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I was having a difficult time coming up with strong points from the feminist criticism point of view for this novel because the only large points that obviously stood out to me were from the critical race theory perspective. However, this book being written about the 1920s identified the patriarchal stereotypes against women. The first source I have decided to use is titled “In Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Whiteness Isn’t Just About Race.” I like this source because it provides perspective of the bond or “social ties” between black women. Specifically the sources mentions Irene’s disgust of Clare’s social disregard of her black ancestry and how Irene wanted nothing more than to out Clare’s secret. However even though Irene saw Clare as conniving and a falseifer to her own race Irene could still not expose her and tear her life apart. What this piece really shines a light on is not only the black bond but also the black women's aspiration to only help and build up another black women’s life even if they are tearing each other apart. I cannot fully understand the complexity of this bond since I am not black however I conclude that these ties are a mutual understanding that black women already suffer so much they should not ever have to suffer at the hands of someone with the same struggle.

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In Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Whiteness Isn’t Just About Race - Electric Literature

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The classic book deals with the complicated intersection of race, class, and culture

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I wanted to find a source that was written from the perspective of a black woman who dilutes the social struggle of Clare and Irene. The source I found is called “Lessons of Passing: Remembering Nella Larsen on her birthday,” a blog post by Nsikan Akpan. What I like about this source is how Nsikan explains the black womens’ struggle to survive in a society that is made for white men. She talks about how black people, especially black women have a desire to be a part of society, to be seen the same as everybody else. However, being seen the same as everyone else or “passing,” disregards the black struggle and their hatred from society. She even brings up her own experience with “passing” in the school system and how that made her feel like a version of herself that wasn't actually her. I would use this source in my paper to identify the black women struggle to feel like she has to give up who she is in order to achieve the American dream. Also relating to Clare how she feels that the only way she and her daughter can live a full and wealthy life is to be tied to a man who hates their race, all at the cost of achieving the American dream.

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A guest blog post by Nsikan Akpan

Characters in stories are hardly given enough credit for their bravery of taking on the task of representing the idiosyncrasies and lifestyles that the public prefers to keep private. Clare and Irene in Nella Larsen's Passing are appropriate examples. Irene's complexion is light enough to pass for a white woman but makes the choice to side with her true community. On the other hand, Clare, Irene's friend from childhood, is also light enough to pass for white and finesses this fact to marry Bellew, a white racist. As readers maneuver their way through the lonely, privileged lives of both Irene and Clare, we find that wealth and passing for the sake of wealth may not be worth one's peace of mind. It can lead to a fatal end.

Passing by Nella Larsen examines themes of hypocrisy, physical (racial) as well as social "passing," and the sacrifices made for the American dream. Passing is a form of pretending, and sometimes we cross boundaries when playing pretend. What makes Larsen's work significant is that it displays passing as an example of natural human desire to survive. Judging Clare equates to judging anyone that has been put in a situation where the only way out is to be something they are not. Humankind has done worse for survival. Still, Clare's life is a lesson: one can make it to the other side and realize there is nothing there for them.

I am reminded of O. J. Simpson's story. Simpson, a black man, had been a supreme football player, the first to run over 2,000 yards in one season. He was an athletic mogul. He helped paved the way for athletes to not only play the sport of their choice, but to do so while starring in movies, commercials, and gaining fortune from various endorsements. He was treated as an American hero and embraced by white America. If Larsen's Clare had her pale skin that allowed her to pass as white, Simpson had wealth and his white wife that made up for his chestnut skin color and allowed him to pass in white society. In 1978, Simpson starred in a famous Hertz commercial, running through an airport as people - notably, all white people - cheered him on. "Go Juice, go!" They hailed. Until they stopped. In 1994, Simpson was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. When Simpson was accused of murder, he became black again.

Passing is seductive. Joe Bell, a childhood friend, said of Simpson, "He is seduced by white society." In Larsen's novel, Clare was seduced enough to want to be a part of that society, so much so that she became a part of it. As examples of passing - physical and social - Clare and Simpson demonstrate that passing does not turn out well in fiction or in real life. In Larsen's words, Clare "had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next thing she was gone."

