넬라 라슨의 『패싱』 속에 나타난 과장과 반복으로서의 여성 재현: 버틀러의 수행성 이론을 중심으로

Abstract

Judith Butler argues the possibility of subverting patriarchy from within the system (as the term “subvert” suggests), while other feminists have dreamed ‘subverting’ from the outside. Butler insists that the Others within the system, for example, homosexuals within the heterosexual system, can reveal the artificiality and fictionality of the dominant system by repeating and exaggerating the given/prescribed roles. Nella Larsen’s Passing meets Butler’s concept of performativity as the title itself implicates an African-American subject pretending to be white and following white norms. Passing in Passing, however, is acted not only on race, but on gender and sexuality as well. The fact that the two heroines of Passing are black females makes feminism, along with racial discourse, the main analytical frame of the novella. In particular, under the dominant normative ideology of the Harlem region in the 1920s, the two heroines, black middle class housewives, strive to survive as either white or black and their struggling becomes complicated and severe. However, through this complexity and severity of their lives, which neither fit the norm nor deviated from it completely, Passing discloses the fictionality of white, heterosexual, and patriarchal ideology. This article reexamines the issue of female representation in Passing, especially the representation of black women, through Butler’s concept of performativity: Clare’s (overt) representation of women’s beauty and Irene’s performance of the Angel in the House. Clare’s excessive representation of female beauty debunks the male subject’s or observer’s standard on aesthetics, according to which, only women “proper” enough to be contained within the male’s scope of understanding can then be judged “beautiful.” Irene’s repetition of an angel in the house also represents the dilemma of the “true (white) woman”– or a slave master’s wife in the antebellum South – who had to maintain the “house” in the face of her husband’s tacit infidelity with the other woman, the black slave. Hence, the two females’ passings represent the myth of ‘true womanhood,’ but the representations in repetition and excess as everyday performance denaturalize the discourse on black women’s gender.