nter the African American community.Clare begins to realize that her desire to return to her African American heritage overshadows the disaster it will cause. In order to “get the things [she] wants badly enough, [she]’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away” (Larsen 210). In reality, Clare’s ultimate “loss of soul” is realized in the fact that she is willing to forsake her family, including her daughter, in order to reclaim her racial identity. This, not her eventual death, becomes Clare’s ultimate tragedy. She loses something of her own soul living in the world of white men. Thus, in Clare, one “finds in her a tragic symbol of the whole irrational concern in America over color and race” (Davis 98). She feels that society forces her to abandon her family simply because part of her is African American. The fact that Clare pretends to be white in order to secure an economically stable life is crucial to understanding the motivations for people who pass. First, for these people “there was an economic motivation. When almost every job of any consequence in the white world…were closed to the Negro, it was only natural for those who could pass to take advantage of their color” (Davis 97). Clare also passes “because it enables her to marry a man of means. Because she, like most other black women of the 1920’s, if she achieved any middle-class status, did it by virtue of a man’s presence in her life by virtue of his status” (Washington 48). Clare tells Irene that “money’s awfully nice to have. In fact all things consider…it’s even worth the price” of passing (Larsen 160). Clare’s motivation for passing does not mean that she feels that the African American race is beneath her. Instead, she understands that passing allows her to escape the poverty she faces as an African American. Clare pas...
