Passing Critics Flashcards
‘What is Africa to me?’
Countée Cullen
Countée Cullen
‘What is Africa to me?’
“the novel is more about class than it is about race”
Ann Joyce
“the picture I have of the American dream is one of an illusion”
Naylor
Ann Joyce
“the novel is more about class than it is about race”
“the picture I have of the American dream is one of an illusion”
Naylor
“Larsen’s protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide”
Wall
“Nella Larsen made a career of not quite belonging”
Dean
Wall
“Larsen’s protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide”
Dean
“Nella Larsen made a career of not quite belonging”
“Clare is an adventuress; Irene, the ordinary woman, afraid of life, wrapped in home, child, husband, gone Berserker when these latter are threatened.”
Nelson
Nelson
Clare is an adventuress; Irene, the ordinary woman, afraid of life, wrapped in home, child, husband, gone Berserker when these latter are threatened.
Emily Bernard
“All the scenes between the two women vibrate with a thick sexual tension”
“It is possible to read Irene’s fears as a ruse she concocts in order to protect herself from her homosexual desires”
“An ongoing, endless struggle to redefine the image of the black in the white mind”
“It dramatises the impossibility of self-invention in a society in which nuance and ambiguity are considered fatal threats to the social order”
“Clare passes ‘because she hated being poor, not being black’”
“Clare is ‘personification of desire itself’”
McDowell
“The book is as much about sexual longing between two women as it is about race”
“[Irene’s] most glaring delusion concerns her feelings for Clare […] Lest the reader miss this eroticism, Larsen employs fire imagery - the conventional representation of sexual desire”
“The awakening of Irene’s erotic feelings for Clare coincides with Irene’s imagination of an affair with Clare and Brian. Given a tendency to project her disowned traits, motives, and desires onto others, it is reasonable to argue that Irene is projecting her own developing passion for Clare onto Brian.”
“Clare is both the embodiment and the object of the sexual feelings that Irene banishes.”
Charles Scruggs
Paradoxically, Irene is both attracted to and appalled by Clare’s desire to live on the edge.
Throughout the novel, Irene assumes a moral superiority over Clare because Irene is grounded in the black bourgeoisie whereas Clare’s father was an alcoholic janitor.
