To portray the danger that Clare always put herself in, I started with a large and overbearing hand, which covers nearly the entire paper. To me, the idea of an oppressive and large hand captured the feeling of always being under someone’s control or at someone’s mercy. This, as we know, was always the case for Clare: “‘I [Clare] nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out alright. But, I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish’” (36). In this scene, Clare was at the mercy of her own body, her own child.
I wanted to represent the exceedingly “hellish” “strain” that Clare was under, by not having the hand completely touching the ground. I left the hand perpetually frozen a distance above the ground, revealing to the reader the pitch black chasm that lies beneath the hand. Clare, I would imagine, exists under this hand, outside of the reader’s view, always under the oppressive control of someone else and always consumed by a never-ending, “hellish” darkness. I felt that depicting and envisioning Clare being trapped in an endlessly dark place could give me a better understanding of Clare’s potential feelings of hopelessness and desperation, her feeling that there might not be any way out of her predicament. And it certainly did: simply imagining myself in such a place would be endless tormenting. The idea of never knowing what could happen and of feeling that your own future is outside of your control, is something I imagine Clare constantly felt while passing, and is certainly a terrifying idea to think about. This was, in large part, the insight I gained into Clare’s predicament—and of course all those like Clare who really did pass during this time.
After completing this drawing and contemplating the choices I made in this drawing, I feel I have gained a newfound appreciation for the danger and risks that Clare had put herself in for the sake of improving her social status, and of course, more broadly, the dangers and risks of passing in the early 20th century. In my visual adaptation, I reversed the presence of characters and feelings in the novel. In the novel, the characters who are apparent to the viewer are, of course, the characters of the novel (i.e. Clare, Irene, etc.), and what is invisible to the viewer is the oppressive sense of danger that drives characters like Clare to do what they do and say what they say. In my adaptation, I made the characters invisible and this abstract feeling of danger apparent to the reader. By making this switch, of course, the characters are entirely lost—specifically, the contributions made by their individual personalities and decisions to changing (i.e. alleviating it, worsening it, etc.). their “passing” situation. Instead, what the reader is able to understand is the contributions made by the danger of passing itself to the character’s personalities and decisions. This reversal allows the adapted character Clare to reveal, as I would imagine it, her feelings about passing, without regard to factors like setting and social status—factors which, if I had not removed the character from my adaptation, would interfere with any analysis of Clare’s state of mind. Then again, this raises the question of whether or not setting and context can be separated from one’s state of mind, as Clare would likely not have “passed” if it weren’t for the social benefits that “passing” gives.