Self-delusion and self-sacrifice in Nella Larsen's 'Quicksand.'

African American Review, Spring, 1997 by Kimberly Monda

Nella Larsen's portrait of Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) criticizes the ways in which white racist constructions of black women's allegedly inherent lasciviousness have cut black women off from experiencing their legitimate sexual desires. Helga fears her desires because they seem to confirm stereotypes about black peoples' "primitivism" and "savagery." The first part of this essay treats Larsen's criticism of the sexual self-sacrifice of repression, a repression that stems from both white society's distortion of black peoples' sexuality as "savage" and from Helga's equally damaging family dynamics. The child of a black father who abandoned his family shortly after she was born and a Scandinavian immigrant mother, Helga associates her mother's coldness and rejection with their racial difference. Karen Nilssen's failure to grant her daughter the recognition that would help her gain access to herself as an active subject helps explain Helga's emotional repression as an adult.

The second part of this essay examines Helga's attempt to escape the self-sacrifice of emotional and sexual repression by quitting racist America for the liberal environs of Denmark and the affection of her dead mother's sister, Katrina Dahl. Helga channels her unacknowledged sexuality into the pleasures of consumeristic purchasing and self-display as the wealthy Dahls dress her in gorgeous clothes and show off her "exotic" beauty to their friends. Larsen uncovers the objectification at the heart of consumerism, exposing Helga's experience of desire and agency as illusory. This objectification returns her to the white constructions of black "primitivism" she had fled Harlem to escape. Helga finally seems to elude the tangle of cultural and psychological pressures that demand her sexual and emotional repression, however, when she rejects Axel Olsen's marriage proposal, thus repudiating both the Danish packaging of her exoticism as well as the distant mother who failed to recognize her. This symbolic rejection of her mother allows Helga to identify with her unknown and formerly reviled black father, an identification that permits her to gain temporary access to her subjectivity and, when she returns to Harlem, to acknowledge her long-repressed desire for Dr. Anderson.

The essay concludes with an analysis of Larsen's chilling portrait of the way in which Helga's sudden release from the self-sacrifice of sexual repression propels her into a nightmare of domestic self-sacrifice; Larsen ends her story of sexual discovery with Helga's sinking into what she finally recognizes as a "quagmire" of endless, life-threatening pregnancies and childbirths (133). Eda Lou Walton, one of the most perceptive of Quicksand's contemporary reviewers, felt that Larsen's treatment of her heroine's sexuality was incomplete:

To tell the story of a cultivated and

sensitive woman's defeat through her

own sex-desire is a difficult task. When

the woman is a mulatto and beset by

hereditary, social and racial forces over

which she has little control and into

which she cannot fit, her character is so

complex that any analysis of it takes a

mature imagination. This, I believe,

Miss Larsen is too young to have. (212)

While Walton's review stands out for its understanding of Larsen's interest in her main character's sexuality (most other reviewers focused solely on the racial dynamics of the novel(1)), it fails to grant Larsen the benefit of the doubt. Most critics today read Helga's tragic end as a powerful criticism of the social forces that conspire against her achieving a fulfilling life, admiring Larsen's handling of the very complexity Walton felt Quicksand did not dramatize.

In the context of my analysis of the different pressures toward (and forms of) female self-sacrifice that Larsen explores, Helga's "fall" from the discovery of her sexuality to the spiritual death and physical near-death of involuntary pregnancies as the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green's long-suffering wife reveals Helga's failure to relate her sexual desire to her greater longing for recognition and her striving to experience her subjectivity. Because Helga never connects her desire for Robert Anderson to her earlier, even stronger need for recognition from her remote mother, Anderson's rejection of her hinted-at wish for an affair drives her into a self-destructive rage, the mirror image of her profound longings for connection and understanding. Larsen's bitter, satiric vision of Helga's entrapment in a terrifyingly literal portrait of wifely and motherly self-sacrifice condemns the racist and sexist society that allows a woman to be murdered by her domestic role even as it highlights Helga's own contribution to this oppression: her failure to learn from her past and thus to grant herself the recognition she does not receive from the men in her life.

Larsen's exploration of the destructiveness of sexual repression reflects her society's new openness about female sexuality, as well as the risks this new openness poses for black women. As John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman explain in Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, "the 1920s began initiating a revision of what was deemed proper for women" (213). Post-World War One America's "patriotic" suppression of radical reform movements and its conservative emphasis on the importance of individual effort and fulfillment made sexual expression an ideal outlet for feelings of rebellion and discontent:" ... sex was becoming a marker of identity, the wellspring of an individual's true nature" (226). As Paula Giddings points out, the new obsession with "sexual freedom" and "glamour" also swept through urban black communities (185), but the sexual permissiveness of the 1920s that spelled new freedoms for white women had more ambiguous implications for black women. In "The Task of Negro Womanhood" (1925), Elise McDougald's defense of black women's morality makes it clear that, for most black women, sexuality remained an area of vulnerability rather than a source of liberation: "The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does. Yet she has been singled out and advertised as having lower sex standards" (379). That the only essay devoted to the African American woman in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, and one ostensibly dedicated to analyzing her economic opportunities, must argue yet again that black women are no more sexually permissive than their sisters of other races highlights the social forces that make sexual repression a reasonable choice for members of the black bourgeoisie like Helga Crane.