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Describes in chapter 1 – inevitable black and white: (mis)recognition and (mis)representation in the wrong man and freedom and chapter 2 –things: a geography of material desire in quicksand.
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A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS English May, 2015 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Judith Irwin Madera, Ph.D., Advisor Erica Still, Ph.D., Chair Rian Bowie, Ph.D.
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Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Judith Madera for advising this project: for guiding me through my drafts and letting me chat in her office about post-grad plans. I would also like to thank Dr. Erica Still and Dr. Rian Bowie for being my readers and directing my attention to wonderful resources for studying Larsen’s work. I would also like to thank my family and friends, especially my twin sister Catherine and my partner Brett, for absorbing my stress and sharing in my successes not only during the thesis- writing process, but the past two years. I would also like to thank Dr. Stephanie Hawkins for working with me on my undergraduate thesis at the University of North Texas, and exposing me to the work of Larsen when we read Quicksand in her modernism class. Finally, I would like to thank the Department of English, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Writing Center at Wake Forest University for giving me the incredible opportunity to work and study as a graduate assistant at this incredible institution.
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Abstract My project explores the tension between materiality and textuality in the fiction of Nella Larsen, using new materialist and affect theories as frameworks for reading her short stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom” (1926), and her novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). I argue that Larsen mobilizes concepts of misrecognition and misrepresentation through characters’ encounters with materiality in order to challenge ideologies of race and gender. Significantly, Larsen’s stories and novels form an intertextual relationship not only with each other as a fictional body of work, but with biographical documents by and about Larsen, suggesting the tenuous relationship between fiction and reality. I aim to explore not only how Larsen thematizes these tensions in her own work through acts of passing and desire, but how she provides readers with new ways of thinking about identity politics in the twenty-first century.
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Introduction
What things are there to write, if one can only write them. Boiler menders,society ladies, children, acrobats, governesses business men, countesses, flappers, Nile green bath rooms, beautifully filed, gay moods and shiveringhesitations, all presented in an intensely restrained and civilized manner, and underneath the ironic survival of a much more primitive mood. Delicious. […] And surely it is more interesting to belong to one’s own time, to share its peculiar vision, catch that flying glimpse of the panorama which no subsequent generation can ever recover.
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that this type of “multimodal materialism” that investigates the relationship between the particular and the universal emerges in Larsen’s exploration of both aesthetic and political representation. Drawing on materialist theorists, such as Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, and Bill Brown, my thesis demonstrates how Larsen juxtaposes the organic and inorganic in order to reveal how social systems naturalize identity categories, positing normative bodies as universal and othered bodies as particular. She then challenges these apparently fixed classifications through motifs of vitality, misrecognition, and precarity, figuring her protagonists as women continually in the process of becoming-self and becoming-other. Throughout my thesis, I use Grosz’s definition of becoming. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference, she argues that becoming “means that nothing is the same as itself over time, and dispersion means that nothing is contained in the same space in this becoming” ( Becoming Undone 97). She adds that understanding difference as underlying identity urges “the pressure to develop a new understanding of identity that is concerned not with coinciding the subject with its past so much as opening the subject up to its becoming-more and becoming-other” (97). I argue that Larsen’s portrayal of her protagonists’ identities resembles Grosz’s concept of “becoming-more” and “becoming- other” because, through acts of passing and images of precarity, Larsen renders her protagonists as constantly reinventing their understandings of self. While new materialist theories re-conceptualize subject-object relationships by reorienting human subjects to their material environments, Lauren Berlant’s affect theory re-envisions subjectivity by thinking of desire and sovereignty as relational human conditions. Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism (2010) explores the way desire and objects of