While reading Passing, I realized that there are many types of passing. I have come to recognize my own privilege of intellectual passing. I am an educated and cultured black woman who has sat next to distinguished authors and poets. These stimulating cerebral experiences allow me to go into spaces where my color is not considered because my ability to articulate trumps any stereotype that is connected to me. Or so it seemed. It turns out that intellectual passing connects very much with racial and social passing. We must put an end to associating intelligence with whiteness.

I have made a conscious choice not to give into passing. What Clare showed me is this: One can fool people with skin but not with soul. Throughout high school, despite my dark skin, I made myself "more palatable" for my white counterparts. Every time I had an opinion on something, I tried my best to express it very nicely, or sometimes I'd say nothing at all, knowing people might take it the wrong way. Fortunately, I have grown out of that nonsense. I am who I am. An exit is always available, but for me, passing is never an option. It's too exhausting. In my own skin, I am at rest.

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Lessons of Passing: Remembering Nella Larsen on her birthday

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A guest blog post by Nsikan Akpan Characters in stories are hardly given enough credit for their bravery of taking on the task of representing the idiosyncrasies and lifestyles that the public prefers to keep private. Clare and Irene in Nella Larsen's Passing are appropriate examples.

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I wanted to find a source that went more into the notion that women are pressured into changing their appearance in order to move up in society. It is obvious that women have always been the suppressed group in compasiorion to men. Specifically black women being at the bottom of the social totem pole for both gender and racial categories. The review I chose is called,“ Passing’ the original 1929 novel is disturbingly brilliant,” by Carole Bell. I like how this source goes into detail about the struggles of “passing” and how there is a fine line from “passing” as white and reinventing yourself as white. She talks about how “Passing” is not about giving up your race, it is about adapting to society's expectations by concealing who you are for who you want people to see. For example I would talk about how black women use “white face” as a way to be treated the same and receive the same benefits as white women, as a means to survive. Black women shouldn't have to feel pressured to give up who they are, and put on a mask as someone else. However those who do it, out of a means for survival not out of treachery.  Which is a common misconception still not understood in our society today.

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Editor's note: This essay references a book whose title contains a racial slur.
The one thing most people know about Nella Larsen's Passing is that it explores a peculiar kind of deception - being born into one marginalized racial category and slipping into another, for privilege, security, or power. But the significance of Passing isn't found in the surface facts but in the brilliance of its execution: the beauty of the writing, the close character study, and the intense psychological suspense.

Like a decades-early precursor to a Patricia Highsmith novel, a sense of sensual glamour, frustration and foreboding pervades Larsen's famed novella. In 1927 Chicago, two light-skinned Black women, childhood friends whose lives took different paths, meet again in a theoretically white space, and a strange friendship is renewed despite the danger that the connection might bring. For Irene Redfield, a proper Black doctor's wife and a doyenne of Harlem society, passing is a petty indulgence, something she dabbles in on occasion, for "the sake of convenience." Her racial dexterity gains her "restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that." But to beautiful, orphaned Clare Kendry, passing is a means of survival. Clare had a home with her white relatives who disdained her race; she wanted something more, and she grabbed it, making a permanent break.

It's an odd reunion of two very different women. One reckless, flirtatious and bold; the other contained, proper and guarded. Clare lives as white in a gilded cage, a fashionable beauty with a touch of what the book calls "the tar-brush," married to a racist boor who would definitely not approve of her past identity or her connections. And yet despite the precarity of her situation, Clare has agency. Her choices are borne of desperation and ambition, but in thumbing her nose at what's expected, she escapes the arbitrariness and slipperiness of racial categories. She also refuses to live by the rules of passing, refusing to fully leave the world she came from behind. When she runs into an old friend, the well-married Irene, it reignites a longing.

In contrast, Irene lives carefully within walls of her own construction. She is always watching what she does and what she says, even afraid her husband will tell her kids about the "racial problem." She's trying to shield them from ugliness, but thinking she can protect two Black boys in Harlem in 1927 from learning about racism is a signal that she's removed from reality.

The contrast, parallels, and interplay between these two women is part of what makes Passing so beautifully constructed. Every choice is finely calibrated. Their interactions are polite, but Larsen has a way of making the simplest observation feel like a prelude to horror:

The words came to Irene as she sat there on the Drayton roof, facing Clare Kendry. "A having way." Well, Irene acknowledged, judging from her appearance and manner, Clare seemed certainly to have succeeded in having a few of the things that she wanted.

