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Ego
“What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”
—Nella Larsen, Passing.
With Passing, Nella Larsen raises questions of race and finding oneself in an oppressive society, as seen in the inner struggles of Irene and Clare and their interactions. “Ego” is a piece that both voices and speaks to the repressed desires of the main characters of the text. I was initially inspired by the text’s ending, in which psychological ambiguity and desire ultimately takes the stage: “If Clare should die! Then—Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! She felt faint and sick. But the thought stayed with her. She could not get rid of it" (Larsen 101). In the poem, I wanted to explore the main characters of Irene using a psychoanalytic approach, largely inspired by a past reading in the fall semester. As a result, I reimagined how Irene’s repressed desires may translate into an exploration of race and society in a two-part poem: the first part examines the superego; the second part examines the id; and the poem in its entirety represents the ego, the mediation between the two.
I was largely inspired by Sigmund Freud’s idea that an individual’s personality can be isolated into three separate components: the id, the ego, and the superego. According to Freud, the id is what contains and dictates a person’s basic needs and desires. With little sense of right or wrong, the id seeks pleasure before anything else, which is in accordance both with how Irene views Clare’s approach to life, as well as Irene’s inner desire to rid herself of Clare for her own self-satisfaction: to “wear [Clare’s] red lips” and dance. In the wake of Clare’s death, one thought terrifies her as much as, if not more than, Clare’s lifeless self: “What if Clare was not dead? She felt nauseated, as much at the idea of the glorious body mutilated as from fear" (Larsen 113). In turn, the superego acts as a kind of moral conscience that connects the individual to the reality that he or she faces, which is especially seen in Irene’s feelings of guilt and shame both throughout the text and during its ending, in which Clare dies to unknown hands. The superego is represented in Irene’s daily life: how she grounds herself in an attempt to maintain the security of her place in society. Despite their polar differences, the text repeatedly reunites Clare and Irene by way of mirror, showing how they are both literal and metaphorical reflections of one another. While Irene represents the conscious, Clare is the unconscious: all the “songs [Irene] didn’t sing.”
I decided to place the poem within on the top floor of a building, a window creaking open, where all these components came to a final standstill. The first part of the poem acquaints the reader with Irene's voice as she imagines a life in the absence of Clare: “Tomorrow, there will be enough noise / to dance in, knee-deep, our mouths wading. I will wear / bright scarves & red lips & a skirt that rustles / like a plane ticket.” In this life, Irene is both in control of and comfortable with her womanhood, her sexuality, and herself; she is willing to uproot herself, to pause her unrelenting chase toward stability, represented by the mention of the plane ticket. However, her guilt is made apparent in the way that Clare haunts her: “From here, you are so easy to / mistake for a dying star, for something loved.” The second part of the poem, however, represents Irene’s subconscious; in an attempt to represent this in poetic form, the second part of the poem echoes the first part, only stripped down to its core. Interestingly, I initially wrote the “id” portion of the poem to begin with, then adding on in the “superego” portion to mask Irene’s raw feelings behind imagery and sound.
Ultimately, I wrote the poem in order to take a closer look at the ego, or the ways in which the id and the superego are mediated: how Clare acts to awaken Irene’s subconscious—to make her aware of her obsessive desire for security and permanence. With “Ego,” I wanted to show how it is only in Clare’s presence that Irene sees a truer, hidden version of herself, with both ultimately governed by their inner desires.