Sylvia Plath – “Daddy”

Daddy by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not 
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

            Sylvia Plath was one of the first poets who really caught my eye, who made me appreciate poetry as more than just nonsensical wordplay, although her poems do often come off like cryptic riddles or sardonic nursery rhymes.  For instance, her poem “Metaphors”—one of the first poems I truly fell in love, both stylistically and thematically—begins, “I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” after which she gives the reader 8 more 9-syllabled lines, all of which are metaphors for pregnancy and a woman’s potential fears or doubts which may plague some women as they move forward through those 9 months.  Plath’s raw emotions are presented to the reader in Rubik’s cube form, creating a paradox between the poet’s structural liveliness and her visceral anguish.  Personally, I think the best example of this is seen in “Lady Lazarus,” probably my favorite Plath poem.  It’s so powerfully depressing—in a good way—because it is a poetic riddle about her attempts at suicide…and only a short time later they found her dead in her kitchen, head in the oven, “doing it again” as she had done “every ten years.”  “Dying is an art,” she writes, that she “does exceptionally well…I guess you could say I have a call.” Plath takes morbid poetry to a whole new level, putting her agonizing life into beautifully haunting words that, to a certain extent, were the words of a beautiful suicide note.

            Anyhow, while “Metaphors” and “Lady Lazarus” are certainly captivating poems, Plath’s seminal poem “Daddy” is particularly evocative, especially because I myself am at a similar point in life, trying to escape and, as Plath puts it, “to kill” the bleak paradigm I’ve inherited from my parents.  I know that prior to reading her poem over BBC Radio back in the ‘60s she said that the poem concerns “a girl with an Electra complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God” but let’s be honest, we know that Plath is talking about her own father. After all, she is one of the foremost confessional poets.  That said, deciphering this poem is like deciphering Plath’s psyche, a mind depressed and agitated by its former dependence and attachment to a false image of her father, her daddy who “died before [she] had time to kill [him].”  Plath’s eager need to “kill” her father is metaphoric of course, meaning that she wants to get rid of all the subconscious fears, sorrows, worries, and anxieties that her father gave her when she was just a young girl; and seeing as young children are sponges, absorbing everything that a parent does—whether the parents openly expresses it or tries to hide it from the kid—she has lived within this grueling paradigm for all her life.  She is sick and tired of living like shit, feeling anxious in front of people and worthless to the world, a problem that a lot of repressed women had to deal with after World War II ended and the 1950s consumer culture picked up, subsequently cornering women in the kitchen where patriarchal society said they belonged.  No time to even write, they said.

However, Plath and other female poets of the time, like Adrienne Rich, could no longer contain themselves, resulting in the splash of poignant and powerful female voices that emerged in the ‘60s and beyond.  Getting back to “Daddy,” Plath says, “I used to pray to recover you,” insinuating that she used to, until recently, look up to her father and desperately wish that he would come back to her.  This desire for her father’s love, perhaps a Freudian desire, began when she “was ten” and “they buried [her dad]” and lasted beyond her twenties, as she says, “at twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do,” conveying that she attempted suicide when she was 20 years old because, at the time, she thought that the only way to gain her dead father’s love was to also die: “I thought even the bones would do.”  She was pathologically set on her father, depending upon him, dead or alive, to give her comfort, happiness, and love.  All we need is love (cue The Beatles).  Anyhow, they threw her in a mental ward after she tried to kill herself, “suck [her] together with glue”—that is, the innumerable psychiatrists she’s seen have used their far from perfect skills/technology to help her get back to a state of mental balance.  This help is impermanent though, it is the “glue” of the psychotherapeutic and/or electro-shock sessions she was likely given.  Not to say that today’s pharmacological approach to depression isn’t any less “gluey.”

