The Gaze, The Glance, The Mirror: Queer Desire and Panoptic Discipline in Nella Larsen's Passing

esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 1 The Gaze, The Glance, The Mirror: Queer Desire and Panoptic Discipline in Nella Larsen’s Passing ELIZABETH DEAN – Rutgers University, New Brunswick The sublimated queer content of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing has been critically excavated by such notable scholars as Hazel Carby and Deborah McDowell. Despite these interpretive revelations, however, Passing remains in some ways as enigmatic as its dual subjects, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Passing is the story of an intense but fraught friendship between two African-American women in 1920s Harlem. The protagonist, Irene Redfield, is a respected member of the elite; Clare Kendry, her childhood friend, seeks to reclaim a black community while still passing for white—including to her own husband. As their relationship falls apart, accusations of infidelity, queer sexual tension, and scenes of racial recognition and misrecognition culminate in Clare’s death by falling, jumping, or being pushed through a window. In particular, Irene’s fraught narratorial perspective and the ambiguous death scene still beg for further interpretation, and these and other points must be unpacked in order for scholars to place it in the Harlem Renaissance tradition that it both draws on and critiques. I hope that my intervention in the queer readings of Passing will be to bring to bear the concept of gazes, particularly drawing on Foucauldian ideas of panoptic self-surveillance and disciplinary gazes, to explain the central tensions of queerness and respectability in the novel. Based on this reading, I propose that it is exactly Larsen’s attention to the structures of gazing that makes the enigmatic ending legible as itself an interrogation of the reader’s gaze. To begin unpacking Passing is to theorize the plot as a conflict of gazes. Irene is struggling with two fundamentally conflicting gazes: her queer desiring gaze for Clare and her esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 2 replication onto herself and others of the panoptic disciplinary gaze which policed the “respectable” black bourgeois faction of the New Negro movement. This argument adapts Foucault’s theorization of the panoptic gaze from Discipline and Punish, in which the gaze functions to control communities through the subject’s state of perpetual vulnerability to and exercise of surveillance, including self-surveillance, and thus the vulnerability to and use of disciplinary power (Foucault 201). Through the examination of how Irene’s own disciplinary self-surveillance interrupts and warps her queer desiring gaze, Passing emerges as a sensitive exploration the costs of community self-policing according to external standards of respectability optics—that is, according to a threatened but withheld white gaze. Ultimately, our inability to conclusively read Clare’s death makes conspicuous the interpretative gaze of the reader and highlights the finally irreconcilable double gazes of the New Negro queer. Just like how readers are gradually led to see how Irene’s conflicting gazes distort her narration, Clare’s death remains an interpretative puzzle that reveals the ways of looking that readers are themselves operating on the text. The New Negro movement was only one part of the Harlem Renaissance’s revolutionary political and artistic work, and the type of respectability politics that Irene Redfield reproduces through her disciplining gaze are only one potential variation of the New Negro movement or movements. This strategy is, however, represented in the founding 1925 New Negro anthology by Elise Johnson McDougald’s “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” which simultaneously mobilizes a feminist critique of the social and economic positions of African American women and subtly enforces a bourgeois expectation of sexual respectability. She designates upper- and middle-class black women as an “inspiring” class whose virtues of loyalty, hard work, and “moral standards” are more truly representative of black women than the “lower sex standards” esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 3 of working class black women, which she frames as non-representative of black women generally (McDougald 370, 372, 379). This concern with representation and the appearance of sexual respectability that McDougald exemplifies are signs of the actualization of a panoptic gaze by which these women are constantly evaluated and disciplined. Her concerns were in large part a response to racist myths about the sexual behavior of African American women which were used for centuries to justify white sexual violence; thus, McDougald’s exhortations toward visible sexual respectability constitute a type of community self-surveillance operating under panoptic cultural surveillance to through the constant threat of white disciplinary power. According to McDougald, black women should appear heterosexual and traditionally moral. Through controlling how black women are perceived, McDougald and her faction hoped to change how they are treated. However, this ambitious project of race-wide perceptual control necessitated the constant observation and interference of the elite. Passing, then, constitutes Larsen’s literary and political intervention by examining the casualties of the self-surveilling gaze of respectability politics under white disciplinary power: in this novel, the casualties are queer women. Indeed, the queer community of Harlem was one of the primary targets of panoptic discipline from the cultural elite. Tastefully concealed gay male intellectuals like Alain Locke and his cadre were tolerated; working class, femme, and female queers were inadmissible. Strict sexual morality became crucial to the elites’ claim to respectability, and thus the members of their own community who deviated from these norms were subject to intense community surveillance and actual police intervention through which the Harlem elite called police raids down on Harlem gay bars and drag balls (Schwarz 22). Queer women sat at the bottom of the hierarchy of respectability. Indeed, these