Mrs. John Bellew, is determined to maintain her
newly resurrected friendship with Irene despite
the risks to her social status, marriage, and per-
sonal safety. Her insistence gives Irene ample op-
portunity to study her old friend and to assess the
benefits and drawbacks of passing, and the nature
of life in the white world. While Clare reveals that
passing has given her “everything I want, except,
perhaps a little more money” (44), Irene notes
that her friend’s physical loveliness is something
innate, and independent of her feigned racial sta-
tus. Clare, she notes, “always had that pale gold
hair... lips... sweet and sensitive and a little ob-
stinate” and eyes that were “magnificent! dark,
sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and
set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes, slow and
mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, some-
thing withdrawn and secret about them” (45).
Clare’s identity is perpetually under scrutiny, a
point reaffirmed by the nickname that her white
financier husband John applies to her. During
Irene’s first visit to the couple’s apartment, John
Bellew arrives and greets his wife as “Nig,” a name
that he uses now because “When we were first
married,” he explains, “she was as white as—as—
well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’
darker and darker” (67). When Irene presses him
to consider the possibility that she might be “one
or two per cent coloured,” he is emphatic in his
racist rejection. “‘Oh no, Nig,’ he declared, ‘noth-
ing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so
it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as
far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nig-
ger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my fam-
ily. Never had been and never will be’” (68). At
this defining moment, Irene becomes complicit in
Clare Kendry Bellew’s racial masquerade. She re-
frains from revealing her own identity and does
nothing to refute John Bellew’s racism.
The tension continues to build as Irene Red-
field grapples with the overtures from Clare and
the prospect of becoming a sort of racial mediator
for her former friend. “I’ve no intention of being
the link between her and her poorer darker
brethren,” she insists to her husband, physician
Brian. Yet, Irene’s efforts to avoid Clare and her
husband are ultimately undone. John Bellew meets
Irene out in public and in an instant sees her as an
African-American woman, rather than as the
white woman he believed her to be. At a dinner
party, his rage about his wife’s association with
Irene explodes. In an effort to protect her friend,
Irene steps in to protect her friend, determined not
to have “Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew” (209).
In the intense and fleeting scene that follows,
Clare plummets to her death from the apartment
balcony: “One moment Clare had been there, a
vital glowing thin, like a flame of red and gold. The
next she was gone” (209). Larsen artfully con-
structs the scene so that it is impossible to deter-
mine whether Irene, who is last seen with her
“hand on Clare’s bare arm,” has made an effort to
“save” her friend by pushing her to her death, or
whether Clare committed suicide.
According to Larsen biographer Thadious
Davis, the novel is a deliberately organized work
that reflects Larsen’s interest in probing the psyche
of African-American women with middle-class as-
pirations. Larsen, notes Davis in a comprehensive
study, based the character of Irene Redfield on her
own childhood friend Pearl Mayo and on a well-
known YWCA officer and Fisk graduate, Irene
McCoy. The novel prompted a series of positive re-
views that praised Larsen for the “sharpness and
definition of [her] mind” (Davis, 329). The novel
seems to have confirmed Larsen’s formidable talent
as a writer, although recent critical assessments
tend to regard the work as less powerful than her
debut work, QUICKSAND(1928). It is worth noting
that Larsen completed the novel during an espe-
cially trying time in her personal life. She discov-
ered that her husband, FISKUNIVERSITYprofessor
Elmer Imes, was involved in an extramarital affair
with Ethel Gilbert, the woman he would marry
when his divorce from Nella Larsen Imes was final-
ized. Yet, despite the personal frustration with
which she was dealing, Larsen crafted a novel that
would catapult her into the literary elite and result
in her selection as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1930.
Her award also ranked as the first Guggenheim
prize given to an African-American woman.
Contemporary assessments of the Harlem Re-
naissance and Larsen’s contributions to the move-
ment note that her novel tackled prevailing major
questions relating to race, mixed-race identity, and
the complex double-consciousness that scholar
and CRISISeditor W. E. B. DUBOISarticulated in
his pioneering volume, SOULS OF BLACK FOLKPassing 415