Passing 's Desires for Form: Black Respectability, Queer Narrative, and Wayward Experimentalism

abstract: Queer theory often lauds overtly experimental modernisms as models of antinormative disruption and critiques "conventional" narrative forms for complicity with normative ideologies. Nella Larsen's Passing , however, exemplifies how many Harlem Renaissance writers deployed realist and/or linear narrative forms in queer ways. The novel's subtly experimental narration depicts the process by which respectability politics influences a middle-class Black woman to straighten out her own life story in the process of narrating it to herself, revealing the queer deviations undergirding its linearity. A study of Passing 's narrative form thus reveals the queer potential of "conventional" narrative form to critique conventionality from within.