“A Poor, Washed Out, Pale Creature”: Passing, Dracula, and the Jazz Age Vampire

Abstract

Although critics have repeatedly referenced the stagey or cinematic elements that characterize Passing’s (1929) narrative structure and occasionally observed its gothic aesthetics, thus far no critic has attempted to contextualize Nella Larsen’s novel within the American stage and film culture of the early twentieth century or the concurrent revitalization of America’s interest in the Gothic in film and theater. Situated primarily in New York and helmed by many of the same individuals, the Harlem and Gothic Renaissances of the interwar years cooperated to reframe racial and aesthetic discourses, as Harlem art absorbed and reimagined gothic art, culture, and slang and imbued Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its successors with covert racial commentary. This essay studies Nella Larsen’s Passing within this context, paying special attention to the influence of American racial discourse on Horace Liveright’s 1927 stage version of Dracula and its mutually influential relationship with black theater, art, and discourse. Melding contemporary archetypes of the Jazz Age vamp and gothic vampire to construct its liminal heroine, Clare Kendry, as a gothic figure in the vamp/vampire paradigm, Passing repurposes gothic elements to challenge racial binaries and to destabilize the racist status quo. This study suggests the significant extent to which Harlem Renaissance authors not only adapted the Gothic within their own literature but also reinvented and redefined it in the popular discourses of the twentieth century.