In her essay, "Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction," Martha J. Cutter says: "Clare's husband, Jack Bellew, through his insistence on the 'innate' differences between the races, emphasizes a conception of identity that is essentialistic, fixed, and unitary: one is white or black, not both of these things at once...[he] even believes he can discern who is black and bar them from his household: 'I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be" [40]* . Bellew believes he can draw the color line, separate black from white, prevent the intrusion of the unwanted and savage Other...Bellew...learns that his own identity - which is so firmly founded on an opposition between himself and a black Other - is subject to erosion. Bellew bases his identity on a sense of absolute racial differences that he can know and tell. The world is very simple to him: either you are white (and therefore 'good') or you are black (and therefore 'bad').

Cutter references what Irene Redfield herself is remembering in this passage. The irony here lies in the fact that just as Jack Bellew draws a "color line," separating black from white and placing his allegiance with the latter which Irene resents, she herself is doing the very same thing in wishing she had taken "up the defence of the race" to which she belongs. A paragraph later, Irene acknowledges that she has a duty to Clare, that she is "bound to her by those very ties of race, which, for all her repudiation of them, Clare had been unable to completely sever" (52). Irene herself is also drawing a color line between black and white, and placing allegiance and duty on the side she "belongs" to.

1. Cutter, Martha J.. "Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction". Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

2. Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

*Dr. Campbell, I inserted the page number for our book where Cutter had the page number corresponding to the version of Passing that she referenced.