Summary Of Passing By Nella Larsen

The novel Passing by Nella Larsen takes place in the 1920’s. The Passing consists of two characters, childhood friends; Clare and Irene. Both females are both mixed-race and portrait different lives, Clare lives her life as a white woman. Meanwhile, Irene lives her life as an African-American, true to herself. Racial passing is when a black person pretends to be white in order to live in a society. Clare makes the decision to pass while Irene decides not to pass as a white person. Clare lost touch with Irene when she moved in with her two white aunts and made her decision to pass as a white woman because she was convinced that was the only way to find happiness in the white society. At this time, it seemed to be a good choice for a black

She is married to a black man who is a doctor and activist for the black community and strives to live her life with her husband better than the life her parents lived. Irene did not decide to pass as a white permeant although she knows she might be given more opportunities than if she was a black woman in that era. When Irene and Clare reunite after years apart, Irene finds it hard to renew their friendship because Clare chose to abandon her heritage and allow her husband a loud, outspoken racist white financier to speak to her and disrespect her and her ancestry in the way her husband speaks about blacks. Irene cannot wrap her mind around understanding why Clare made her decision to pass as a white. Irene decided not to pass as a white permanently, she is a hypocrite because Irene selects when she wants to pass as white for example; when the novel begins Irene is sitting in a segregated rooftop restaurant because Irene is able to pass as a white and hopes to not be exposed because she is enjoying herself and would rather not be kicked out and humiliated. Irene only portrays as a white person when it has to do with a status, Irene tells the reader she only uses “’passing’ for petty things, not anything important” (6). As Clare’s passing is obsessively and erotically pictured; Irene passing is to an extent is faceless. In this novel the permanent passer, Clare displays through the scrutiny of the casual passer, Irene, who already partly knows what she looks for. In the novel, the narrator tells the reader, “the fact of our ability to ‘pass’” (56). Irene’s evasion is, typically,