Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen's Passing

Abstract

Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the motherhood that slaveholders had denied to Black women. However, racial uplift leaders' insistence on the sacrificial and moral responsibilities of Black motherhood was often co-opted by a middle-class ideology, limiting Black women's ability to envision Black joy through their various forms of intimacy with Black children as well as their own childhoods. This essay contends such conservative aspects of respectable motherhood are exemplified by Irene, whose desire to maintain her family's middle-class status leads her to avoid complex questions about Black happiness. In addition to critiquing Irene's limitations, Larsen further explores Black women's erotic power by describing Irene's conflicted feelings about her childhood friend Clare's willful pursuit of pleasure. Informed by Audre Lorde's attentiveness to the Black inner girl child as a source of erotic power and Saidiya Hartman's Black feminist reading of love of pleasure, this essay argues that the manner in which Irene constructs her memory of Clare's girlhood and the ways the trope of childhood is deployed in the novel reveal Irene's fascination with Clare's yearning for a freer life and her willful refusal of self-abnegation.