Key themes
- Race as performance — and its specific psychological cost
- Desire that cannot name itself
- The gaze of the woman who knows what you are hiding
About this book
Two light-skinned Black women meet by chance in Chicago in the 1920s: Irene is secure in her Black identity, while Clare is 'passing' as white in a marriage to a man who doesn't know. Larsen's compressed, devastating novella explores race, class, desire and the specific psychological violence of a world that forces people to choose.
Published in 1929, Passing was Larsen's second and final novel. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930 — the first Black woman to do so — and then stopped writing. The novel was rediscovered by scholars in the 1980s and has since become a major text in studies of race, gender and sexuality.
Discussion questions
- Irene is simultaneously drawn to and frightened by Clare's passing. What does this ambivalence reveal — about race, about desire, about Irene herself?
- The novel ends in ambiguity — what happened to Clare is never confirmed. Why does Larsen refuse a definitive ending — and what does the ambiguity protect or reveal?
- Passing was written in the Harlem Renaissance and was largely ignored for decades. What does it say that it was rediscovered by feminist and queer scholars in the 1980s?
- The novel is sometimes read as being about repressed lesbian desire as much as racial passing. How do you engage with this reading — does it seem supported by the text?
- Irene is a deeply unreliable narrator. How does Larsen use her unreliability — and what is Irene hiding from herself?
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