Yet Plath, declaring her independence by stating that she is a Jew, says she has a newfound understanding of her father is as “a German,” a “Nazi” oppressor, a “man in black with a Meinkampf look.”  Using the Jew/Nazi dichotomy, Plath separates herself from her father when she says that her father is chuffing her off like a “Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”; that is, her father is the oppressor who torments her in the concentration camps of her psyche.  In the final two stanzas, she writes that her father is the “vampire who said he was you / And drank [her] blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.”  I believe the seven year comment refers to when her father died…at age seven?  I’m not quite sure, but that seems to be the case for the poem’s speaker nonetheless.  By declaring her father a vampire who has sucked her blood for seven years, Plath is revealing, both to us and to the reader, that the idealized image of her father—the attachment which drove her to multiple suicide attempts—is truly an ugly monster that has been feeding off of her blood, or happiness, since he died when she was seven.  “The villagers never liked you,” Plath says, likely referring to the people in her own life that have suffered from Plath’s depression—all the people she drove away because she was carrying the vampire of her father with her, probably making her unbearable to be around, unfortunately.  Yet it wasn’t her, it was daddy’s paradigm, and so the village will be happy when that vampire is dead, when Plath’s inner angst dissipates into an illusory fog.  On another level, the villagers could also represent the various elements of Plath’s subconscious that have been shouting out for help, manifesting themselves upon Plath’s conscious mind.  Explicitly ending her obsession and desire for her father’s approval and love, Plath ends the poem with a powerful affirmation of independence: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”  It’s odd how the family unit so deeply defines one’s view on the world and, consequently, their lives.

Extra:

Jack Kerouac – “The Vanishing American Hobo”

The American Hobo has a hard time hoboing nowadays due to the increase in police surveillance of highways, railroad yards, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the thousand-and-one hiding holes of the industrial night. — In California, the pack rat, the original old type who goes walking from town to town with supplies and bedding on his back, the “Homeless Brother”, has practically vanished, along with the ancient gold-panning desert rat who used to walk with hope in his heart through struggling Western towns that are now so prosperous they don’t want old bums any more. — “Man dont want no pack rats here even though they founded California” said an old man hiding with a can of beans and an Indian fire in a river bottom outside Riverside California in 1955. — Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. — There’s nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.

….

In America there has always been (you will notice the peculiarly Whitmanesque tone of this poem, probably written by old Goddard) a definite special idea of footwalking freedom going back to the days of Jim Bridger and Johnny Appleseed and carried on today by a vanishing group of hardy old timers still seen sometimes waiting in a desert highway for a short bus ride into town for panhandling (or work) and grub, or wandering the Eastern part of the country hitting Salvation Armies and moving on from town to town and state to state toward the eventual doom of big-city skid rows when their feet give out.

…

Today the hobo’s made to slink — everybody’s watching the cop heroes on TV.

Benjamin Franklin was like a hobo in Pennsylvania; he walked through Philly with three big rolls under his arms and a Massachusetts halfpenny on his hat. — John Muir was a hobo who went off into the mountains with a pocketful of dried bread, which he soaked in creeks.

Did Whitman terrify the children of Louisiana when he walked the open road?

….

Oh the poor bum of the skid row! There he sleeps in the doorway, back to wall, head down, with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night, the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Joe Louis hands, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance — the hand like a beggar’s upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips, as though on the tip of the tongue he’s about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldnt say awake: “Why have you taken this away from me, that I cant draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling stoop I have to sit waiting for the wheels of the city to roll,” and further, “I dont want to show my hand but in sleep I’m helpless to straighten it, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I’m alone, I’m sick, I’m dying — see my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the emerald mountains beyond the city, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile — I’m too tired now of everything else, I’ve had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night — take me home, lock me in safe, take me to where all is peace and amity, to the family of life, my mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend — but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I’d give a million dollars to be in my own bed — O Lord save me  –”

-from Jack Kerouac’s “The Vanishing American Hobo”

Kerouac envisions the “poor bum of the skid row”—the titular “Vanishing American Hobo”—as a Christl-ike soul suffering in beatific “holy privacy” despite the grating reality of modern existence.  He sees the American spirit embodied in those American vagabonds and romantics whose unconventional lifestyles are actually rooted in the “Whitmanesque” ideals of hobos, that inner yearning towards the “idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy.”  Making numerous allusions to a medley of historical and/or mythical figures—ranging from Buddha to Benjamin Franklin, from Johnny Appleseed to Walt Whitman—all of whom he says have at one point or another hit the open road or wilderness as a hobo.  That is, walking the land and diving into life and Nature firsthand used to be a very commonplace and natural thing to do.  This all hinges upon the broad context and semantics which frame Kerouac’s particular use of the word “hobo” in a positive light, despite the increasingly negative aura surrounding hobos and hitchhiking—a decline that Kerouac observed firsthand as his spunky sojourns on the road were hindered in the late ‘50s as the mainstream media began disseminating fear-mongering news that made the American hobo out to be a vile creature; as Kerouac puts it, as “the rapist, the strangler, child-eater.—Stay away from strangers, they’ll give you poison candy.”  Cynical sentiments of external distrust were, in Kerouac’s short lifetime, becoming an ingrained American quality that makes “mothers hold tight to their children when the hobo passes through town because of what newspapers.”  What was once “natural” had, within just a couple of years, become a taboo that persists to this day.  Nobody picks up hitchhikers anymore because the media has made them out to be creepy predators; either that or because we have become such an angsty, antisocial society that even the thought of having to sit through an awkward ride with some crusty 28-year-old, as harmless as he/she may be.

But why did this happen?  The unwarranted mistrust held by the general American public was a perception constructed by “the cop heroes on TV” and “the newspapers” that were becoming all the more prevalent, especially as the latter half of the 20^th century crept up on America and the Beats.  Hobos, as Kerouac beautifully describes, found a profound sense of contentment out on the open road, “that secrete eternal hope you get sleeping in empty boxcars fling up the Salinas Valley in hot January sunshine full of Golden Eternity toward San Jose,” going nowhere but someplace else, talking to nobody except someone else, seeking everything by doing nothing—by purely existing as humanity used to, roaming the earth in an endless quest for experience, as oppose to the endless quest of capitalism and the 1950s consumer culture it produced.

In the hobo shantytowns which ostensibly makeup the absolute dregs of America, Kerouac sees the sick and dying American dream, the original America that Whitman idealized about and Thoreau walked amongst.  Instead, the “white-picket fence” American dream has been superimposed over the corpse of the agrarian American dream. “There’s nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom,” Kerouac writes in his simple yet driven steam-of-consciousness style.  He says this, however, through the nostalgic lens of retrospect, as if lamenting the final days of the true American dream and that romantic aspiration for total self-reliance which the American hobo so seamlessly embodies.  Thus, Kerouac’s final punch, as it were, is slammed into our consciousness with the vivid image of a beggar’s hand “upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips.”  The American hobo’s unconsciously outstretched hand—symbolically coming together in a meditative posture, what’s called the “Gian Mudra”—is driven by his/her beatific desire for “the emerald mountains beyond the city” and the natural human urge which desperately begs for divine love and salvation, “I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night[…]O Lord save me.”  This is a hopeless yet beautiful howl, a united voice of the “Vanishing American Hobo”—and the Beat Generation, in a sense—that’s directed both to society and to the infinite spirit of God as a plea for help, a cry for rationality in a time of consumer madness and material disillusionment. Yet the hobo still stands tall like Johnny Appleseed or Walt Whitman, living a practical and unadulterated life in Nature, ‘living off the fat of the land’ even in the face of an oppressive society which continues to threaten the American individuality which is so quintessential to the spirit of freedom that imbues the very foundation of this democratic experiment: America.

Extra! – Footage of Kerouac reading a bit of “On The Road” on The Steve Allen Show:

Allen Ginsberg – Howl

 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

A cacophony of hyperbolic images and juxtaposed lifestyles, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is a rhythmic howl of anguish, a poignant rant on post-WWII American society and the homogenously restrictive 1950s culture it engendered.  Quite absurdly, the disturbing depravations of World War II were met with ubiquitous rows of suburban housing developments, stylish yet affordable automobiles, celebrities like Marylyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, reasonably priced and highly disseminated television sets, tree-lined avenues of white picket fences strewn with 5-cent lemonade stands and peppy milkmen—all of the kitschy products of ‘50s American consumer culture.  What appeared to be a booming society of likeminded conservatives was, in reality, a politically constructed and propagated way of life aimed at repressing the social turmoil incited by two consecutive global wars.

Howl voices the marginalized generation of displaced Americans—the avant-gardes and intellectual experimentalists who quickly became known as the “Beat Generation” or, more loosely, “beatniks.”  Precursors to hippies and the catalyst for the ’60s counterculture, beatniks were one of the many marginalized groups of Americans who “forced on the reading public an awareness of other culture: drug experiences, lives in prison and mental institutions, homosexual and lesbian sexualities, liberal politics, spiritualism not necessarily housed in suburban Protestant environ” (2579).  Above all, they sought truth and contentment in a century plagued by global warfare, authoritative corruption, the increasingly blatant fear mongering political tactics, an obsessive materialism triggered by capitalist marketing ploys brought on by the newfangled ‘50s consumer culture.  Appropriately, the term beatnik carries a mixture of connotations: their writing has a musical cadence, the beat which makes it so pleasing to read or hear read aloud; beat as in the Catholic Beatitudes, or the “supreme blessedness” of the God’s love, represented in Howl as “Eternity,” “Heaven,” “the ancient heavenly connection to starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” “the cosmos,” or, in the “Footnote to Howl,” as “Holy!”; and finally, beat as in they are fed up with this corrupt society that they’ve been born into and therefore express that suppressed rage with the raw imagery and biting humor so characteristic of the Beats.

Ginsberg breaks or at least begins the fragmentation of what was formerly perceived as a unified vision of American culture: the highly prosperous and militantly victorious “American Century,” as it became known as.  Yet as Paul Lauter points out in his essay on “The ‘American Century’: From Victory to Vietnam,” a culture “that appears ebullient and victorious on the surface is invariably masking misery” and that “although the United States was the most powerful nation on earth, within its borders were powerless groups of people.” (2245).  As Ginsberg relentlessly details, “the best minds of [his] generation” are social outcasts, a motley collection of post world-war misfits who, having seen the horrors of two massive world wars—all within half a decade, mind you—are “destroyed by madness.”  The violent realities that they’ve been exposed to throughout their lives have left them “burning alive in their innocent flannel suits” and waiting to be “run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,” further provoking them to revolt against society in the innumerable ways described throughout Howl.

Living in a post-world war America, these aimless pariahs could no longer pretend to live in this society that they now saw as a monster, as something from which the individual must separate or die, as “Moloch!”  In his “Footnote to Howl,” Ginsberg reverses Part II, bellowing “Holy!”—an embodiment and affirmation of love, both human and divine—as opposed to “Moloch!”—an embodiment of the tyrannical, repressive powers of post-WWII American society and the 1950s consumer culture.

Though structurally analogous to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Ginsberg’s Howl is the thematic counterpart to Whitman’s seminal poem, almost a lament to Whitman about the death of the American soul and/or dream.  What happened after WWII to change the American dream from self-sufficiency (the agrarian dream) to a prosperous suburban existence (the white picket fence American Dream; the post-1950s American Dream)?

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah   because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels   who were visionary indian angels,

….

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose-garden and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

Ginsberg’s outrageous humor and brazen wordplay is scattered throughout the poem, as seen here.  Even by today’s standards—in a society where soccer moms openly rave about erotic trash novels like Fifty Shades of Grey—Ginsberg’s blatant sexual or macabre imagery, when sharply juxtaposed with such cultural clichés as a casual stroll through the park, collides into a richly witty poetic statement that not only evokes laughter, but comments on the Beat Generation’s hedonistic sexual experimentation and their complete openness to gay and lesbian relations.  The term “balled” refers to the slang terms for engaging in sexual intercourse as well as the act of crying, or “bawling,” thus clashing the Beats’ sense of misery with the sexual liberation that they unreservedly engaged in.  Moreover, the word “come” is a double-entendre, meaning both to go somewhere assumed to be near the speaker and to reach a sexual climax in which, for a man, he “scatter[s] their semen freely to whomever come who may.”  Raunchy, yes; but Ginsberg is being brutally honest here, sincere yet shamelessly open about some of the experiences he has been through, whether it be sexual experiences, drug induced hallucinations, or spiritually-charged visions.

….

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper   rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

….

and rose  reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabachtani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

….

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skull and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies!  Old men weeping in the parks!

Arthur Miller – The Crucible – Acts 3 & 4

TO BE COMPLETED

Arthur Miller – The Crucible – Acts 1 & 2

TO BE COMPLETED

William Faulkner – Barn Burning

The store in which the justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish – this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet.

 -William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” p. 1704

This passage is the opening three lines of William Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning,” mostly the sprawlingly evocative second sentence which concerns the sharp scent of cheese and the young man “crouched on his nail keg” who we later know as Sarty Snopes.  I had to read the sentence three times over before I could really appreciate it, as with many other sentences throughout the modernist tale, but once I got a sense for Faulkner’s relentless use of clauses, what I’ll call “the cheese sentence” made a hell of a lot more sense to me.  I guess I was just getting lost in the cheese sentence and its multifaceted intonation of theme, character, and setting.  We are introduced to the “boy” as he sits in some type of makeshift courthouse full of “solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read”; clearly, the boy is on the brink of starvation, seeing as he has surrendering his mind to the senses and, subsequently, is surveying his environment with his senses, with his stomach and intestines.  Among the cheese scent he smells is the “smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood”; that is, Sarty’s family and all of the bad habits that the Snopes’ family’s carry with them.  Thematically, Sarty is attached to his father’s identity, lacking his own (as children do).  He has been raised within the paradigm of his father’s behavior and morality and, consequently, cannot see his father’s flaws.  This is a story about a boy striving to find his own identity outside of this paradigm.  So in a very sensory manner, the cheese sentence introduces us to the stark world that Sarty lives in, to both the migrant worker environment and the family environment which, in his case, is tainted with bad blood.  Who knew cheese could convey so much!

