“What Irene Redfield Remembered:" Making It New in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Through a critically updated and comprehensive reconsideration of Nella Larsen’s writerly strategies in Passing, this essay examines her groundbreaking revision of the tragic mulatta character and her ironic critique of the reading practices associated with it. The essay foregrounds how Larsen’s interest in “the psychology of the scene,” as she defined it, enables a new, sophisticated Modernist version of the passing narrative that de-familiarizes the race and gender assumptions popularly associated with the figure of the passer and compels a re-reading of the entire tradition.