Clare Kendry in Bloom: Fashioning Modern Urban Identity in Nella Larsen’s Passing

This essay reconsiders Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) through the conceptual framework of the modernist garden as a spatial and symbolic device that disrupts boundaries between nature and the urban environment. Although Larsen’s novel is conventionally situated within the framework of Black urban modernity and Harlem Renaissance cultural politics, this study foregrounds a less explored dimension of its aesthetic architecture: the metaphorical and performative role of floral imagery in shaping the enigmatic figure of Clare Kendry. Approaching the garden as a liminal space in which categories of nature and culture are continually destabilized and reconstituted, the essay argues that Clare’s attire of daffodils, jonquils, and lilies becomes a powerful metaphor for her performative identity and its disruptive effect on norma- tive social spaces. Through these floral elements, Clare emerges as a “mobile urban garden”: an artfully composed figure that subtly transforms the social spaces she enters and exposes the volatility of the norms regulating visibility, desire, and belonging. This cultivated surface becomes a strategic interface — neither fully organic nor entirely artificial — through which the ideological assumptions of the New Negro Movement are interrogated. By reframing Clare’s floral display as a dynamic metaphor, the essay contends that Larsen uses garden aesthetics to probe the instability of selfhood under modernity and to reveal the artifice underpinning dominant cultural ideals.