Interwar period

The Interwar period, the time between World War I and World War II, gives Passing a world in transition rather than a settled backdrop. The novel’s action is located in the United States of 1927, while the characters’ histories and the novel’s contextual notes connect that present to postwar Europe. Across these settings, mobility promises new possibilities but does not dissolve racial or social boundaries.

The American setting

The novel’s present falls in 1927, in New York City, where Harlem is a center of Black cultural life and an increasingly visible destination for white visitors. Irene Redfield explains that white people of Hugh Wentworth’s kind attend Harlem events in growing numbers; Brian Redfield fears that the trend could eventually exclude Black people or confine them to segregated sections. The scene makes the period’s cultural exchange inseparable from unequal access to public space.

The story also reaches back to Chicago. A chapter opens by identifying its account as Irene Redfield’s memory and places her there in August, shopping for gifts for her sons. The remembered encounter with Clare Kendry takes place at the Drayton Hotel, where Irene’s ability to pass as white allows her to enter a space in which she fears being recognized and removed. The city offers anonymity, but that anonymity remains conditional: strangers’ looks and judgments can turn an ordinary public visit into a test of belonging.

Mobility and exposure

Urban movement shapes the characters’ choices throughout the period depicted. Irene’s questions about Clare’s decision to pass concern the practical cost of crossing into a different social environment: how to account for one’s family and past, and what it means to meet other Black people while concealing one’s background. Clare’s account of her youth gives that choice a history. After her father’s death, relatives housed her but expected her to work; they invoked religious teaching to rationalize hard labor for a girl with Black ancestry. Irene challenges the cruelty that can be justified in the name of Christian kindness, while Clare describes wanting independence and the life she had seen others possess.

The risks of managing identity persist in 1927. When Irene encounters John Bellew on a New York street while accompanied by Felise Freeland, she refuses to acknowledge him and continues on with her friend. She then considers how to warn Clare, but concludes that writing or telephoning could be unsafe and that Bellew may already have recognized her. The period’s urban anonymity creates opportunities for concealment, yet a chance collision can undo them.

Europe after the war

The novel’s historical frame extends beyond its American cities. Contextual notes describe Clare’s travels through France, Germany, England, and Austria-Hungary during World War I and its aftermath, from 1914 to 1926. These references place her personal history alongside a continent undergoing political and social change. The Weimar Republic period is presented as a setting of sharp contrasts: conspicuous cabaret life and extravagance existed beside severe poverty and economic crisis.

Other references locate postwar Europe in the worlds of labor and fashion. The notes connect an English general strike with postwar unrest and identify the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries in Paris as a stimulus to the city’s fashion houses. They also describe the 1920s as the Silver Age of Budapest, when the city attracted wealthy visitors to its spas and casinos. These details make the interwar setting geographically broad, even though the novel’s principal action remains in American cities.

Narrative significance

The period’s significance lies in the friction between movement and constraint. The Great Migration and the growth of urban public culture help make cities sites of transformation, while racial segregation and the color line continue to regulate who may belong and on what terms. For women, participation in public social life also unsettles the restrictions of separate spheres. Passing becomes especially possible in city environments where strangers can remain unknown, but the same concentration of encounters increases the possibility of scrutiny and exposure.

The novel’s shifts between Irene’s remembered Chicago and the 1927 New York present give this historical setting a personal rhythm: earlier choices return as present risks. The Interwar period is therefore not simply a date range. It is the unstable social time in which racial identity, gender, class, and mobility are repeatedly negotiated, and in which a character’s access to a new life can depend on remaining unread by others.