The Quest for a Black Female Identity in Nella Larsen's "Quicksand"

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Seminar für Englische Philologie), course: Jazz in America, language: English, abstract: Nella Larsen¿s Quicksand was published to critical acclaim in 1928 and is said

to be one of the key texts of the Harlem Renaissance era. Larsen herself was of

Danish-Carribean ancestry and was highly interested in issues of racial

identity, especially as they relate to being female. For that reason one should

not be surprised that Quicksand focuses on the protagonist¿s struggles toward

selfhood, her attempts to find her place in the world as a woman who is

considered neither white nor black.

The child of a Danish mother and a black West Indian father, a socalled

¿mulatto¿, Helga Crane finds herself outside of the black as well as the

white world, fully comfortable in neither one nor the other. During her

unhappy childhood she learns to regard her skin color with hatred and selfloathing,

resulting in a deeply rooted sense of insecurity about her blackness

and mixed heritage, which continues to be felt all her life. Internalized (white)

stereotypes about black womens¿ promiscuous, ¿primitive¿ and immoral

sexuality lead Helga to fear and repress her sensuality and female desires. As

she detests and completely denies these emotions she is incapable of

developing an identity as a woman either.

In this seminar paper I will argue that Nella Larsen¿s Quicksand is

about Helga Crane¿s search for a black female identity which she will fail to

find. Further, my aim is to demonstrate how intimately connected race and

gender oppressions are, since imposed definitions of blackness and

womanhood complicate Helgas search for her personal identity as a black

woman.

As Quicksand has a geographical symmetry to it, I will follow this

pattern in my analysis. It starts out in the South in Naxos where Helga works as

a teacher, then moves on to Chicago and Harlem, from there it shifts to

Copenhagen, returns back to Harlem and finally ends in the deep South, in a

tiny Alabama town, where Helgäs search ends in tragedy.