Passing Through History: Nella Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance
Written By Stephanie Hampton
Young Adult Librarian
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in 1920s America—an explosion of creative thought and action that pushed the boundaries of what was believed to be possible for Black Americans in America. Writers essential to American literature found themselves in Harlem, New York, during this time. Writers and intellectuals included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and W. E. B. Du Bois. But the Harlem Renaissance was not created by five or six famous names. It was built by hundreds of writers, artists, musicians, editors, intellectuals, and ordinary people who created spaces where Black creativity could flourish. Some became household names. Others, like Nella Larsen, were pushed into the background of literary history despite producing work that continues to resonate nearly a century later.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, Larsen left behind only two novels and a handful of short stories. Despite being the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, being married to Elmer Imes, the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics, and becoming one of the first Black female graduates of the New York Public Library School, Larsen’s life eventually moved far away from the literary world in which she had once been celebrated. She died in 1964, working as a nurse. Born in 1891 to Peter Walker, a mixed-race West Indian man from the Danish West Indies, and Marie Walker, who was Danish, Larsen grew up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood. Her complicated relationship with race, identity, and belonging would become central to her fiction, particularly her first novel, Quicksand, and eventually her final novel, Passing. In 2021, Netflix adapted Passing into a film starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson and directed by Rebecca Hall.
Passing tells the story of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two childhood friends who reconnect after years apart. Upon meeting again, Irene discovers that Clare has decided to “pass” for white. Irene, meanwhile, has married an African American doctor, has two boys, and lives quietly in Harlem. In the book, the two women dance around each other in a beautiful combination of envy, adoration, resentment, and affection. Clare is reintroduced to the Black world she chose to leave behind, blurring the line between the two lives she could have lived. Irene, who has built a stable life with her husband and children, finds herself increasingly unsettled by Clare’s presence and by the freedom Clare seems to possess.
This is a story of identity.
Rebecca Hall’s personal connection to the subject certainly influenced the care and structure of the film adaptation. How lovely it looks in black and white, and how ironic that the themes of the movie deal so directly with that very division. The film is quiet, light, and musical, much like the way Clare is often described in the novel. As an adaptation, there are characters from the novel who do not appear in the film, as well as scenes that I personally would have included. However, the screenplay, also adapted by Hall, gives more attention to certain characters, particularly Brian, Irene’s husband, played by André Holland. The film also expands on some of the frustrations with the American systems of the 1920s that are expressed more subtly in the novel.
The concept of “passing” has always interested me. It is a subject found in some of my favorite books, like The Personal Librarian and The Vanishing Half, and one of my favorite films, the tearjerker Imitation of Life. But Passing was unique for its time in the way it displayed Black Americans experiencing modernity. These were college-educated, upper-middle-class African American New Yorkers tackling subjects like motherhood, politics, race, marriage, and gender norms while taking advantage of new opportunities being created for them.
Larsen lived among the legendary talent of the Harlem Renaissance. She knew many of the people whose names would eventually become synonymous with the movement, and yet her own name has often been left at its margins. Perhaps that is part of what makes Passing so fascinating. Larsen was not interested in presenting a simple story about race. Instead, she explored the complicated ways that race, gender, class, marriage, and social expectations could determine the lives of Black women.
Irene and Clare are both living within worlds constructed around what other people believe them to be. Irene has built a carefully controlled life in Harlem, one that provides her with stability, family, and a sense of belonging. Clare, meanwhile, has sacrificed that connection in exchange for the privileges that come with being perceived as white. Neither woman is entirely satisfied with the life she has chosen. Irene envies Clare’s freedom, while Clare envies Irene’s connection to the Black community she abandoned. Their relationship becomes increasingly complicated because neither woman can simply exist without questioning what the other has.
That tension is what makes Passing feel so contemporary. Larsen’s characters are constantly negotiating the versions of themselves that they present to the world. They are asking questions that extend far beyond the specific circumstances of 1920s Harlem: Who gets to decide who we are? How much of ourselves are we willing to change to be accepted? And what happens when the life we have chosen begins to feel like a prison?
It is also impossible to discuss Passing without acknowledging Larsen herself. Her own life crossed racial and cultural boundaries in ways that complicated the categories surrounding her. She experienced the Harlem Renaissance from within its intellectual and artistic circles, yet her work did not receive the same lasting recognition as many of her male contemporaries. After publishing Passing in 1929, Larsen largely disappeared from the literary world. Her Guggenheim Fellowship was a remarkable achievement, but her later life was far removed from the literary fame that might have been expected of someone who had once stood at the center of such an extraordinary cultural moment.
And perhaps that is why revisiting Larsen matters.
Passing deserves to be read not simply as a novel from the Harlem Renaissance, but as a work that asks uncomfortable questions about identity and belonging that remain relevant today. Larsen understood that identity is rarely as simple as the categories society creates for us. Her characters live between worlds, and perhaps Larsen herself did too.
For me, that is what makes Passing worth returning to. It is a quiet novel about people living complicated lives in a complicated society, written by a woman whose own place in literary history became just as complicated as the identities she wrote about. Nella Larsen may have been overlooked for decades, but Passing makes it difficult to overlook her now.
Passing by Nella Larsen is available at the Trenton Free Public Library!
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