The Personal Librarian

Many of the internal and external conflicts Belle da Costa Greene encounters in the novel arise from the novel’s historical period and cultural context. One specific source of conflict is Belle’s attempt to navigate increasingly discriminatory laws that limit the personal and professional options open to Black Americans in the years between the Civil War and World War I. Writers in the American literary tradition explore these tensions in the passing narrative, a genre that centers protagonists who choose to live as white to avoid the burden and dangers of a racist world.

The passing narrative sometimes features a white-presenting Black woman who is unaware of her Blackness until some pivotal event (generally during childhood) helps her to discover that she is Black. The young protagonist then learns the cost of being Black in a racist, segregated country. Another convention is the discovery that passing allows the protagonist to escape racism. However, as the protagonist lives as a white person, they are constantly confronted with the psychological toll of their decision and the feeling that passing is an evasion of their responsibility to Black people.

In some early passing narratives, passing ends tragically with homelessness, madness, death, or suicide when the woman’s identity is revealed. The white-presenting women frequently at the center of such narratives are examples of a racial archetype called the “tragic mulatto”—tragic in this case because there is no space for such people in a world in which Black people and white people are separated by law. The word “mulatto” (now deprecated because of its roots in oppressive systems of racial classification) references the dual racial heritage of such characters.

Literature during the time of slavery (and after) frequently portrays multiracial people as being predisposed to psychological illnesses such as depression and actions such as suicide because of supposed biological deficits in having both a Black parent and a white parent. Because multiracial protagonists exist because of the violation of boundaries between Blackness and whiteness, they are doomed. When these protagonists survive, it is often because they abandon passing to be of service to the Black community.

On its face, passing narratives thematically emphasize that stepping across racial boundaries violates the natural order of things, but such narratives unravel themselves when their protagonists successfully pass for any period. The fact that a single person can occupy multiple racial identities undercuts the notion of race as a natural, as opposed to social, reality. If a Black person can use clothing, speech, naming, and a fabricated personal history to pass as white, then race is revealed as a social construct. Since white supremacy presupposes the inherent inferiority of Black people, the passing narrative attacks the social and political order built on racial hierarchies that are supposedly rooted in biology. In addition, the sustained existence of people like the Fleets and Belle in would seem to argue that the psychological and biological fragility of multiracial people must be a myth.

Authors Benedict and Christopher Murray are writing into a longstanding literary tradition with the publication of this novel. They incorporate some of the conventions of the traditional passing narrative, while they subvert others, especially when it comes to Belle’s character arc. They stick most closely to the conventions as they portray the mental burdens Belle faces as she becomes white.

Belle experiences great psychological burdens as she deals with guilt over her failure to participate in efforts to secure civil rights for others and the unearned privilege of having light skin. This guilt is apparent, for example, when a Black server recognizes her at a party in the Vanderbilt novel, leading Belle to feel guilt and anger over the differences in their positions. During the visits to the Fleets in Washington, D.C., and with her father in Chicago, Belle realizes that the cost of passing includes the loss of her extended family. When the affair with Bernard Berenson goes awry in the aftermath of Belle’s abortion, Belle engages in problem drinking to deal with the stress. The frequent references to walking on a tightrope and the fear she feels as she navigates the relationship with J.P. Morgan all point to how wearying her impersonation is.

On the other hand, the novel departs from some conventions of the passing narrative because of the choices the authors make as they close out Belle’s arc. Belle experiences tragedies, but she is far from being tragic. To the end, she manages to achieve her professional goals and live out her ambition to create a lasting legacy as the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Learning to manage the strain of passing for white emboldens her to violate gender norms as well, with the result that she learns to excel in the male-dominated world of collecting. At the end of the novel, Belle keeps her secret and accepts the compromises she has made to achieve her remarkable success.