hi everybody and welcome to the second lecture of week four uh you've done it you're halfway through the summer session of humanities 202 congratulations uh and today we're going to be briefly discussing the novella passing by Nella Larson uh from the late 1920s um I find it to be one of the more interesting books that we read in Humanities uh 202 so I hope you have a lot of ideas and things to say about that on the discussion forum if you read the opening excerpt you should recognize it as from County Cullen's Heritage which we discussed a little bit last time one three centuries removed from the scenes his father's loved spicy Grove Cinnamon Tree what is Africa to me and you might ask yourself well what does that poem have to do with the beginning of passing are we passing itself none of the characters are from Africa well I think that Larson chooses to begin her uh novella with that passage from Heritage because it really is a book that's about these internal divisions that we talked about when we were talking about Heritage um and more broadly the difference between County Cullen and Langston Hughes these internal uh divisions between what it means to be white and what it means to connect to the African-American experience how these two things are at odds with one another and that clearly is the case with Irene as well as her friend Claire who reappears both of these characters seem to struggle mightily uh with their own racial identity um if you look uh to get a sense of this we look on page 190. her son Ted and husband Brian are having a conversation about lynching and obviously this is a very sensitive subject and something that is very important to have conversations about uh dad why is it that they only Lynch colored people Ted asked because they hate him son Brian Irene's voice was a plea and a rebuke on several occasions throughout the course of the novel you hear about Irene trying desperately to distance herself from the race problem the race question that she says she wants very much to be normal and to be normal means to not consider think about discuss acknowledge um the horrible aspects of racism within America in the early 20th century but all of this is kind of repressing it within herself she uh ends up feeling quite intrigued as well as repulsed by uh her by Claire's Beauty and her attractiveness and her ability to pass or to pretend to be white successfully and pull off the disguise so um Irene feels this ambivalence you could say this um satisfaction and dissatisfaction this longing this hatred she really loads Claire she really doesn't want her to be around and on the other hand she seems magnetically to be pulled towards Claire uh these these different emotions really do set the stage of what does it mean to be African-American in the early 20th century another example of the ambivalence um happens on page 155. uh she's considering Brian uh her husband who she has convinced herself is quite uh Restless quite dissatisfied in their marriage Brian again unhappy Restless withdrawn and she who had prided herself on knowing his moods their causes and their remedies had found it first Unthinkable and then intolerable that this so like and yet so unlike those other spasmatic restlessnesses of his should be to their incomprehensible it should be to her incomprehensible and elusive he was restless and he was not Restless he was discontented yet there were times when she felt he was possessed of some intense secret satisfaction like a cat who had stolen the cranium now this is interesting on two levels for one it again is getting at us at this ambivalence this juxtaposition between what it means to be white and what it means to be African-American these characters are internally divided uh within themselves dissatisfied yet satisfied and so forth on the other hand what's interesting about this is Irene uh who considers herself to be an expert on her husband's moods one of the most interesting elements of this Novella uh is that inability to know what we are thinking well one other uh you look at your husband and you think you know uh what he wants what he desires what he's thinking about in reality you have no idea um and this disconnect between people even people who believe that they know each other or can see through each other uh this idea that we are really strangers uh to one another is a marker of 20th century literature generally I think this is something that is very common in modernism it's very common uh in forms that we're going to see later on but this idea as we've seen elsewhere of Disconnect this lack of ability to bond with fellow human beings is if we are all kind of severed from one another and for Irene she feels estranged from her husband as soon as Claire arrives because Claire is either the object of Brian's affection or Claire is someone who is unjustly loathed by her husband so she projects her own anxieties about Brian's affections for her onto Claire rather than dealing with them herself now all of this estrangement and disconnect this emphasis on the surface rather than on the content of one's character so to speak uh is really well described in the uh the number of parties in the novella the importance of having a party now hopefully all of us have been to a formal party at some point in our lives if not I'm sure you'll have an opportunity to do that down the line but when you have when you go to a formal party you get dressed up you put on makeup you put on a tie you put on these kinds of things uh two in a sense wear a mask a likable mask so that when you go to the party people will make the proper assumptions about you um so she describes the party as follows the familiar little tinkling sounds of spoons striking against frail cups the soft running sounds of inconsequential talk here we have uh as she's getting ready for this superficial chitter chatter of the party um satisfied after bathing her swollen face is on 164 in cold refreshing water and carefully applying a stinging splash of toilet water she went back to the mirror and regarded herself Gravely satisfied that they're lingered no betraying evidence of weeping she dusted a little powder on her dark white face and again examined it carefully and with a kind of ridiculing contempt the idea of putting on a mask obviously is extremely important to understanding um understanding this the the point of this novel what this novel is about going to these social events