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attachment can become cruel or unbearable amid personal and systemic crises. While Berlant’s work focuses specifically on tracking narratives of adjustment to crises and aesthetics of precarity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, her concepts engage productively with Larsen’s work, because Larsen’s writing responds to both her own particular crises (her childhood as the only black child in an all-white family, her divorce, the charges of plagiarism leveled against her), as well as what Hazel Carby calls “the crisis of representation” felt by black artists and politicians alike during the Harlem Renaissance (169). For this reason, my thesis draws on Berlant’s “poetics of attachment” in order to investigate how Larsen uses the medium of the novel to describe the relationship between desire, representation, and relationality. Each of my chapters begins with biographical documents from Larsen’s life in order to show how her texts form a fabric between fiction and reality, and aesthetics and politics. On a personal level, Larsen not only wrote into her fiction biographical elements of her life, but she also wrote into her life fictional elements.^1 On a more collective level, Larsen’s work both belonged to the Harlem Renaissance tradition (belonging to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”^2 ) and challenged its assumptions about authentic black identity. According to Mollie Godfrey, Harlem Renaissance-era artists and politicians— cultural and political representatives “of the race”—sought to challenge white notions of “authentic humanity” (universal) and “authentic blackness” (particular), by rewriting their own versions of authentic blackness; as a result, they nonetheless sustained notions (^1) Drawing on Davis, Jessica Rabin writes, “Although her novels draw on autobiography, much of the time Larsen spent revising her texts was devoted to ‘the process of reinventing fact’ (Davis 296). Her novels arethus doubly fictionalized, since the ‘facts’ of Larsen’s life are largely fiction and then Larsen subjects these to literary fictionalization” (Rabin 108). (^2) Biographer Charles Larson notes, “[Elmer and Nella Imes] were part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed the ‘Talented Tenth,’ the Negro elite, whostimes surpassed it). Sophisticated and urbane, and usually light skinned if not blue bloods, they assumed ae education matched that of their Caucasian counterparts (and at kind of stewardship for their darker and less educated sisters and brothers” (56).
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West Indies, Nella Larsen existed on the fringe of the networks in which she is often included. Jessica Rabin calls this Larsen’s multiple affliliation : “serial or simultaneous connections to more than one formation—and in many cases, to competing formations” (106). Even after achieving fame, Larsen “remained […] highly visible, but rarely the center of attention” (Davis, Nella Larsen 7). As her fiction makes clear, Larsen was interested in exploring what it meant to be both an insider and outsider, to be both represented and to be the other that was excluded, but that nonetheless constituted, the subject. Using these materialist and affective theoretical frameworks alongside biographical and historical research on Larsen, my thesis interrogates the relationship between the material reality of Larsen’s historical-social-aesthetic context and the textual landscapes she creates to investigate identity politics. The first chapter of my thesis examines Larsen’s first two short stories, “The Wrong Man” (1926) and “Freedom” (1926), published under her pen name Allen Semi in Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine. While “The Wrong Man” takes place at a party for an “exclusive” Long Island set and heavily employs imagery of material culture, “Freedom” depicts a psychological drama that uses mostly organic imagery. In this chapter, I read the presence of material culture in “The Wrong Man” and the organic imagery and immateriality in “Freedom” together, arguing that by complicating politics and aesthetics of recognition and representation, Larsen’s narratives render black female subjectivity both a universal and particular experience that emphasizes difference over identification. The second chapter of my thesis uses Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism” to track the protagonist Helga Crane’s optimistic attachments to material culture and
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abstract “things” across a trans-Atlantic landscape in Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand (1928). In this chapter, I specifically examine Helga’s invocation of a desire for “things” that organizes her geographical movement, a movement into spaces that I describe as narrative “impasses” (to use Berlant’s term). While Helga’s desire for things reveals her ontological precarity and motivates her relocation to various cities, each site of relocation reveals itself to be an impasse because of Helga’s social, economic, and racial precarity. I argue that Larsen’s use of desire as a narrative strategy—mobilized through her elastic use of the word “things,” free indirect discourse, and geographical/narrative impasses— re-presents identity and subjectivity as modes of difference and becoming. In my third and final chapter, I examine scenes of encounters between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry in Larsen’s second novel, Passing (1929), arguing that the act of passing reveals recognition to be a form of misrecognition. For Larsen, the act of passing is a narrative device that allows her to explore precarity, which I argue that Larsen defines as the convergence of danger and desire for misrecognition. I track how Larsen complicates her dual protagonists’ subjectivity by forcing them to encounter their own nonsovereignty through each other and materiality. My reading leads me to re- examine the ending of Larsen’s novel, specifically the under-studied possibility that Clare dies an accidental death by falling out of a window. While the ending of Larsen’s novel is ultimately unsolvable, I argue that considering the possibility of an accidental death illuminates the way that Larsen’s text not only destabilizes identity categories, but problematizes the very notion of individuality itself and hints at the transformational possibilities that nonsovereignty offers.