"Seemed" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. Clare seems to have gotten what she wanted but there's more going on below the surface. Clare's unfettered sexual magnetism and Irene's simmering sexual jealousy adds yet another dimension.

Time and again, alongside the social aspects which remain chillingly relevant, it's Larsen's artistry that leaps out: specifically her masterful handling of plotting, character and mood. She seamlessly blends genre elements into a literary novella about race. The language and iconography of suspense and horror are there from the beginning. Some of the mood-making is subtle; Irene's mindset gets increasingly tense as her liaison with Clare deepens and she begins to feel that the glamorous interloper is threatening the life she's built.

At other times, Larsen is bold, putting the vernacular of the Gothic into Irene's head, invoking "dread," "foreboding," and even "horror." Then there's the foreshadowing in Clare's hysterical speech, how she frames herself as a threat in conversation with Irene: "Can't you realize that I'm not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, 'Rene, I'm not safe." Or the cold feeling that runs through Irene on the street, just after she meets Clare's husband:

A slight shiver ran over her. "It's nothing," she told herself. "Just somebody walking over my grave, as the children say."

Published in 1929, during the Harlem Renaissance - a movement its author was deeply entrenched in - Passing caused more of a ripple than a sensation at its release, with critical acclaim far outstripping its sales. (In deliberate provocation, and recalling Carl Van Vechten's controversial novel about Harlem Nigger Heaven of three years earlier, Passing's original intended title was simply Nig.) The influential sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois reviewed it favorably in the NAACP's Crisis magazine. Calling Passing one of the finest novels of the year, Du Bois wrote that Larsen explained "the psychology of the thing; the reaction of it on friend and enemy. It is a difficult task, but she attacks the problem fearlessly and with consummate art."
A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.
Nearly one hundred years later, those contributions remain. In 19th and early 20th century literature, the "tragic mulatto" was a stock figure, a person of mixed background whose African heritage and longing for a white existence causes great isolation and suffering. Despite having similar contours, Larsen's novel was a pivotal step beyond those characterizations. Deftly juggling the psychological closeup and the bigger picture, Larsen dips into, contradicts, and complicates that worn image while also bringing to life Du Bois' concept of double consciousness. Larsen shows how intimate choices are bound up in social forces while endowing her characters with indelible specificity. As her last published novel, that is quite a legacy.

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'Passing' - the original 1929 novel - is disturbingly brilliant

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Editor's note: This essay references a book whose title contains a racial slur. The one thing most people know about Nella Larsen's Passing is that it explores a peculiar kind of deception - being born into one marginalized racial category and slipping into another, for privilege, security, or power.

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I wanted to find a source that connected the struggles of race and gender in “Passing” and I really like how this source touches on the fact that biracial black women are only taught to express one side of themselves. In fact that was a struggle that both Irene and Claire struggled with. This analysis of “Passing,” by Alylson Sebright does a great job of emphasizing the biracial women's struggle of not being identified for who she is and being forced to pick a side. Meaning she is half black and half white however American society only sees these women as black which is why in the novel Irene frowns upon Claire for expressing herself as a white woman almost burying her blackness.  A section of the text that stood out to me was when Sebright quotes Scholar Patricia Hill Collins when she states “these ties between what one does and what one thinks illustrated by individual Black women can also characterize Black women’s experiences and ideas as a group.” I would use this source in my essay to emphasize the black woman bond and how Irene and Clare benefitted from both communities. They can pass as white and reap the social benefits, such as being allowed in buildings that black people wouldn't be allowed in. While they also got a sense of black community “supplied by Harlem.” Lastly I would talk about how in the novel the idea that one cannot be both was implied by Irene because one cannot fully relate to the black community while being able party with their suppressors.

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My name is Alyson Sebright. I was born in Boise and grew up in Nampa, where I still reside. I'm currently a Junior majoring in English with an emphasis in Literature here at Boise State, with plans to study abroad in Stirling, Scotland this coming Fall of 2019. I chose to study literature because of my deep passion for storytelling, not only in telling my own stories but better understanding those of others. I believe wholeheartedly that sharing stories can change the world and for that reason I study literature with the intention of one day working in the publishing field as a developmental fiction editor. After graduation I am planning to pursue a graduate degree, either through a Fulbright program or a graduate school here in the States. When I'm not studying, I can usually be found loitering around the Writing Center with my coworkers, doing photography around town, or working on my latest creative writing project.

