Running away from their mother, Mallard, and all things familiar, the Vignes twins eventually find themselves in New Orleans and take up jobs to support themselves.
Stella, on the other hand, mainly longs to get away from her employer and his unwelcome hands. Desiree, seemingly the more ambitious twin, wants nothing to do with this town, its hypocrisy, and its obsession with skin color. The novel dives into the lives of Desiree and Stella Vignes, light-skinned, mixed-race, identical twins, and follows the diverging paths their lives take once Stella decides to pass as white.Įarly on, The Vanishing Half paints the picture of Mallard, Louisiana as a town for people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” Obsessed with the lightness of skin, every Mallardian aspires to marry lighter than themselves, and view the dark-skinned folks with disdain. The complex and heady mix of paranoia, deception, and identity crisis that constitute passing is at the very heart of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. Calling into question the constructedness and divisiveness of human society, passing also underpins the paranoia that goes hand in hand with the fear of being discovered, of being accused of fraud, and of losing sight of who you really are. Passing-the ability of an individual to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category distinct from their own, whether it be race, caste, religion, gender, state of disability, or sexual orientation-is a loaded term with a loaded meaning. In the sociological sense, “passing” is a deceptively simple term for a complex concept.
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