Race, Gender, and "Real Brains": Interrogating Unreliability in Nella Larsen's Passing

Abstract

Abstract:This essay analyzes narrative reliability in Nella Larsen's Passing by putting it in the context of early-twentieth-century ideas about gendered modernity and the scientific racism of eugenics discourse. Larsen's use of focalization—the formal separation of narrating voice and focalizing consciousness—illuminates how bias against raced and gendered subjects are naturalized in ascriptions of reliability. Through such formal strategies, Passing asks readers to interrogate the systems of oppression the novel's Black women navigate, making visible the frame structures (both narrative and sociopolitical) that function to undermine their articulations of independence and intelligence.