Outward Layers: Fashion in Conjunction with the Envelope

The materiality of passing extends beyond letters. Fashion can also function as a physical means of subverting the color-line. In “Dressing to Pass During the Harlem Renaissance,” Elizabeth Way explores how authors Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen use “fashion and style to investigate how Black women negotiated their personal identities” (537). As a letter uses the concealment of an envelope to pass through spaces, Black women could don a similar outer layer to pass through domains. Theorist Mary Balkun similarly professes, “Clothing has long been understood as a means for constructing identity, for asserting boundaries, and for identifying the other among us” (103). Whereas the letter’s envelope in Passing lacks an address, Rena’s possession of the right kind of dress allows her to cross racial and physical boundaries; while the envelope’s want of an address gives it an uncoded, anonymous origin, Rena’s refinement encases her in whiteness. However, one must acknowledge that the clothes themselves do not characterize a body as white or Black: “Black Americans are not a monolithic group that dresses in a uniform manner … It is clothing on the black body that makes black fashion because the viewer will always take the race of the wearer into account” (Way 539). The layering of clothing onto the “marked” body creates the marked ensemble. Therefore, wearing mainstream “white fashion” while passing reinforces the expected whiteness of the body that displays it.

This unwritten rule to “assume the whiteness” of mainstream fashion exemplifies the notion of sumptuary codes. In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen and Barbara Fields define sumptuary codes as “written or unwritten” rules that “enforce social classification,” “establish unequal rank and make it immediately visible,” and “do what nature leaves undone” (33). Sumptuary codes compel a person to immediately classify an individual based on arbitrary visible cues, like clothing or a physical feature. For instance, Balkun attests, “Because African Americans could rarely shop in the most exclusive stores, a woman wearing the kinds of clothes that Clare sports was not likely to be identified as a Negro” (106). Evidently, the intermingling of class and race plays a major role in defining who can and who should wear what. The dominant white culture in 20th-century Harlem cannot imagine that a Black person could be of a high class. This conflation between race and economic class continues to be pervasive: “From very early on, Americans wove racist concepts into a public language about inequality that made “black” the virtual equivalent of ‘poor’ and ‘lower class’” (Fields and Fields 11). By wearing “white” clothing, Black passing women rely on the sumptuary codes embedded in the unconscious gaze of others to presuppose their whiteness. The Fields sisters denote this gaze:"Deference rules, variable sumptuary codes, mistaken shootings by police, and border monitoring or segregated spaces all stand in reference to a person as a seen “object.” That reference entails, besides, a seeing object and of course a seeing subject … Our tour examines in close-up the intimate yet public practices that organize individual perception of physical appearance, including one’s own, as subject … Americans observe themselves and each other through their own eyes and those of others, all the while classifying and evaluating. (70)"The American gaze enforces prejudice on a fundamental level. In just a single glance, one makes grand categorizations about the identity, the definition, of a stranger. Thus, the act of passing essentially tricks the gaze by capitalizing on these “visible markers” of racial classifications. In other words, “passers” trust the gaze of others—the “invisible ontologies” of others—to classify them as white based on their use of mainstream and/or expensive attire (Fields and Fields 194).

Larsen’s Passing demonstrates the role of fashion in crafting an exterior with this heightened ontological whiteness. “Luminous,” “Radiant” Clare Kendry, passing as a white woman, wears an “ivory mask” that includes enrobing herself in the finest of attire (Larsen 13, 15, 83). During every scene featuring Clare, Irene, bitter yet in awe, describes her outfit. In one instance, Irene gushes, “Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, in a stately gown of shining black taffeta, whose long, full skirt lay in graceful folds about her slim golden feet; her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the name of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels … she [Irene] regretted that she hadn’t counselled Clare to wear something ordinary and inconspicuous” (Larsen 58). Though Irene finds extreme beauty in Clare’s accouterments, she resents how Clare so freely navigates the white stage. Balkun corroborates: “Her ability to outdress every other woman in a room is a clear indicator of Clare’s social standing and economic clout, but it is also the way she constructs herself as white” (106). Furthermore, when Irene visits Clare earlier in the novel in “a sitting-room, large and high, at whose windows hung startling blue draperies,” Clare wears “a thin floating dress of the same shade of blue, which suited her and the rather difficult room to perfection” (Larsen 23). Her beautiful, flowing gown emphasizes her ability to access the white space of her home since she passes within her marriage. Clare, with her expensive garments and trendy taste, shows how “fashion could be wielded by individuals to manipulate society’s gaze and to try on different personas within the context of a fluctuating 1920s America” (Way 541). Even Irene, not continuously passing throughout Passing, employs fashion as a way to access white spaces, like when she dines on the rooftop of the Drayton Hotel. Both “use clothing to completely re-create the self as white, either occasionally (as Irene does, so she can shop in stores that would not otherwise admit her) or permanently (as does Clare)” (Balkun 103). When Irene, passing as white on the roof of the Drayton, sees Clare regarding her with “steady scrutiny,” Irene looks down at herself and thinks, “Something wrong with her dress?” (Larsen 7). After pausing for a second, she jumps to a frightening conclusion: “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that her before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (7). Irene considers the notion that her attire may be revealing her true race. In questioning her outfit, Irene reinforces how she intentionally dons an ensemble that will give an impression of whiteness; she “calibrate[s]” her “clothing when negotiating the white urban gaze” (Way 543). Her garb serves as a cloak of alabaster in a white realm.

