Research Article
The Symbolic Role of the Elevator and Identity Crisis of Colorism in The Vanishing Half and Passing
Francois Kodjo Adaha
,
Senakpon Adelphe Fortune Azon*
Issue:
Volume 13, Issue 5, October 2025
Pages:
104-113
Received:
26 August 2025
Accepted:
20 September 2025
Published:
18 October 2025
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijla.20251305.11
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Abstract: This paper examines the symbolic role of the elevator in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), with particular attention to its connection to colorism and identity crisis. Set almost a century apart, these novels illuminate the enduring complexities of racial passing in the United States, where skin tone stratification shapes access to privilege and belonging. The elevator, far from being a mere mechanical device, emerges as a metaphorical stage for the negotiation of race, class, and selfhood. Through the dual application of Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT), the study demonstrates how elevator scenes dramatize both aspiration and entrapment. Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the “mask” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness help illuminate the fractured selfhood of characters like Stella Vignes and Irene Redfield, who experience upward social movement only at the cost of authenticity and psychic security. CRT further situates these struggles within systemic racial hierarchies, exposing how legal and cultural constructs of race sustain barriers that passing can only temporarily circumvent. By comparing the earlier twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance text with a contemporary African American novel, this article highlights the transhistorical persistence of passing as both a strategy of survival and a source of alienation. Ultimately, elevators embody a paradox: they lift characters into spaces of prestige and temporary acceptance while simultaneously reminding them of the fragility of such an elevation. In both works, mobility is revealed to be precarious, conditional, and psychologically burdensome. The analysis thus contributes to scholarship on African American literature by proposing the elevator as a powerful symbol that encapsulates the paradoxes of racialized existence. Elevators become not simply vehicles of transport but metaphors for the precarious balance between aspiration and authenticity, privilege and exposure, belonging and estrangement in a racially divided society.
Abstract: This paper examines the symbolic role of the elevator in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), with particular attention to its connection to colorism and identity crisis. Set almost a century apart, these novels illuminate the enduring complexities of racial passing in the United States, where skin tone strati...
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