passing - clare/irene Flashcards
berman ghan
but neither can fully accept either of the racial identities which they perform. Irene is unable to fully subsume herself in the performance of whiteness by a husband and children that are themselves unable to pass for white, while Clare’s black identity is suffocated by her need to pass for her racist husband
- are trapped in that clash between their personal/social selves, unable to feel like they truly belong, so long as the performances are demanded of them.
bernstein - clare and irene relationship
both cause suffering to eachother - source of anguish
irene’s security in identity and clare’s defiance and recklessness - irene’s greatest concern is for
security, for the avoidance of danger
“I’d do anything” “I’m not safe”
“you had all the things I wanted and never had had”
“Secretly resenting these visits to the playroom and kitchens”
ULTIMATELY at the end irene and brain ‘having so completely lost control of his mind and heart’
tate - unreliable irene vs abstract clare
Clare is mostly described using physical descriptions, while Irene has near to none physical descriptions (but her “encounter with Clare provides the occasion for the subtle revelation of her psychological character”).
‘too vague’, ‘incredibly beautiful’, ‘lovely creature’ - hyperbolic and ambiguous
“Clare Kendry’s loveliness was absolute, beyond challenge”
DOUBLING - “the two portraits are polarized and mutually complementary - one is purely external, while the other is intensely internal”
“A flood of feelings, resentment, anger, and contempt”
“Violence of the feelings which it stirred in her”
“Rage boiled up in her”
WALL - double as irene is indeed ready to ‘do anything, hurt anyone, throw anything away’ - psychological suicide
Irene- “What she felt was not so much resentment as dull despair because she could not change herself in this respect, could not separate individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry”
“For a moment she was unable to say more, so accurately had Clare put into words that which, not so definitely defined, was so often in her own heart of late”
“her full, red lips,” and “the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile,
the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry” - Irene’s inability to control clare’s sexuality maddens her to murder
“trill of notes” - voice
du bois - influence on others
“Violence of the feelings which it stirred in her”
“A fascination, strange and compelling”
“we disapprove of it and yet we rather admire it
psychology and influence of passing on others/friends
M.L.H. irene
‘divided personality’ - […] Irene’s experience seems to outtop the other events and steal the title of “main character” away from Clare.
“humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled”
“The thing that bound and suffocated her”
“Instinctive loyalty to a race”
“She couldn’t have her free”
Nicolas Tredell
recurrent feature of passing is the use of the present participle (eg with title of the novel) - engaged in ongoing process rather than distances observers of completed actions
vs name ‘the great gatsby’ suggests a state of stasis tantamount to death’
mixture of fascination of judgmentalism - simultaneously admiring and reproving
“A fascination, strange and compelling”
nicks reaction to life “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”
nick = “you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” vs “represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”
both are confidence trickster - performing an idenity to defy race and gender roles/ class
attaining knowledge unavailable to less daring souls - clare “was yet capable of heights and depths of feeling that she, Irene Redfield, had never known”
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY DREISER (personal and national)
