Nella Larsen Read Online Free PDF Page B

surfaces on which Irene reads (writes) her own psychic projection of otherness. Significantly, upon their first encounter, Irene is figured as a reader who “[fills] in the gap of her history,” while Clare—constructed as a surface that lacks depth and interiority—is rendered “silent.” But it is her aversive glance (“she had only to turn away her eyes, to refuse [Clare] recognition”) that restricts Irene’s knowledge of the Otherness that is Clare. For the reader, then, the meaning of Clare’s character remains buried in Irene’s unconscious and the textual unconscious.
    Structured by three chapters, “Encounter,” “Re-encounter,” and “Finale,” Larsen’s novel structurally mimes and formally thematizes a theatrical performance. The second “act,” as it were, opens with Irene ruminating over a missive she had received from Clare some two years earlier—“a letter that was, to her taste, a bit too lavish in its wordiness, a shade too unreserved in the manner of its expression.” Not only is Clare further textualized in this passage, but she is associated in Irene’s imagery with an aesthetics of theatricality or performativity (her face is an “ivory mask”) whose affect is excess: “It roused again that old suspicion that Clare was acting, not consciously, perhaps—that is, not too consciously—but, none the less, acting.” Clare’s excess is expressed not only in what is elsewhere described as her “theatrical heroics,” but in her dress, which “deliberate[ly] court[ed] . . . attention”; in her language, characterized by “all those superlatives”; in her smile, which is “a shade too provocative”; and in her appearance, which renders her “just a shade too good-looking.” But if Clare is a duplicitously performative text, associated with
excess,
Irene is arguably an unreliable narrator, associated with
lack:
Indeed, it is Irene’s psychic anxiety and repression that is reflected in the narrative’s gaps and anxieties. Put somewhat differently, if Clare signals a kind of psychic exhibitionism, Irene figures a psychic repression manifest both at the level of the body (sexual repression) as well as narrative (textual repression). But although the reader may indeed share Irene’s fear and fascination with the text (Clare) as an aestheticized object of knowledge, Irene’s repressive reading need not be the reader/ critic’s.
    Significantly, it is Irene who, at the outset of the novel, fears “being ejected”—or “outed,” as it were—from the racially exclusive Drayton Hotel tearoom. 57 What soon becomes evident, however, is that Irene’s true “outing” is a consequence of her re-encounter with Clare Kendry, whose “daring” and “having” ways expose Irene to her own alterity, or “otherness.”
    Arguing that Clare, in fact, exists in terms of Irene’s own projections of “otherness” (“the unconscious, the unknowable, the erotic, and the passive”), Cheryl Wall figures Irene and Clare as psychological “doubles.” 58 Similarly, for Thadious Davis, Clare embodies “the personal and psychological characteristics that Irene needs to become a complete person.” 59 Further, Ann duCille figures Clare as “something more than . . . another doubling or dividing”; for duCille, Clare functions less as Irene’s “alter ego than her alter libido, the buried, long-denied sexual self.” 60 Like these readings, my own assumes a relation of complementarity between Irene and Clare, in which the latter functions to disrupt Irene’s sense of identity by exposing her long-repressed self-difference.
    In her portrayal of these two women as mirrorlike images, Larsen frequently subverts the opposition claimed by Irene: “Actually