Tony Lindsay Presents... Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen was unique, not only as a writer but as person: a female contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, a Guggenheim Fellowship winner, a childhood in Denmark, a Chicagoan, a Harlemnite, a divorcée in the 1930s, and a professional with three successful careers librarian, writer, and nurse. As her life and writing reflects, Nella Larsen felt that a woman’s place was wherever she wanted it to be.  

In the novel Quicksand, the reader is introduced to Helga Crane the protagonist of the work. She is a young college professor who has become disenchanted with the school that employs her and those who work for the school including her fiancé. She viewed the school as, “a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness”(48). A place she no longer belonged.  This feeling of not belonging and being on the outside is a motif throughout the Quicksand. 

Larsen’s ability to place the reader in the story through precise, reader involving, descriptive details speaks to her literary craftsmanship. Larsen puts the reader where the character, Helga Crane, is to illustrate what and who Helga is escaping.

Bi-racial in culture and in ethnicity, Danish and African American, Larsen’s Helga Crane is often outside of the community she is living. Initially, she is attracted to the communities by feelings of nationalism or common ethnicity, but these prove not to be enough to sustain her belonging, or to prevent the ever ebbing feeling of being an outsider.

Inevitably, Crane becomes hostile toward the community she is within and begins to feel trapped and drawn into the lifestyle of the inhabitants; the communities themselves begin to suck her in much like quicksand. Of Harlem, she says,

Here the inscrutability of the dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the same indefinite mold, and so like her own, seemed pressing forward against her. Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing irritation of the past weeks was a smoldering hatred. Then she was overcome by another, so actual, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she preferred to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk? (85-86)

            Revealingly, Larsen’s Helga Crane is aware of her character flaw. While in Denmark she asks,

. . . what was the matter with her? Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn’t she be happy, content, somewhere? Other people managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn’t she know how? Was she incapable of it? (111)   

            How Larsen ends this novel is totally unpredictable, but true to the motif the end is as unsatisfying for Helga as the life she lived in the previous pages. Larsen gives the freedom of choice to her female characters; if they make the correct choice is up to the reader to decide. This edition of Quicksand was in The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen a wonderful book that gives exposure to an incredibly talented writer.  

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His book ONE DEAD DOCTOR was chosen by Conversations Book Club as one of its Top 100 Books of 2012. Lindsay was named Conversations Author of the Year 2012-2013.  His new book EMOTIONAL DRIPPINGS is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.