queer black women, from lesbian and bisexual blues esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 4 singers such as Gladys Bentley and Bessie Smith, drew crowds of white women whose exoticizing, desiring gazes threatened the optics project of New Negro leaders as much as those of white men, invoking the possibility of white disciplinary power and white sexual violence which had forced the self-surveilling responses of McDougald and others. This culture clash is exactly where Larsen steps in to explore the phenomena of queer female desire within the ranks of the New Negro elites. Irene’s queer desire of Clare in the first section of the novel is structured largely through this fraught looking. When they rekindle their friendship on the roof of a hotel, Irene’s clear appreciation of Clare’s mouth and figure through her clothes register a sexual dimension to her look that is only highlighted by Irene’s attempt to dispel the tension by looking shyly away. When Irene sees that she is now Clare’s object of scrutiny, she reveals her awareness of her constant vulnerability to social judgement under the panoptic gaze of respectability by anxiously checking the neatness of her attire before even worrying about her racial passing, checking whether she had “put her hat on backwards” several lines before worrying about her racialized appearance (Larsen 149). Finally, Irene notices, and disapproves of, Clare’s appearance in her interaction with her waiter, saying her smile was “just a shade too provocative” (149). Because of Irene’s immediate attraction to Clare, she reads her interactions as full of sexual potential, but at the same time, her participation in a panoptic gaze that disciplines the optics of sexual respectability attunes her to the potential inappropriate sexual behavior of others. It is this state of contradictory gazing in which Irene is frozen when Clare approaches. It is only Clare who has the ability to dispel the doubled gaze with action, Irene is trapped in a gazing short-circuit. Her queer desire and her urge to control optics of respectability are terminally incompatible. Meanwhile, Clare’s interruption moves away from Irene’s sexual preoccupations to instead form esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 5 a moment of racial solidarity between the two passing women, a type of solidarity and specifically black racial belonging which Clare seeks throughout the novel as she turns away from the hollow prosperity that whiteness has handed her. Irene’s desiring watching only intensifies throughout the plot, as she watches Clare participate in parties, dance, and laugh. She cannot say “no” to anything that Clare wants, and when Clare momentarily responds with intimate affection, Irene’s decision to distance Clare is totally eclipsed by her growing ardor. In this scene, “[Clare] dropped a kiss on [Irene’s] dark curls. Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling” (194). This gesture from Clare marks with gentle affection Irene’s always already racialized dark, curly hair. This feature is adored and recognized in the gesture of affection as one that simultaneously separates her from the fair-haired Clare and serves as a symbol of the black racial identity that binds them together. It’s worth asking whether Irene’s queer desire is answered by Clare’s relational desire to see and acknowledge on Irene’s body her own missing markers of black difference and black identity which she mourns throughout the novel. Indeed, when Clare begs favors from Irene, it is usually asking to be seen as black and included in New Negro activities of racial solidarity and community. The “onrush” of feeling that Irene experiences could be not only desire but also a co-recognition of their shared need for solidarity that they can offer one another. However, Irene’s treatment of Clare changes drastically when she come to believe that Clare is having an affair with her husband Brian in what can be read as an attempt on Irene’s part to rationalize Clare’s disruptive desirability according to the respectability gaze of bourgeois New Negro ideology. The reader is given no indication whether this belief is true. Instead of coming to awareness of her own queer desire, Irene is swayed by the power of her own self- esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 6 surveilling gaze to perceive (or invent) a strictly heterosexual threat to her marriage. When Irene finally turns the disciplining gaze of bourgeois respectability on her own life, she experiences a crisis that allows these crossed gazes to destroy her relationships with Clare and her husband Brian. The stakes of an elite New Negro marriage were high, as Michelle Ann Stephens documented, “[f]or heterosexual New Negro couples, the trope of the New Negro operates as a real historical and ideological force shaping the intimate lives of black subjects struggling with the New Negro as an impossible idea” (407; emphasis added). Therefore, New Negro selfsurveillance as a response to white panoptic discipline infects Irene’s gaze even as she casts it on her own life. Irene is aggressively devoted to the heterosexual underpinnings of New Negro ideology, much like her real-life peers who brought the police down on Harlem crossdressers, in a way that primes her panoptic gaze to see threats to her marriage as threats to her own security as a respectable African American woman. Irene’s panoptic gaze rebounds on her own life in a crucial mirroring scene. Her surveilling, suspicious heterosexual gaze is literally reflected onto herself and her husband in a way that spawns her suspicion of Clare and Brian’s affair—a suspicion that will consume and unhinge her as it clashes with her extant gaze of queer desire. Irene is doing her makeup in the mirror and speaking about Clare to her husband behind her when she catches, in the mirror, a suspicious expression on Brian’s face. Irene jumps to a damning interpretation of the moment. She says to herself, “Clare Kendry! So that was it! Impossible. … The face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind” (Larsen 217). The vision-blotting “thing” which is shortly later defined is Irene’s realization of Clare and Brian’s alleged