In The House Behind the Cedars, too, Rena’s neatness and sophistication, in addition to her visible whiteness, automatically classify her as white under the codes of post-Civil War South Carolina. In one scene, after receiving the title, “The Queen of Love and Beauty,” at the annual tournament of the Clarence Social Club, Rena prepares for the subsequent ball. Her etiquette instructor Mrs. Newberry advises, “The first thing to do is to get your coronation robe ready. It simply means a gown with a long train. You have a lovely white waist” (Chesnutt 39, 42). Mrs. Newberry cannot even begin to imagine that a Black woman could have been crowned The Queen of Love and Beauty. As Way states, Rena’s mannerisms and dress “immediately gain her acceptance into white society because white people cannot conceive of a fashionable black woman” (Way 565). Chesnutt accords special attention to Rena’s appearance (and the ignorance of tertiary characters regarding said appearance) to emphasize the senselessness of sumptuary codes and the absurdity of “race.” In Rena’s case, we can see how an unmarked exterior gives her access to previously unreachable spheres. Way proposes protagonist Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand, like Rena in The House Behind the Cedars, can similarly “code switch in her dress, a clear sign of her double consciousness, but one she can manipulate for her own ends” (558). Rena’s “tasteful” clothing, combined with her outward fairness, gives her the ability to uphold the “fiction of queenship” and perform as white (Chesnutt 7, 43). Rena, acting as “Cinderella before the clock has struck,” wears whiteness as a costume (44)

Up until now, I have primarily considered Larsen’s Passing and Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, exempting The Human Stain from my considerations of clothing. Thus, my analysis elicits a question that begs to be answered: does Coleman Silk in The Human Stain also “dress to pass” (Way)? Unlike Rena and Clare in our other two passing narratives, Philip Roth does not devote much of his novel to describing Coleman’s dress. For instance, as Nathan Zuckerman enters Coleman’s house in one of the opening scenes of the novel, he writes, “Coleman wore a pair of denim shorts and sneakers, and that was it” (Roth 15). The primary details we receive regarding Coleman’s attire relate to his lack of clothing. However, this lack of dress emphasizes his paleness, his “light yellowish skin pigmentation” (Roth 15). Rather than relying on sumptuary codes to assume whiteness based on his attire, Coleman trusts in his actual, ambiguous skin color to assert his position as a Jewish (passing) man. The brief statements of attire nevertheless allude to an intentional emphasis on his light-skinned appearance. Even Nathan recognizes the symbolic resonance of Coleman’s nakedness, stating: “He was still without a T-shirt, which now that we were out of the kitchen and on the porch I couldn’t help but take note of it—it was a warm July night, but not that warm” ( 21). Coleman appears to wear his nakedness with the same purpose that he would wear a T-shirt. Of course, Coleman presents himself differently in the privacy of his home, with the company of a trusted friend, rather than in a public space. His undressed state may in actuality represent a lapse in passing; he has let down his guard and now wears nothing to conceal his identity. More importantly, however, Coleman’s bare upper half draws attention to the tattoo on the top of his right arm:"‘U.S. Navy’ is all the tattoo said, the words, no more than a quarter inch high, inscribed in blue pigment between the blue arms of a blue anchor, itself a couple inches long. A most unostentatious design as military tattoos go … It was the mark evocative not only of the turbulence of the worst night of his life but of all that underlay the turbulence—it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of the ineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed. (Roth 183-4)"Without his shirt, we can clearly see the U.S. Navy tattoo as it corresponds to Coleman’s bare body. The tattoo, in its embodiment of the “whole of his history,” contains more racial undertones than even Coleman’s visible skin color. Coleman’s tattoo reminds him of both his passing as Jewish but also his Blackness: “The ‘blue pigment’ of the tattoo serves to remind Coleman that his ‘black’ pigmentation almost gave him away and could have led to a court martial and a dishonourable discharge” (Moynihan 140). The tattoo represents the racial discrimination that Coleman avoids by passing as Jewish (though he still faces anti-Semitism at the hands of Les Farley). Perhaps a tattoo is not exactly “clothing,” but because one ‘wears’ a tattoo as if it were a bodily accessory. Although Coleman does not craft an appearance that so neatly conceals his race as in the cases of Rena and Clare, he nevertheless “wants to create a Utopian space of self-fashioning, a desire that helps explain why he chooses to pass as Jewish rather than as an unethnic white. Passing as Jewish puts him at a slightly oblique angle to the American racial binary and the color line” (Wilson 144). From the gaze of an outsider, the U.S. Navy tattoo appears to be an imprint of Coleman’s Jewish passing; because Coleman “lie[s] about his race” to join the Navy and “step through a door where the only out-and-out Negroes on the premises were either laundering the linens or mopping the slops,” the tattoo signifies his first formal breach of the color-line, his “first great crime” (Roth 109, 182). Though the tattoo does not act as a layer of clothing that others can conflate with class or race, Coleman has branded the anchor into his arm as if it were a method of physically categorizing him as Jewish/not African American: Julia Faisst writes, “Due to this corporeal marker, Silk literally embodies his secret identity” (126). Moreover, considering the tattoo as an act of inscription or imprinting makes us consider the connection between the physically marked body and the marked letter.

While letters compel us to consider the physicality of passing, clothing (and tattoos!) also emphasizes how material entities can “construct identity” (Balkun 103). In manipulating the invisible ontologies present in the gaze of others, clothing can elicit an assumption of race. As a layer of ink on Coleman’s shoulder stamps him as white, an envelope conceals the marked inner layer it contains; As Rena wears the wreath of the Queen of Love and Beauty to attend the ball, Clare wears the thin dress of blue to access a similar white domain. Both the protagonists and their accompanying letters pass through racial boundaries with the aid of a gaze-controlling layer.

-MD