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might be regarded as “compulsory blackness,” in which, by virtue of the one-drop rule, one’s “roots and genealogy” are also denied.
    41. For Wall, these roles are defined as “the perfect lady” and “the exotic Other.” Wall argues, correctly, that Irene is “the perfect lady” and Clare “the exotic Other”—both roles rejected by Larsen’s earlier protagonist, Helga Crane, in
Quicksand.
See Wall, 121.
    42. Deborah McDowell, Introduction, Nella Larsen,
Quicksand
and Passing
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xxx.
    43. See Washington.
    44. Tate, 143.
    45. Wall, 138.
    46. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Eth
nicityin American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59.
    47. McDowell, xxvi, xxx. In
Bodies That Matter,
theorist Judith Butler both extends and revises McDowell’s reading of
Passing
by arguing that race and sexuality are “inextricably linked, such that the text offers a way to read the racialization of [sex and] sexual conflict, 272.
    48. Larson, 82.
    49. See Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradi
tionin Black Women’s Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Clare Kendry’s ‘True’ Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s
Pass
ing,” Callaloo 15.4 (1992).
    50. Critic Hazel Carby suggests that the mulatta “is a narrative device of mediation; it allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relation between the races.” See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence
of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171. Similarly, Ann duCille describes the mulatta as “both a rhetorical device and a political strategy,” 7.
    51. McDowell, xxvi; Tate, 144.
    52. Saks, 44.
    53. See Deborah McDowell’s argument, cited above, that Irene’s attraction to Clare is based on latent or repressed lesbian desire.
    54. Saks argues that because “the deviance of social form from legal form makes social form an unreliable sign of legal form (and vice versa), this deviance causes a crisis of representation,” 63.
    55. Referencing the black postmodernist subject, W. Lawrence Hogue compares the decentered subject of postmodernism to the modernist subject: “Unlike the alienated, modern subject who seeks temporal unification of the past and the future with the present, the postmodern subject is free from all metaphysical narratives, free to simply desire and want. He or she no longer seeks social change; he or she exists only to satisfy his or her own desires.” See W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity,
Postmodernity: A Look at the Literatures of People of Color Since the
1960s
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 152.
    56. In his S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguishes between le scriptible (the writerly) and
le lisible
(the readerly) text, the latter allowing the reader to collaborate in the production of meaning. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Also see Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response model of reading in which the “act of reading” generates new meanings, and even new identities, on the part of the reader: Wolfgang Iser,
The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communicationin Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and
The Act of Reading:
A Theory of Aesthetic Reception
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Both models of reading would seem especially useful for understanding the consequences of Irene’s “act of reading” Clare.
    57. My reading here signifies on Deborah McDowell’s reading of Larsen’s
Passing.
    58. Wall, 130. Curiously, Wall focuses on
Irene’s
function as
Clare’s
double,