Chapter 1 – “Inevitable Black and White”: (Mis)Recognition and (Mis)Representation in “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom”
Nella Larsen (“Passing”) has skin the color of maple syrup. Her costume of shading grays makes it seem lighter than she really is. […] Underneath her satinsurface Nordic and West Indian are struggling. […] Nella Larsen’s philosophy toward life is answered:things to me instead.” […][S]he is convinced recognition and liberation will—“I don’t have any way of approaching life…it does come to the negro only through individual efforts… […] She wants things— beautiful and rich things.
novels. In fact, sections of the stories are in some cases directly transposed into her later texts, especially themes dealing with the relationship between material culture and identity. But, not only are these stories prototypes for Larsen’s more developed narratives; they also, as Yolanda M. Manora writes, “serve […] as lenses for reading them,” in that they mark the beginning of explorations of gender and race that Larsen develops more fully in her novels (58).^4 In this way, I argue, Larsen highlights the interconnectedness of materiality and textuality, while simultaneously exposing the gap of nonidentity between the two. Indeed, both stories employ motifs of materialisms to complicate facets of identity. Examining Larsen’s choice to publish in Young’s under a male pen name, the first section of my chapter argues that she employs misrecognition and misrepresentation as strategies for evading the exclusion she would most likely face as a black female author, whose experiences were marked as particular rather than universal. In fact, these material conditions provide a conceptual backdrop for Larsen’s stories. In the second section, I argue that Larsen stages misrecognition through the protagonist Julia Romley and the racialized and gendered space of the Long Island party, problematizing both aesthetic and ontological binaries that categorize bodies. While in “The Wrong Man,” Larsen draws heavily upon motifs of material culture to evaluate identity politics, in “Freedom,” Larsen presents themes of misrepresentation and nonidentity from a psychological, immaterial standpoint. In this final section of my chapter, I read Larsen’s use of free indirect
(^4) Thadious Davis similarly explains, “Larsen’s two stories in Young’s , read intertextually with her other published fiction, reveal the integral relationship between landscapes and mental processes, between physical landscapes and boundaries and human manners and styles, between racial and economic structures” ( analysis of these stories to Larsen’s Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance novels Quicksand 183). While this chapter will not provide an intertextual and Passing , I will examine the ways in which material culture, organic processes, and the relationship between body and place illuminate Larsen’s developing interest in identity/body politics that become so crucial to her later work.
Writing about black artists’ reception during the Harlem Renaissance, Mollie Godfrey observes, Harlem Renaissance-era white critics often measured artistic value in terms of a work’s supposed universality, but they barred black art from being considered universal in two ways: first, by dismissing such work as imitative whenever it looked too much like white art (either in style or in characterization); and second, by dismissing it as primitive or racially particular whenever it was recognizably black. (122) While Godfrey’s article refers specifically to Larsen’s short story “Sanctuary” (1930), her comment illuminates concerns surrounding the speculation about the publications of “Freedom” and “The Wrong Man.” That Larsen does not explicitly address themes of race and that she uses a pen name that masks her gender and, as some critics argue, her race (a point to which I will return shortly) demonstrate her awareness of the tension between white male experience as universal and black female experience as particular. In fact, not only does Larsen seem to be aware of this tension, but, as I argue in this chapter, she thematizes this tension through misrecognition and misrepresentation centered around or initiated by the characters’ encounters with material culture.