affair. esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 7 However, Irene perceives the alleged affair only through her own mirrored gaze, never through any other evidence or changes in the pair’s behavior. Instead of seeing herself in the mirror as a queer desiring subject in a Lacanian moment of identity formation, Irene finds her disciplinary gaze of bourgeois sexuality deflected defensively—but damagingly—onto herself. Her outward-facing queer gaze and inward-facing gaze of self-surveillance collide. This collision of gazes almost seems to blind her, as she glances away from the mirror to “fumble” with things on the table, seeming to be both visually and psychologically stunned, grasping anxiously among her makeup and she grasps anxiously for a heteropatriarchally legible reason for her anxiety and confusion (217). Indeed, Brian stands in the background in this reflection as an embodiment of the heteropatriarchal values looking over her shoulder. In this scene, Larsen shows how Irene’s panoptic gaze of respectability is literally reflected by the mirror to focus on threats to Irene’s appearance of heterosexual respectability that is so crucial her middle-class racial uplift ideology, performing exactly the type of self-surveillance under threat of disciplinary power which Foucault theorizes in Discipline and Punish. Irene’s subsequent surveillance-induced paranoia marks a sharp change in her tone and focus in the narration to intense negativity about Brian and Clare, even in the absence of further intimations of infidelity, thus extending her new perspective to the reader. The mirror is both a reflector rebounding Irene’s panoptic discipline back on herself and a funhouse mirror that distorts her reality. The cognitive dissonance of her incompatible gazes has her seeing mirages, dizzying her senses and reason to a state of uncontrollable anxiety and irrational behavior. Further, the constant specter of Brian’s desire to leave Harlem becomes more urgent than ever, and Irene frequently dwells on the sacrifices she fears she must make for her family’s comfort— and, more truthfully, to maintain her own position of social respectability in her and in others’ esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 8 eyes. She muses, “Security. Was It just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? … she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life” (235). In the end, her desiring gaze is inextinguishable but her panoptic gaze produces crushing fear of insecurity (personal, moral, financial, familial) precisely because of the queer gaze’s potential to disrupt her treasured security and respectable status through the “unknown ecstasy” of the queer attraction that she fears (235). In the climax of the novel, it is this mixed gaze that replaces definitive action in the narration of Clare’s enigmatic death. The audience is not privy to Irene’s exact thoughts or actions in the critical moment of Clare’s fall, but only to what she sees. “There was even a faint smile on [Clare’s] full, red lips, and in her shining eyes. … One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone” (239). Irene figures Clare’s death in terms of her defiant, seductive presence, and then her sudden absence. Irene is seeing for a moment with both gazes—panoptic judgement of Clare’s inappropriate smile in response to Mr. Kendry discovering that she has been passing for white, and at the same time burning queer desire for Clare’s “full, red lips.” This cognitive dissonance of both gazes forces the foreclosing of the problematic gazed object—that is, Clare’s death. The ambiguous narration leaves open the question of whether Clare’s death by plummeting through the open window was murder, suicide, or an accident. In fact, Larsen’s ending invites the gaze of her contemporary reader—using either the queer or the New Negro gaze—to interpret the death. Those laboring under panoptic self-surveillance enforced by racialized respectability politics would read exactly the type of visible queerness that they felt threatened the uplift of the race generally. In other ways Clare’s death partakes of the tradition of esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 9 “tragic mulatta novels,” in which the passing subject struggles to experience both solidarity among black communities and safety from white disciplinary power, which Larsen herself addresses at length in Quicksand. Indeed, Clare’s death may just as likely stem from Irene’s jealous privileging of queer desire over racial solidarity as it may have been cause by the violence of her white husband’s disciplinary power—both racial spaces fail her on her quest for belonging which the text de-centers in favor of Irene’s queerness, respectability, and anxiety. Other readers could have been savvy enough to see Larsen’s critique of that disciplining gaze, in which the disciplining gaze itself is that which can be reflected and distorted to create violence. I want to make it clear that this is not a story about the failure of the New Negro movement, but instead a tragedy of queer of color self-surveillance enforced by the specter of the white disciplinary gaze. I argue, then, that the final gaze which Larsen’s novel is concerned with is the gaze of her reader. Do they see the relieving resolution of a threat to the uplift project? Do they see the queer violence that a heterosexual panoptic gaze would lead them to expect? Do they see a tragic love story? Or do they see, perhaps, Larsen’s concerns with how the self-surveillance enforced by white disciplinary power precludes the possibility of diverse gazes, and the diversity of gazing subjects? esd56@scarletmail.rutgers.edu 10 Works Cited Brody, Jennifer DeVere. “Clare Kendry’s ‘True’ Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Callaloo, vol. 15, no. 4, 1992, 1053-65. Butler, Judith. “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge.” Female Subjects In Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. U of California P, 1997, pp. 266-84. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America. Columbia UP, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed., edited by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995. 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