Passing: The Historical Phenomenon through Nella Larsen’s Narrative

This thesis talks about the way the historical phenomenon of racial passing influenced Nella Larsen’s writing and it focuses on her novel Passing (1929). Through the support of the novelist’s biographies and many essays written on this topic, I demonstrate how the phenomenon of racial passing, although it was a source of salvation for thousands of African Americans in the period of the Jim Crow Laws, hid a dark side. Indeed, even if it gave many individuals the chance to escape the persecution perpetrated towards African Americans, it still required psychological sacrifices. The main characters of the novel represent a clear demonstration of this theory, since they both find themselves fighting against their own real identities of mixed-race women, just as Nella Larsen did. While one of them longs to accede to white privileges, the other one has a desperate desire to return to her own people, but, unfortunately, none of them is able to obtain what they really want. It results evident that being a person born of an interracial couple during the Segregation era was extremely difficult since it not only meant to repress a part of the own identity, but also to live in a life of contradictions and ambiguity, just as Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry do in the novel. In any case, it is possible to affirm that individuals having a biracial identity were destined to live a life of suffering, no matter what path they chose. Society did not even consider the existence of these people as a possible option; no choice would have ever let them live happily.