"This Tortured and Uncertain Life": A Psychoanalytic Reading of Vera Caspary’s The White Girl

• In Event: Taboo in the Black Literary Tradition

Abstract

In 1929, Vera Caspary published a novel entitled The White Girl about a woman who passes as white. The plot itself initially appears to be conventional of passing narratives: the protagonist, Solaria, dissociates from her family thus metaphorically killing them off; she moves to New York City and avoids any associations with African Americans; and she dies tragically after fearing racial exposure. Yet this story includes elements that are far from conventional, such as her very vocal rejection of her employer’s sexual harassment and the fact that her skin darkens right before her death.

This text has received very little scholarly attention after being eclipsed by Caspary’s popular detective novel Laura (1942) which was made into a movie in 1944. Perhaps her contemporary critics were turned off by Solaria’s strong feminist leanings or the fact that this passing narrative was written by a white woman; an anomaly considering black authors of the Harlem Renaissance typically wrote on the theme of passing at the time The White Girl was published.

Though it went out of print decades ago, I was able to purchase an original edition of this text for my dissertation in 2014. I would like to present a paper that offers a “new” perspective on this old text, by focusing on Solaria’s death. The “tragic mulatto” is a long held stereotype that assumes that racial passers passively succumb to societal pressures. Using Freud’s notion of the death drive, I argue that twentieth-century passers have an internal desire to die, thus Solaria commits suicide. Moreover, I argue that her death scene features an indictment of passing, since her skin turns black as a reminder that she cannot die without encountering her black past once more. In short, I would like to closely analyze Solaria’s death scene using the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive, to make larger implications for the demise of twentieth century passing characters. Even though the theme of passing is an old one, I want to shed new light on a text that critics have ignored.

Author

• DONAVAN L. RAMON, William Paterson University