um Claire's ability to pass herself off uh creates a certain kind of paranoia a certain kind of um how can we ever be a hundred percent sure what that other person is thinking for example when she uh is trying to determine whether or not her feelings about her husband's infidelity or husband's strain mind she acknowledges she had no facts or proof on page 176. the only thing that she can do to prove it is she thought that the look on his face was most Melancholy on page 170. how do we read one another in a world that is full of everybody is passing not just on a racial level although that happens to be the most um important level for this novel um on a deeper level it's about everybody passing um think back to the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock the people who are judging one another coming and going living in this kind of superficial boring World tedious World um and what is lost in that is an ability to communicate on some more significant level what does this have to say um about race um what does race mean here is race something that is akin to wearing a mask uh we can look on page 141 it's Irene having a conversation with Hugh at the party well take my own experience with Dorothy Tompkins I'd met her four or five times in groups and crowds of people before I knew she wasn't a negro one day I went to an awful tee terribly Dicky Dorothy was there we got talking in less than five minutes I knew she was Faye not from anything she did or said or anything in her appearance just just something a thing that couldn't be registered um foreign what happens here as is described by um Irene is there's a sense that maybe race is substantial that maybe race is something that is that you can see just just something something you can tell you can tell that it wasn't it's someone putting on an act the problem is as we see with uh Irene's attitude towards Claire as well as even more importantly towards her husband that in fact we cannot trust these imaginary or romantic ideas uh in fact perhaps we it would be impossible to tell if someone was passing or Not by some intangible suggestion because Irene is misreading her husband here um why can we why would we not also assume that Irene is misreading the Dorothy Tompkins situation as well we can call into question or into doubt her ability or anyone's ability to read under the surface of one's skin color and detect some kind of Kernel of an essence of a racial identity we can call that into question and say perhaps that's all a myth know if that is a myth and if it's true that race is simply a mask that you can take off that you can put on on one level that raises the issue of how arbitrary race is the fact that we think that race means something if you have white skin you are this if you have black skin you are this and so on down the line if that is made to be arbitrary like a mask that you can take on or take off then it calls into question the entire category of race maybe race itself has never meant anything maybe it's just us assigning those things to a certain kind of arbitrary marker like skin color it really has nothing to do with the content of one's character that also uh that works very well for the individuals who can perhaps pass whose skin color is light enough to pass but what about the individuals who have dark skin and who cannot uh pass what do we do with those individuals what do we do with the darker skinned individuals well the answer to that question is if race has been shown to be an arbitrary marker that doesn't have any connection to the content of one's character then that would hold true regardless of whether or not one was passing that would always be the case we would have to recognize that we're interpreting the world in a very meaningless and superficial way and that would challenge us to rethink our own ideas about race and maybe to begin to move past racism altogether where away from that even still today but that was a significant notion for nella Larson to propose in the early 20th century now before we move on I think we should discuss a raise the issue of uh the final scene in the novel the final scene John Bellow comes um and he is by a window and the of course he gets let's just say he ends up out of the window um and the question that is raised here is John Bellow once he has discovered that his wife is actually African-American is in a rage he invades into this party and starts acting belligerent um and so when he goes out the window there are questions about did he kill himself was he murdered and we cannot really be sure do you trust Irene do you trust Claire um do you think you have an understanding of John Bellow enough to know that he would do X Y or Z this position of uncertainty complements nicely the in the rest of passing as a novel it it really brings home for us as readers what Larson has been trying to say which is we are sitting here as readers trying to pass judgment trying to come to some significant judgment on one of these characters either they're murderers or they committed suicide or something else and we do not have enough facts to do that all we have are guesses all we have are arbitrary markers of identity we don't have facts we don't have uh concrete evidence to point to this is true not just of that final Act but it is actually true of the entire novel it throws the mirror back on us and says you think you're certain of what you know you think you can make judgments on things but in reality you know a lot less than you think you do and if that's true you should Reserve judgment far more frequently than you are currently throwing judgment around and you should recognize that the things you often base your judgments on are arbitrary uh they're not enough they are insignificant in the grand scheme of The Human Experience I think it's an absolutely compelling case um raises a lot of really interesting questions about how we think about race in America the final uncertainty that the reader feels really cements for me um that feeling of uncertainty that I think is extremely productive if we're going to combat racism uh moving forward into the 21st century I hope you also enjoyed uh Nella Larson's passing I hope you will discuss some of your favorite passages raise some of those significant questions on the discussion forum and I will look forward to hearing those as well as reading your Reflections in the days ahead all right thanks very much