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"Betraying the Sender": The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts

1994; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1538-974X

Peter J. Rabinowitz,

American and British Literature Analysis

In the fall of 1992,1 taught Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing in my course on Literature and Ethics. My aim was double. I wanted to expose my students to how carelessly they read; but I wanted, simultaneously, to dislodge them from their self-congratulatory liberalism, a liberalism more alert, at least on the sur face, to racism than to homophobia. And I hoped to fulfill this twofold purpose by showing them that, in reading the novel from the perspective of race, as most of them did, they defused much of its explosive power. Specifically, I treated Passing as an exemplification of its subject: a novel about lesbians passing as heterosexuals that passes as a novel about racial passing. As an interpretation, I think that this reading of the novel was?and still is?reasonably sound. The story centers primarily on the rekindling of the rela tionship between Clare Kendry Bellew (married to a White racist, John Bellew, who does not know she is Black) and her childhood friend Irene Westover Redfield (married to, but emotionally and sexually disengaged from, a prominent Black physician). And from the letter from Clare that opens the novel (I ... cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before [145]) through Irene's recognition that Clare's beauty is a torturing love liness that had torn at [her] placid life (239), the novel hints at a else for which [Irene] could find no name (176), a fascination, strange and compelling (161). But while this something else is utterly beyond any experi ence or comprehension of hers (176) (and was, for years, beyond the compre hension of most of Larsen's audience), it is not beyond the grasp of sophisticated contemporary readers?at least those who, unlike Clare's husband John and even the liberal White novelist Hugh Wentworth, have learned the trick of tell[ing] the sheep from the goats (206).l Part of my activity in class, then, consisted of teaching my students some tricks of close reading?and shocking them with the revelations that can come when heterosexist assumptions are abandoned.