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

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.