Throughout Passing, there is a theme of classification, how classificiation affects people, and how people subvert classifications. In the novella, there are two classifications that the characters: Claire Kendry and Irene Redfield subvert, the Black race and the White race. Nella Larson was familiar with classification, she was a librarian. As a librarian, she understood how classification systems worked. As a black librarian, she knew how these classifications marginalized women and people of color, and were arbitrary.
In “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135th Street”, Karin Roffman writes “Nella Larsen’s work as a librarian was a catalyst in her rethinking of social issues, particularly her concerns about how systems of classification work to inhibit the creation of new categories of thinking” (752). During the time Larsen was a student, she would have studied the eleventh edition of the Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal system, named after its inventor Melvil Dewey, is an ambitious classification system that Dewey believed could account “for all present and past knowledge, but also for all future knowledge” (756). The same way racial classification sought to catalogue all variations in the human family. Like both systems, they would show the biases of the classifier and the arbitrariness of the classifications.
The Dewey Decimal System divides all human knowledge into ten categories each given a digit, which can be divided into 10 categories ad infinitem. For example, in a library books on language would be numbered within the ranges of 400-499. However, the system shows its 19th century American bias. English, German, French Italian, Latin, Greek are get their own main categories. All other languages are labeled “Minor Languages”, thus language unrelated to each other such as Arabic and Chinese, Persian and Coptic, Celtic and Japanese are relegated into the same category. For example, a book on Russian (an Indo-Europoean language) is frequently next to books on Arabic, which can be next to books on Japanese. In other words, according to this system all these languages are throw-away.
Works Cited
Roffmann, Karin. “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135th Street.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 53, no. 4, 2007, pp. 752-787
Khalifa's Blog 
I like how you smoothly transition into the discussion of a classification system to connect back to Larsen’s writing.
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Classification may be difficult to avoid in systematic work. But what to be based on when classifying needs to be considered.
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Hey Khalifa! It is interesting how you looked at classification. For me I was more interested in the colorism aspect of the piece. It is outstanding how there are so many themes and different perspectives to see the same theme within one novel. I like how in depth you went with explaining the article, but I am curious to know you take on the theme/article. Great work!
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