The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity

Abstract

In this scene from James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the encounter between the young, nameless mulatto boy - who will soon transform into the still nameless ex-colored of the novel's title - and his image in the is both troubling and inconclusive. The boy seeks in this seemingly objective specular image the visible evidence of his identity - a sign or mark which might brand him indisputably as either or white. He finds instead both liquid darkness and ivory whiteness contraposed, the blackness of his hair falling over his temples, making his forehead seem whiter than it really was. In short, for the boy his image is a doubtful proof of his race, as was his former opinion of himself (as or, more precisely, as blank or without color), or as are the opinions others will later form of him (as white, black, mulatto, etc.). Barred from what for others seems an objective test of identity, the boy is left in a peculiar position: He may choose his race. This choice, of course, is not an uncomplicated one, entailing as it does either the denial of his own history, on one hand, or the acceptance of an unjustifiable but undeniable economic and social subjugation, on the other. The complex of social, economic, and political considerations involved in this choice - both undergirding it and following from it - are symbolized when the boy looks into the mirror. Does a man gaze into the looking-glass to find a man looking back? Or is it the other way around? Johnson never answers these questions, but never stops asking: The question of verifiable and constant identity is as crucial for the boy in this scene learning that he is black as it is, later in the novel, for the man determined to pass as white - and as ambiguous. The Negro becomes, in Johnson's novel and in other African American literature of the same period, the conscious, speaking center of what for the rest of the world is a largely unconscious effort to mark the borders of race, class, and self; his struggles with self-definition, with class and race consciousness as both internalized and articulated, are themselves mirrors for the racialized American dialogue of identity that surrounds him. Similar mirroring confrontations - both literal and figurative - arise in Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, another novel in which issues surrounding American racial identity are explored through an examination of the lives of its two passing characters, John and Rena Walden. In each of these books, the confrontation between the figure and his/her image marks a point at which the enigmatic American dialogue of race is resolved into a single human being, as the complementary notions of alienation and assimilation inherent in that dialogue are balanced on the narrow fulcrum of a constructed and constructing self. Hall of Mirrors: Lacan and Gates In order to understand fully the implications of passing for identity-formation, it may be useful to examine the figure's confrontation with the from two similar, yet distinct, theoretical vantage points: first, from the point of view of Lacan's identity theory, and then from the more racially aware perspective of Henry Louis Gates's theory of Signification. Certainly, the scene with which I began this essay resonates with Lacan's mirror - that (to Lacan) crucial stage in a child's development during which the child develops an I: The stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject... the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality . . . and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of alienating identity which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Thus to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Urn welt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications. …