Studies in American Fiction

Abstract:

This essay sheds new light on the character of Passing’s Brian Redfield, whose restlessness and mood swings bear a striking resemblance to contemporaneous accounts of shell shock among Great War veterans. Brian, himself such a veteran as well as a physician, is so insecure about his wartime past that he looks to Claire Bellew as a model for how to pass successfully, even if the nature of his passing is not based on race, as hers is, but based on a facade of emotional stability. Larsen’s novel reveals how the intertwined discourses of shell shock and racial passing attempted to explain whiteness’s insidious role in America’s postwar “return to normalcy.”