Race, modernism, and plagiarism: the case of Nella Larsen's "Sanctuary"

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Hildegard Hoeller

"I'm in trouble." His hands were shaking a little.

"What you done?"

"I shot a man, Mrs. Adis." (Kaye-Smith 321)

"Ah's in trubble, Mis' Poole," the man explained, his voice shaking, his fingers twitching.

"W'at you done done now?"

"Shot a man, Mis' Poole." (Larsen, "Sanctuary" 15)

Written at the height of Larsen's career, the short story "Sanctuary" (1930) would also be her last publication. The similarities between her story and Sheila Kaye-Smith's were publicly noted, and her "plagiarism" caused a scandal from which she--as many critics have pointed out--would never quite recover. For most critics, too, the striking similarities between the two stories have remained an insurmountable and puzzling fact. Why would Larsen, a professional, successful writer and a librarian, put herself knowingly in such danger? No one will ever know the answer. Yet, this essay argues, regardless of her immediate motivation or the unknowable facts of the text's production, Larsen's allegedly "plagiarised" story and her public defense are important texts for the exploration of the relation between race, modernism, and plagiarism.

Larsen's story and the author's explanation defending its legitimacy raise fundamental questions about the relation between race and literary property. By reconsidering "Sanctuary" within the modernist strategies of racial masquerade, primitivism, and collage, this essay explores Larsen's relation to these aspects of modernism. Her form of plagiarism reveals that race became one way for modernism to resolve its reliance on two contradictory concepts of originality: that of the primitive, and that of the artist's personal creation and literary property. "Sanctuary" "failed"--and is worth reconsidering--precisely because it intervened in this racial hypocrisy of modernism's appropriation of "other" texts, voices, and traditions. Consciously written within the rich context of other modernist techniques of borrowing, imitating, and masking, "Sanctuary" and its defense are highly sophisticated modernist experiments that try to reconfigure the relation between race, modernism, and plagiarism. Ironically, Larsen's text might ultimately have been censored as "plagiarized" because its contribution to modernism may have been too original to be either recognizable or acceptable.

Larsen's Scandalous Plagiarism: The Case and Its Critical Aftermath

Literary Dirt," wrote Harold Jackman almost gleefully to Countee Cullen on January 27, 1930:

      Nella Larsen Imes has a story in the
   Forum for this month called Sanctuary.
   It has been found out.., that it is an
   exact blue print of a story by Sheila
   Kaye-Smith called Mrs. Adis which is
   in a book called Joanna Goodens Marries
   and Other Stories. The only difference is
   that Nella has made a racial story out
   of hers, but the procedure is the same
   as Kaye-Smith's, and ... the dialogue
   in some places is almost identical. If
   you can get ahold of the Forum and the
   Smith book do so and compare them.
   But isn't that a terrible thing. It
   remains to be seen whether the Forum
   people will find this out." (Davis 348)

The Forum people did find out, and they published a reader's letter that, as some others, pointed their attention to the similarities; the editor investigated and allowed Larsen to respond to the charges. In the April 1930 edition of the Forum, the journal expressed its support for Larsen by telling readers that they had examined her drafts and concluded that an "extraordinary coincidence"--such as the one when the incandescent lamp had been invented simultaneously by two different people--must have taken place (41). In the same issue, they also published Larsen's own explanation of the similarities, in which she claimed to have heard the story, a part of black folklore, from a patient of hers while working in a hospital.

Despite this explanation and the editor's backing, the aftermath of this scandal would devastate Larsen; according to many critics, it ended her career as a writer. Deborah McDowell, for example, asserts that, "despite her editor's support, Larsen never recovered from the shock of the charge. She disappeared from the literary scene and returned to nursing at Bethel Hospital in Brooklyn where she remained until her retirement. She died in Brooklyn in 1964, practically in obscurity" (x). (1) Cheryl Wall confirms that the "furor that developed soon after the short story appeared helped to ensure her silence" (132). (2) It is certain that even though Larsen was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship shortly after her Forum response and continued to write for some time, she never published again.

Critics dealing with Larsen's career and life have struggled with this moment. It is, after all, impossible to recount Larsen's literary story without coming to this troubling point. Wall who judges "Sanctuary" as a "failed experiment" at best, seems compelled to admit both that "the similarities are unmistakable" and that Larsen's explanation does not convince her. Wall concludes: