Mary Mabel Youman's Critic For Passing

Mary Mabel Youman one of the critics for Passing, a novel written by Nella Larsen in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance. She explains in her critic that Passing, is about how blacks can lose their spirituality, and how they continue to live within their racial groups. As the main character of Passing, according to Youman, Irene Redfield, is the one character that struggles the most with her black heritage and lack of spiritual values than Clare Kendry, the character in the novel that struggles being black and passes herself as a white female. After being gone for twelve years, she returns to visit Harlem, to her heritage, because she has lost her spirituality and ironically, she misses being around blacks. Claudia Tate’s critic refers to Passing as “an intriguing romance” (349). The story of a beautiful mulatto, passing for white, Clare Kendry, who leaves Harlem and is married to a rich white man. The critic believes the story

Her emotional state and insecurity perhaps allows her to be spontaneous, she is “capable of heights and depths of feeling” (340), something Irene lacks. She needs thrill in her life and that is why she wants to return to Harlem. When she writes to Irene, she expresses how sad she really is, and how much she wishes to return to Harlem;
I am lonely, so lonely … cannot help longing to be with you again, a I have never longed for anything before; and I once wanted many things in my life… You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I often thought I was glad to be free of…. It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases … [ellipsis Larsen’s] (p. 8) [7]; and “You don’t know, you can’t realize how I want to see Negros to be with them again, and to talk with them, to hear them laugh (p. 129) [51]