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Irene Redfield Identity

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Irene Redfield starts the story off knowing her identity. She continues the story holding her identity tightly, and not bending from who she thinks she is, or what she thinks she is. She does not react well to change and likes things to be a certain way. Her problem in the story is not that she has not found her identity, but that she hasn 't done enough to develop her identity. She sees the world as black and white, and unlike Clare who sees the grey area, she is blinded to it. In the novel, the narrator says, "But Irene didn 't know and didn 't try to discover." (Larsen, 10), This quote represents how Irene isn 't trying to find herself, she just stays in the safe zone and doesn 't try to truly find her identity. She just stays with, what she perceives her identity …show more content…

Due to Clare coming into her life, Clare showed Irene the grey and made her envious of what Clare has and can have. Irene then becomes insecure and loses her balance, calculated identity. She becomes lost, and she doesn’t exactly know who she is any longer. The reader see’s that with this statement, “She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race… Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic” (Larsen, 98). This statement shows the change in Irene, and how her identity becomes shaken. Irene has at the beginning of the book would have easily chose race, she has even expressed her dislike for Clare, and also Clare has had an affair with her husband. Though Irene now no longer see’s things as black or white, and see’s the complexity of the grey, is now unable to make a decision that was once easy. This confusion expresses the confusion Irene now has with her identity. Irene has passed before on occasion, but Clare has shown her more than she has ever known and has confused her. Making her lose her once stable

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She uses the words ‘died’, ‘terror’, ‘fear’, ‘dark’, ‘risk’, ‘strain’, and ‘hellish’; which are all words associated with danger or negativity. In contrast, Irene enjoys being a mother and always thinks about her children when making decisions. She feels motherhood is a strong life-long responsibility that can definitely be stressful, but is worth it in the long run. She feels such an obligation to her children that she puts their needs before hers. “Nor did she admit that all other plans, all other ways, she regarded as menaces, more or less

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This earns her Irene’s compassion, empathy and closure. Irene portrays her as an emotionless and catlike creature who has a difficult emotion to understand. Perhaps her father’s death has altered her psychology, hence making her more prone to danger. Clare searches for thrill by chasing after danger and freedom to make her life more exciting and fill the void created by her race and the death of her father. Her daringness gives her courage to pass, which she considers a way to tackle the obstacles her race exposes her to.

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