His father mounted to the seat where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining back in the same movement.

-William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” p. 1706

Faulkner’s connection between Harris Snopes’ and irate horse whipping and some 20^th century greaseball revving his car engine, attempting to boost his machismo in the most obnoxious way possible.  There are a few other places in the story in which Faulkner links the past to his present day, such as when Sarty “heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before his birth” (1713).  Essentially, Faulkner is—like he does when he touches on the pitfalls of one’s family history—commenting on the incessant reoccurrence of history overall: thepast.  Like a family’s bad habits that get passed down from generation to generation until one individual decides to reconstruct their inner paradigm, humanity as a whole must break the cycle of history, lest we continue burning barns into eternity.

Nella Larsen – Passing

It was, she saw at once, what she had expected since learning from the postmark that Clare was in the city.  An extravagantly phrased wish to see her again.  Well, she needn’t and wouldn’t, Irene told herself, accede to that.  Nor would she assist Clare to realize her foolish desire to return for a moment to that life which long ago, and of her own choice, she had left behind her.

                                                                        -Nella Larsen, Passing, p. 198

Larsen’s novella, particularly Part One, is steeped in tension and carries a very uncomfortable vibe.  Both Irene and Clare are light skinned African Americans, and though they are connected by their pasts the two childhood friends have taken two drastically divergent approaches to life.  While Irene stuck with her African American identity, Clare “passed” as a white woman; that is, Clare took on the normative white identity by accentuating her white features and dying her hair blonde, but Irene embraced what she feels to be her natural identity as an Africa American.  Thus, when Irene receives the letter in the beginning of the story from Clare about this glorious “pale life” of hers, it creates that strong sense of unease about their ensuing reunion.  It feels like a terrible version of those awkward encounters I’ve been having lately with various childhood friends who approach me for coffee, only to realize that we have absolutely nothing in common—besides redundantly talking of ‘the good ole days’—and that the two of us have gone down two very different paths in life.  I say it ‘feels’ like this because my experiences come nowhere close to what Irene and Clare had to go through—not only are they very different people on the inside, they have grown into two different racial identities.  Irene begrudges Clare for leaving “that life which long ago, and of her own choice, she had left behind her,” making it clear that she believes Clare has betrayed her African American roots by choosing to pass as white; she is angry at Clare for being an unprincipled imposter.  In Irene’s eyes, Clare sold her true identity in order to fit in with the hegemonic white society and to evade racial strife—yet why is this wrong?  Though “passing” might seem like the most pragmatic way for light skinned African Americans to live, Irene is aware that the practice of “passing” is a product of institutionalized white racism.  For instance, by taking on a white identity and suppressing her black identities Clare is given an escape from the horrors of racism in 20^th century society.

“But you never answered my question.  Tell me, honestly, haven’t you ever thought of ‘passing’?”

Irene answered promptly: “No.  Why should I?  And so disdainful was her voice and manner that Clare’s face flushed and her eyes glinted.

                                                            -Nella Larsen, Passing, p. 160

Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.

                                                                        -Nella Larsen, Passing, p. 166

Regardless of how strong a woman Irene is, Clare’s reappearance in her life produces a cluster of doubts that Irene has to make sense of; and in the process of thinking about what it would be like to have “passed” as a white woman, she feels this sense of isolation and “aloneness”—that she is being “outnumbered” by Gertrude and Clare and all of the people who are passing as white and benefiting from it, at last in the short run.

In the long run, however, “passing” is detrimental to both the African American community and the individual who is doing the passing.  Clare convinced herself that passing is better in terms of her financial situation, but she slowly realizes through Irene that passing is a craven act of evading racial issues and abandoning the fight against racial inequalities and the anxieties anchored to those prejudices.  Yet playing into white culture and becoming part of the hegemonic white society only serves to reinforce the idea that African Americans should ‘strive for whiteness’ and adopt a white mentality rather than embracing their African American roots like the slew of black artists who, during the Harlem Renaissance, used art and narrative to create the “New Negro”—a new African American identity that takes pride in their blackness and rejects this idea of adhering to white standards by passing.  Clare sold all sense of respectability when she renounced all African American conventions, thereby removing herself from the African American culture she grew up in so that she could fit into the dominant white society.