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Passing: An Exploration of Performed Identity

Nella Larsen's novel, Passing, centers around the experience of two biracial women whose identities are primarily performative as they navigate life with the privilege of "passing" as White. Through this narrative, Larsen suggests that both racial and gender/sexual identities are as largely performative as they are inherent. Passing explores the ideas of both these identities as they exist in a world where passing is possible. Larsen calls into question the very nature of such concepts and their intersections: how identity shapes the experiences of individuals, and how those individuals shape those identities in turn.

The novel evaluates racial identity in several ways, but centers upon the socially-enforced performative nature of biracialism. In one of the opening scenes, Irene is waited upon in a rooftop cafe where she is passing as White in order to exist within the space and receive the service she desires. Larsen explains of Irene: "Never, when she was alone, had they [White people] even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro" (Larsen 8). This is one of the first moments in which the reader sees Irene engage in the activity of "passing", and it emphasizes the nature of race as a performative identity in the case of "mulatto" or lighter skinned Black individuals, whose biracial identity is largely ignored, forcing such individuals to "choose" to perform one race or another. As one scholar explains: "the act of passing both subverts racial categories and reinforces them, employing the logic that people of mixed ancestry are 'really' black but pretend to be white" (Nisetich 350). In this moment, Irene's choice to pass, while it does afford her the desired effect of being treated as a White citizen, necessitates her to temporarily deny her racial identity. This choice is inherently ironic, as Irene becomes obsessed with the idea of racial "loyalty" as the novel continues, in relation to her perceptions of Clare's decision to pass as White.

Irene focuses heavily on the idea of "uplifting the race", referencing and engaging with her identity as a Black woman, but in doing so is also ignoring the fact that her identity is inherently Black and White, due to the fact that society forces her to choose between one of these labels in her performance of identity. In contrast, Irene criticizes Clare's decision to pass and lead the privileged life of a White person in America, while also sporadically engaging with her Black identity when it suited her. Larsen explains, "the trouble with Clare was not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well" (38). Irene's frustration with Clare comes from her understanding of Clare's positioning within the social hierarchy, and the way in which Clare manipulates her performed identity to best suit her interests. Clare chooses the privileges of a White lifestyle rather than making an earnest attempt to be a good representative of the Black race and attempting to uplift it in the "talented tenth" sense as established by W.E.B. Du Bois. Here, Irene is struggling with the core issue of the biracial identity: how one occupies two identities that are widely considered to be contradictory or opposing. Both Clare and Irene represent opposing ends of of this ideological spectrum in their performances of their racial identities, and in doing so further perpetuate the socially enforced idea that biracial individuals must "choose a side" to perform, rather than embracing and performing their biracial identity.

However, the idea that biracial individuals embody two contradicting identities is inherently problematic. There is no logical reasoning for such identities to entail an inherently antagonistic relationship. In asking biracial individuals to choose a race to perform, society additionally asks them to ignore an aspect of their identity while also being excluded from both communities as they occupy their biracial identity, which is widely perceived by American culture to be nonexistent. Due to the historical establishment of ideas such as the "one drop rule", wherein a White individual with even "one drop of black blood" could and should be racially categorized as Black, American society has embraced the idea that an identity that is both Black and White is impossible.

Applying this to Larsen's novel, critic George Hutchinson explains: "the difference between Irene and Clare is not that Clare escapes from the [one drop] rule, which she does not recognize, but that her attempt to live free of its sway is in the end defeated by the way in which others, including Irene, view her" (345). In this way Hutchinson suggests that, despite her performance of racial identity, Clare cannot escape her Blackness due to the perceptions of others within her community. Hutchinson suggests that what Clare did not consider in her performance of identity is audience, and that ultimately her identity has to be externally recognized in order for it to be real, due to the nature of a performed identity.

