Passing for American: Establishing American identity in the work of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein.

Racial passing appears as a theme in both black- and white-authored American novels from the mid-nineteenth century on, and receives particularly intensive treatment during the 1920s. Since United States citizenship has by the early twentieth century come to mean an exceedingly rarefied whiteness, this dissertation argues that the establishment of any American citizen-identity in that period will inescapably proceed according to the model that passing provides. But racial categories are complex and shifting social phenomena. Thus I expand the concept of passing, arguing that Americans pass to escape whatever embodiment--race, gender, class, sexual orientation--obstructs their access to abstract American citizenship. Passing, that is, effectively disembodies one, so that one's operations in the public sphere will seem natural rather than transgressive. Thus I read as narratives of passing not just James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), but also F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). These texts deploy representations of passing so as to illuminate not just movement within, but alternative configurations of, the framework of national identity that would marginalize the overembodied subject. James Weldon Johnson creates a narrator whose mixed-race embodiment and decision to pass for white render him, ironically, a thoroughly representative American. Narrator Nick Carraway emphasizes that Gatsby's efforts to mingle with the polo-playing, Nordic upper class are strained and unnatural so as to avoid recognizing that he is himself passing. Irene Redfield's and Clare Kendry's radically divergent modes of passing in Larsen's novel reflect their distinct orientations to white patriarchal law. And Gertrude Stein reveals how passing both acquiesces in and undermines conventional identity at once, securing the social advantages of (an implicitly white and masculine) American identity by passing as a genius while conjuring through her concurrent passing performance as Alice a potentially infinite array of alternative configurations of the American subject.Ph.D.American literatureAmerican studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129713/2/9610189.pd