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The Searching of African American Women’s Identity in Passing

Author: LuMing
Tutor: LiuZhuo
School: Northeastern University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: mulatto passing culture identity gender identity self-reconstruction
CLC:
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 55
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Abstract

This thesis researches on the formation, development and reconstruction of African American women’s identity by Nella Larsen’s Passing.It is a particular phenomenon in American Literature and Culture that African American women are confusing and struggling with their identification. In the society of Anglo Saxon and man power, African American women oppressed their culture and gender identities, which caused traumas both in psychology and physiology.African Americans women are living in the dilemmatic situation, and they are under American’s cultural dissension and masculinism’s discrimination. Due to the hybridization of the ethnics, there were many light skinned black people in American, their skin were white enough to pass the racial line to be the whites. It was a common phenomenon in Harlem period in American. Passing means betraying and breaking off with their heritage and ethnic which was brought by the racialism. And as to the black women, under the gaze and control of the male, they shifted compromised emotion and rights to the same sex. Under the stress pressure of culture and gender, African-American women’s identity mutated confused, culture conflict and gender opposition caused African-American women lost them in "twoness" world.Nella Larsen’s writings reflect the common concerns of African-American women writers, and her works will be enlightening and encourage for the study of African-American women’s literature as a whole. The characters Irene and Clare in Nella Larsen’s Passing are the representatives of women mulatto. In searching of their identities, they experienced the tergiversation and reconstruction of their culture and gender identities. From Clare’s racial passing to Irene’s gender passing; from Clare’s spiritual returning to Irene’s spiritual discarding, the reconstruct of the identity come to an end.Passing is as easy as staying inside the identity line, but it is difficult to be in and out. In searching of their identities, Irene and Clare paid a heavy price, when Clare falls down the building, the significance of the story emerged:passing is impossible in reality; it is a lost game, the ending of passing is always a tragedy for both Irene and Clare. Fortunately from Clare we are conscious of the awakening of African-American women. African-American women should not be labeled as inferiority or sub ordinary, though they are different from the whites and male. It is important to awake them to fight for the "other destinies, other denouement". Like other native writers, Nella Larsen wrote the story to arise the concern and sympathy to those "white-black" women, which in turn empower them to reconstruct cultural and gender identities as well as for readers.I will begin by the theoretical construction of African-American women’s identity, and give an analysis of the motivation of passing. I will focus on culture and gender aspects to account for African-American women’s identity. Next I have deep formulation to analysis the suffering and final result of passing. She focuses her works on the mulatto theme, which explores the identity of African-American women. The mulatto figure was recognition of the difference and separateness of the races at the same time as it was a product of a sexual relationship between white and black.

The Searching of African American Women’s Identity in Passing

Abstract

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