The Public/Private and Interior/Exterior Binaries of the Letter

Not only does the letter “as / not a genre” challenge racial boundaries, but the physicality of the letter mirrors the passing trope (Jolly and Stanley). Nella Larsen’s Passing perfectly exemplifies this phenomenon. The novel opens with protagonist Irene Redfield receiving a “mysterious,” “furtive” letter “which bore no return address to betray the sender” (Larsen 1). Immediately, however, Irene recognizes the letter’s sender could be no other than Clare Kendry, her childhood companion who has decided to pass as a white woman. Irene, noting the “danger” of the letter’s contents, senses its symbolic potency (Larsen 1). The envelope acts as a site of containment—almost as if it were a Pandora’s box. Within its folds, it holds the risk, the danger of Clare’s breach of the color-line along with the betrayal of her race and culture. Because Irene feels “bound” to an obligation to her race to maintain the color-line, Clare—and her letter—threatens her sense of security (Larsen 38). Theorist Walter Benn Michaels explains how this notion of race as a “possession” functions: Michaels suggests one’s culture, as a part of a wider structure of racism, has become “the right one for a certain people” (Michaels 683). He continues: “It is only the appeal to race that makes culture an object of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture, preserving it, stealing someone else’s culture, and so on, their pathos” (685). The letter’s contents, penned by Clare’s hand, put into question the stability of racial boundaries and endanger Irene’s prized stasis and security. Because Irene views race as an inescapable “duty” to which one must be loyal, she sees Clare as a deserter of her race (Larsen 38).

In accordance, Matthew Wilson suggests, “The ‘transgression’ of race becomes a moral transgression” (141). Clare’s passing not only disrupts Irene’s sense of order, but it also implies Clare would rather forsake the identity that is “better for her” and place both herself and Irene in a perilous position rather than be Black (Michaels 683). Irene sees this as both morally wrong as well as “selfish” (Larsen 38). Moreover, the letter’s materiality also represents Clare. As Johanna M. Wagner suggests, Irene “personifies a letter from Clare attributing Clare-esque characteristics to the harmless epistle” (149). The letter, contained in an “envelope of thin Italian paper,” reflects Clare’s position as a passing white woman (Larsen 1). Just as Clare possesses racial fluidity in her ability to identify as both white and Black, the anonymous envelope, lacking a return address, can slide through borders and occupy multiple domains concurrently. The anonymous letter “defies the assumption that blackness must be visibly evident” (Moynihan 138). With some paper, a pen, an envelope, and a stamp, anyone can send anybody anything, regardless of identity. Irene even describes Clare’s existence as an “ivory mask,” a white façade (Larsen 15). The letter lies within a blank envelope, a white “skin,” that gives it a quality of unmarkedness. Like Clare, “its skin colour renders [its] race ultimately unknowable: [it] can easily cross the borders between the white and the black world” (Pile 1).

After Irene receives another letter from Clare, she tears the “offending letter into tiny ragged squares that fluttered down and made a small heap in her black crêpe de Chine lap … And that, she told herself, was that” (Larsen 36). The violent, meticulous destruction of the letter mirrors Irene’s attempt to sever any connection with Clare. However, due to her self-proclaimed “duty” to Clare, the ties hold (38). Because Clare represents this subversion of racial boundaries that Irene so fears, the letter, able to “pass” from a white (passing) hand of Clare to a Black domain, doubly represents this subversion. Wagner also notes this doubling, arguing that “Clare operates as Irene’s double” (146). Although Wagner focuses not on the doubling of letters but instead on the doubling of character, she nevertheless identifies how Clare inhabits the same oppositions as the epistle. The envelope, the impenetrable exterior, occupies the unmarked public terrain, while the letter, literally marked, rests snugly in its private bed of anonymity. In traveling from sender to receiver, the letter passes between Black and white, named and anonymous, and private and public spheres. In its position as a repository of binaries, the letter encapsulates the complex character of passing as well as the complex character who passes. Thus, in asserting her affective loyalty to her race and her sense of security, Irene attempts to nail down the fluidity—the subversion of binaries—that Clare presents. Irene’s methodical tearing of the letter foreshadows Clare’s eventual demise. Even if Clare’s death is ambiguous, her termination nevertheless restores order to Irene’s conception of reality. Irene cannot live with the idea that her systematic way of existence rests on a cracked foundation.

-MD