Gender, Race, and Authorship: Young’s Magazine , “Allen Semi,” and The Critical Reception of Larsen’s Short Stories In “Freedom” and “The Wrong Man,” Larsen’s coding of race, treatments of transgressive female sexuality, and motifs of material culture cater to the readership and narrative formulas of Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine. Biographer George Hutchinson
writes that Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine (sometimes also referred to as Young’s Magazine ) was a pulp monthly that specialized in stories featuring “‘modern women’ who smoked and had affairs” (197). The plots typically revolve around a love-triangle, often in which a poor girl and a rich girl compete for the same male lover. Although the intended readership was young women, biographer Thadious Davis writes that the stories (with titles such as “Wisdom of the Serpent,” “The Hootch Dancer,” and “Pearls for Purity”) usually followed a “male-defined formula” told “from the perspective of male fantasies,” revealing “an internalization of male-constructed images of women as sexual objects” ( Nella Larsen 173-174). Yet despite the male-centered formula, the magazine had a large female readership, and Hutchinson adds that, according to E. Franklin Frazier, the stories “‘helped to define the meaning of sex’ for many young black women in the ‘demoralized’ areas of Chicago’s South Side” (197). More than likely aware of her readership, Larsen perhaps chose to code treatments of race in the text as a way to begin exploring themes of passing that would dominate her second novel. If the narratives of “Freedom” and “The Wrong Man” code race—how we “read” blackness and whiteness on bodies—Larsen’s pseudonym reveals how she also obscured other aspects of identity, namely gender. Larsen published her two short stories under the name “Allen Semi,” an inversion of her married name, and various theories exist as to why Larsen decided not to use her own name. Larson interprets Larsen’s choice as a determination “in her career to separate her personal and public selves,” but he also suspects that the publication in which the novels appeared—a “slick magazine”— influenced her choice (58-59). Equally compelling, Manora argues that the pen name “acts as a signifier for Larsen’s transgressive tendencies; black and female, she published
party with her husband Jim (Larsen, “The Wrong Man” 5). There, she discovers that her rival Myra Redmon has brought a man named Ralph Tyler as her date. When she has a moment alone, Julia summons Ralph to the garden, pleading with him not to tell her husband that she was once his mistress during a personal financial crisis. However, the end of the story reveals that Julia has confided in the wrong man. In an attempt to mask her own past from her beloved husband, Julia not only misrecognizes the man with whom she has shared this secret past, but inadvertently exposes herself, stripping herself of the material security that allows her to participate in her bourgeois fantasy. In “The Wrong Man,” Larsen employs a poetics of misrecognition through a commodity aesthetic, a dialogue between clothed bodies and interiors, and encounters between characters in order to thematize her experience as a black female author as universal rather than particular. The dialogue Larsen establishes between both the clothed body (fashion) and the confined body (the interior) problematizes racial binaries of universal whiteness and particular blackness through the subversion of modernist aesthetic categories and the “inevitable black and white” inscribed on the bodies of the story’s characters. Through the setting and clothing of the characters, Larsen places Julia Hammond Romley at a crossroads in modernist aesthetics that challenges the distinction between white/universal neoclassicism and black/particular primitivism that defined what Godfrey terms the “two competing visions of modernism” (125). Describing the scene as “blaz[ing] with color” and “riotously hued,” and the jazz music as “primitive” and “savage,” Larsen evokes a primitivist aesthetics within a mannered, bourgeois New York setting (3, 4). For Manora, who draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, Larsen uses the party
setting to explore class and racial transgressions, revealing the “tenuousness” of the “mannered worlds” of parties and inverting power structures by displaying them as oddities (Angela Mitchell qtd. in Manora, 61-62). Indeed, Larsen’s references to primitivist aesthetics hint at racial transgression, coded in class; but I would also add that these descriptions participate in contemporary discourses of the relationship between race and aesthetics that Godfrey outlines. Like “Sanctuary,” “The Wrong Man” “disrupt[s] the primitivist aesthetics and neoclassicist logic that holds the universal and particular—or the civilized and the primitive—at odds” (Godfrey 131). By bringing the “primitive” to the mannered setting of the bourgeois New York party, Larsen not only ruptures the “universality” of whiteness and its privilege over the “particularity” of blackness, but exposes that white universality—predicated, contradictorily, on exclusion—as, ultimately, a particular itself. In deploying these two aesthetic categories in the description of a party, Larsen reveals that both the primitive and the mannered are socially-constructed categories rather than innate to a particular race, and she even suggests that these racial categories might themselves be socially-constructed. The setting of the party thus serves as a conceptual space for Larsen to interrogate aesthetic categories and identity politics. Within the space of the party, Larsen’s color-coding and gendering of clothing disrupt normative categories of gender and race. The narrator observes, “It seemed that the gorgeous things which the women were wearing had for this once managed to subdue the strident tones of the inevitable black and white of the men’s costumes” (“The Wrong Man” 3). Larsen uses clothing color to gender the male partygoers, while she terms the women’s clothing “gorgeous”—an adjective lacking any color association. While the “inevitable black and white of the men’s costumes” infer distinctly-drawn categories, the
