Mary Rennels’s Doubts
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Maybe I’m wrong…? Maybe I just don’t get the point? I have just read Alice Dunbar-Nelson‘s review of Passing… and I am shocked, puzzled, and deeply unsettled. How can she, one of my idols, a person whose work I admire and look up to come to such a different conclusion?
To her, this book fully succeeds because it tells a moving, immersive story, not because of the bigger story it could tell us about race and oppression. She claims that Clare “did not a (sic) have to be a near-white woman to do this, nor did the others have to be colored”, to her this is “a situation that is so universal that race, color, country, time, place have nothing to do with it.” (90) To me, this just seems to be a complete misunderstanding… On the other hand I can’t believe that someone like Mrs. Dunbar-Nelson could be wrong about anything that has to do with race and gender. I simply can’t believe it. This book is about race! But not to her… she even goes so far as to state that “the book would have been just as intriguing, just as provocative, just as interesting if no mention had been made of color or race, Clare might have been any woman hungry for childhood friends; Irene and her brown skinned friends any group out of the class of the socially elite.” (90)
Well, I guess that to her this is about showing the world that we are just like anyone else… That we feel the way white people do, that you can tell a story about us that is not about race. That might be an achievement, but is that enough? Shouldn’t this be clear from the very beginning? Shall we really celebrate a work for the accomplishment of showing that racist assumptions about us as “different” and inferior are wrong? I mean, does she really think that a racist will get this idea from reading a story about friendship, jealousy and relationships? And if it was so, why should Mrs. Larsen have chosen to let one of her characters pass, to let one of them have a husband full of hate for Black people, to set this story in Harlem and Chicago?
The more I read and think about this book, the more confused I get. I need to talk to someone!
Source:
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (1929): As in a Looking Glass. The Washington Eagle, May 3, 1929, n.p. In: Larsen, Nella (1929/2007): Passing. A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 90-91.