Additionally, Larsen emphasizes the hypocrisy of Irene's criticism of Clare through her actions as a Black woman in the domestic setting. Whereas many Black upper-middle class citizens of this era employed White servants (due to the fact that many Black individuals would refuse to work for Black families), Irene's servant is Black and incapable of passing. When this character, Zulena, is introduced, she is immediately objectified and dehumanized in her description as a "small, mahogany-coloured creature"(Larsen 40). Despite a third person limited perspective in the novel's narration, the reader is aware that these descriptors are at the very least informed by Irene's own opinions, and therefore reflect her own perceptions of Zulena. As one scholar explains,"introducing Zulena into a reading of Passing reveals the domestic sphere as a fraught arena for the development of African-American female selfhood, in which ideologies of middle-class domesticity intersect uncomfortably with service and servitude" (Wilson 980). This suggests the conflict between Irene's ideology and her actions, as she firmly commits herself to be an "uplifter of the race" while she simultaneously perpetuates stereotypical career roles for Black women.

One of the most important aspects of Passing in terms of its role in the American canon is it's expression of intersectionality in the American experience, particularly in terms of gender/sexuality and race. As Irene and Clare's narratives develop, the moments in which issues of race and gender intersect are critical to understanding Larsen's depiction of how one's expression of their identity shapes their experience. In many ways, Clare serves as the uncanny doppelganger to Irene in the Freudian psychoanalytic sense. As Freud describes, "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (515), and the double, which instills a sense of the uncanny as it is "marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own" (522).

Freud theorizes that what makes the double uncanny is its role in confusing the idea of the "self", that providing a duplicate of the self that draws into question who or what can be identified as the "real" or "true" self. Thus, Clare occupies the narrative space as the uncanny double figure of Irene, embodying the familiar in the sense that she seems to share the same racial, sexual, and gender identities as Clare while also being a representative of the unknown, as she chooses to live her life as a White woman. This explains some of Irene's frustrations with Clare, as Irene can recognize the strong connections between her and Clare's identities, and this forces her to consider the morality of how she chooses to pass permanently as Black, only engaging with her own White identity when it suits her interests.

The theory of the uncanny double helps explain Irene's hatred of and obsession with Clare, as she simultaneously represents everything Irene is as well as everything Irene chooses not to be. The best external example of this narrative device comes in the form of Irene's husband, Brian, and his implied attraction to Clare. Irene describes: "that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress" (Larsen 36). While this quote is directly addressing Brian's desire to move to Brazil in order to escape some of the discrimination him and his children experience as Black Americans who are incapable of passing, it also foreshadows Brian's interest in something "strange and different" that puts stress upon his marriage- an interest in the uncanny. By expressing a preexisting and persisting tension caused by Brian's desire for something "different", Larsen suggests that perhaps this issue is not necessarily limited to racism in America, but a deeper issue within Brian and Irene's marriage. This issue will then be further explored with the introduction of Clare, the double, as it presents the opportunity for Brian to explore everything Irene might be lacking.

Once she has convinced herself that Brian is having an affair with Clare, Irene surmises: "She [Irene] was, to him, only the mother of his sons. That was all. Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle" (Larsen 74). Here, Irene seems to be suggesting that Brian's interest in Clare stems from the fact that he cannot remove Irene's identity marker as the mother of his children enough to be sexually interested in her, and she now only serves as an "obstacle" over which he must hurdle to attain the object of his desire. She has become, as Freud would describe, the "heimlich" or familiar, of which there is a sense of safety and consistency, but also homeliness, in the sense of both the literal definition of "domestic" as well as the connotative definition of "unattractive". Clare, in contrast, supplies an alternative version of Irene: a shifted version of the same biracial straight woman that at one time Brian loved, but now with the new context of choosing to pass as White. This also seems to imply a certain level of internalized racism in Brian, as he seems to desire the "White option" of Irene in the form of Clare the double, thus perpetuating certain stereotypes of American beauty standards that profess Whiteness is inherently more beautiful or attractive.

