of the second episode of our new original podcast, Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books.
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