Quicksand Quotes Showing 1-10 of 10 “Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped.” ― Nella Larsen, Quicksand. “Helga Crane was silent, feeling a mystifying yearning which sang and throbbed in her.”.
This paper challenges the pervasive tendency to treat Larsen’s work as explorations of black women’s lives and examines the distinctly biracial perspective that her fiction attempts to elaborate. I argue that her novels employ narratives of frustrated desire in order to show the impossibility of the racially liminal subject in a society that thinks in black and white. In developing this argument, the essay explains the aesthetic and theoretical implications that ensue from taking this biracial perspective seriously. For instance, it shows how each novel mobilizes a distinct ontology of biracial identity—biraciality as synthesis in one case ( Quicksand [1928]) and biraciality as oscillation in the other ( Passing [1929]). In its discussion of the aesthetics of Larsen’s fiction, the essay demonstrates how this shift in racial perspective enables us to reassess her endings, which vexed critics in her day and continue to vex readers in ours (including the scholar arguably most responsible for Larsen’s current prominence, Deborah E. McDowell). Aware that aversion to the essentialist “tragic mulatta” trope has been one of the primary impediments to concentrating on biraciality in Larsen’s work, I offer ways of understanding Larsen’s focus on biraciality as more—rather than less—subversive of American racial ideology than previous studies suggest.
Larsen uses this lacerating metaphor to jaggedly attack the attitudes and beliefs of Booker T. Washington, who sought to form schools to train blacks for specific occupations in low-skilled fields and “believed racial agitation was a course for disaster” (Hill 6). Helga credits her unease at Naxos to “a quality within herself” that she cannot understand (Larsen 12). Helga soon confesses her bi-racial frustration to the principal, Dr. Anderson, but only after becoming disturbed by her sexual attraction towards him. Helga’s first confrontation with Dr. Anderson almost leaves her speechless! Larsen describes Helga’s reaction as an “inward confusion” that felt to her “like hysteria” (Larsen 18). Larsen again only hints at this attraction, in an indirect manner. A careful analysis of the text, however, will make her point obvious. Larsen illustrates Helga’s sexual temptation regarding Dr. Anderson with clever insinuations. As their conversation develops, Helga is overcome by a “mystifying yearning” that “throbbed in her” (Larsen 20). Larsen uses words, such as “desire” and “urge” in conjunction with Helga’s inner thoughts to delicately express Helga’s sexual enticement in the wake of Anderson’s charm (Larsen 20). It is in this meeting with Anderson that Helga’s sexual feelings clash with her bi-racial insecurity. The resulting emotions from this inner conflict leave Helga with a sense of “lacerated pride” that