Once Irene assumes that Brian holds these ideas (as it is never actually confirmed or denied by him), she seems to lose all sense of her own sexual identity. In a Freudian sense, Irene has submitted her sexual identity to her double, as Clare is the presumed sexual partner of Brian. Additionally, this could account for Irene's own implied sexual interest in Clare as a projection of her own sexuality. In this way Larsen seems to be implying that Irene's sexual identity centers around her marital relationship with her husband, and that whoever is engaging with him sexually is the "true" version of Irene. In this way, Brian represents the crux of the intersectional issue of both Irene's racial and gender/sexual identities. His desire for the "other" version of Irene represented by Clare implies a preference for a White Irene, which is in turn related to beauty standards that are inextricably connected to Irene's identity as a woman.

Once Brian favors that which Irene is not, Irene must reconcile with what that means for her as a wife, and by extension, a woman. In the attainment of the defining female role of mother, Irene seems to have lost her sexual appeal to her husband and now faces the crisis of such a paradox. In her decision to pass as Black she feels she made an unintentional decision to give up her chance at the traditional American standard for beauty and desirability: Whiteness. It is in this way that Larsen draws a direct connection between race, gender, and sexuality as they inform one another due to socially accepted perceptions of beauty standards that inform gender expectations which in turn affect the sexual relationships of those raised in that society.

In turn, the understanding of Irene and Clare as doubles also makes interesting suggestions about their social experience of race. In choosing which identities they perform, each character formed for themselves a unique lifestyle and experience of American culture. While both of these doubles engages occasionally with their "other" racial identities when it is advantageous to them, the vast majority of their adult lives are experienced in a performance of one side of their biracial identity. However, both women seem to have ended up in relatively similar socioeconomic statuses, calling into question the "correctness" of either perspective. Both women reap the benefits of passing as Black or White-the feeling of community supplied by Harlem as well as the privilege of being allowed to exist in White spaces-while also feeling the costs of the race they chose to "give up" for the majority of their day-to-day lives. Irene must reconcile with the "cost" of having children that cannot pass and the risks this poses to them in a pre-Civil Rights era, and Clare longs for the community and connections with her own Black identity.

In this way, both women reflect different aspects of the African-American experience, as they experience their racial identities in inverse manners. Part of the crisis that Clare forces Irene to face is the hypocrisy of passing, as she reflects the subverted versions of the same beliefs Irene holds. In this way Larsen identifies the ways in which "identical" experiences of race can also be inverse of one another. Scholar Patricia Hill Collins evaluates this idea in her book "Black Feminist Thought", and suggests: "these ties between what one does and what one thinks illustrated by individual Black women can also characterize Black women's experiences and ideas as a group" (24). Considering this, Larsen seems suggest through her narrative that the inverted experiences of these doubles represent how performed identities inform the experience of those community members, but also contribute back into how these identities are shaped for other similarly-identifying individuals going forward.

Passing is a novel highly concerned with the reality of uncertainty, specifically in terms of identity. With the understanding that identity shapes experience, Nella Larsen creates a narrative in which characters are forced by society to choose their experience. By identifying those aspects of identity that are performative, Larsen asks her readers to consider the ways in which they also perform their own identities. Through the inverted images of Clare and Irene, Larsen explores performances of identity and their effects on the individual experiences of race, gender, and sexuality. However, Larsen also seems deeply interested in how these performances and engagements with externalized identity will inform experiences of the generations to come. While the novel does not spend much time considering the upcoming generations, it is clear Larsen is attempting to question the performances of identity reflected in her characters and suggesting that perhaps there is a different approach that has been left unconsidered as of yet: the idea of embracing the duality, rather than choosing to fight it.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Critical Tradition, 3rd ed, edited by David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martins, 2007, pp. 514-532.

Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Vol. Rev. 10th anniversary ed, Routledge, 2000. EBSCOhost, libproxy.boisestate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=70795&site=ehost-live.

Hutchinson, George. "Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race." American Literary History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 329-349. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/490290.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. Knopf, 1929.

Nisetich, Rebecca. "Reading Race in Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the Rhinelander Case." African American Review, vol. 46, no. 2/3, 2013, pp. 345-361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23784063.

Wilson, Mary. "'Working Like a Colored Person': Race, Service, and Identity in Nella Larsen's Passing." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 42, no. 8, Dec. 2013, pp. 979-1009. EBSCOhost, libproxy.boisestate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2014393372&site=ehost-live.

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Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Passing: An Exploration of Performed Identity

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My name is Alyson Sebright. I was born in Boise and grew up in Nampa,...