Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)

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The Name of the Mother: Modernity, Maternity, and the (Bi)Racialized Failure of Relational Female Subjectivity in Nella Larsen's Quicksand / Yolanda M. Manora

 

Abstract: The major ideological and political agenda of the aesthetic movement that was the Harlem Renaissance, namely the (re)negotiation of African American subjectivity/identity and social place, was worked out by African American Modernist writers, in part, through discourses and dialectics related to maternity.  This essay is an examination of the present absence of the maternal in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and the negotiation of the maternal feminine as a principle in both the construction of female subjectivity in the novel and within themodernist/Harlem Renaissance project of cultural revision.

 

Helga Crane sat alone in her room [. . . .] She visualized her [mother] now, sad, cold, and – yes, remote. The tragic cruelties of the years had left her a little pathetic, a little hard, and a little unapproachable. 

(Quicksand 1, 23)

<1> In his 2006 award winning monograph In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson illuminates the life of a writer long considered the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," shedding new light not only on the biographical facts of Nella Larsen's life as a biracial individual coming of age during an "era when 'race' trumped" all relationships, even those of family, but also on the effects these experiences had on her psychologically, especially on her ability to forge a relational life. [1] He contends that "tangled feelings of love and abandonment, anger and self loathing, empathy, shame and powerlessness stamped Larsen's emotional development in childhood and shaped the attachment problems that would affect her until she died." [2] Given her socially and psychically untenable subject position as the "too dark to pass" child in a white family and the sense of isolation and, ultimately, abandonment, that attended it, it's little wonder that Larsen's autobiographically-informed fictional narratives can be read as sites of relational failure. [3]

<2> Rejected in childhood by her white relations, as an adult Larsen was very much an accepted, indeed celebrated, member of Harlem's elite inner circle, the black literati who were the force behind the ideological and aesthetic movement that would come to be called the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. DuBois, arguably the dean of the movement, declared Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, "the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnut" (Marks 149), expressing a sentiment that other cultural leaders and arbiters of the day would echo, including Alaine Locke who considered the novel a critically important social document that took black fiction into uncharted territory. The ideological architects of the Harlem Renaissance's first wave, the African American intelligentsia generally regarded as the vanguard of the movement, and the wave with which Larsen, along with writers Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, and James Weldon Johnson, is associated, DuBois and Locke no doubt read Quicksand as a fully, perhaps perfectly, realized race novel, a text that through its engagement with issues related to racial prejudice, discrimination, and stratification, and its implicit championing of cultural assimilation and social integration, seemed very much in keeping with the first wave's sensibilities and social agenda and at a far remove from the concerns of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, members of the later generation of Harlem Renaissance writers, whose second wave ideological convictions and aesthetic commitments turned not upon cultural assimilation, but cultural continuity, less upon social integration than social justice.

<3> The Harlem Renaissance's critical dialectic, cultural assimilation and social integration versus cultural continuity and racial identity, would shape discourses concerning African American subjectivity and social place long after the period's apex in the 1920s and early 30s. But it was during this signal social and aesthetic movement, and the broader cultural moment of which it was an expression, a moment that is most aptly termed African American Modernism, that the dialectic was born, birthed by and then intersecting with the era of ideological disruption and literary experimentation that was American Modernism. Quicksand, perhaps more than any other work of the period, belongs to both movements, capturing as it does the slip-sliding and overlapping currents of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance and their dialectical engagements with issues of social place and subjectivity.

<4> As the unprecedented carnage of the First World War came to an end, massive industrialization and urbanization, along with rapid technological advances and a burgeoning capitalism, transformed the American landscape. The social structures and cultural foundations, the fundamental ideological absolutes upon which American culture had rested, were shaken, creating what Frank Kermode called "an open breach with the past." America's old, accepted social order, heretofore deemed natural, even preordained, an order that had reserved the center for European Americans and designated the margins for those of African descent, was revealed to be a construct. As their place at center could no longer hold, those white Americans who had occupied positions of privilege experienced the modern moment, its reckoning with the Other and the attendant identity crisis, as socially and psychically tumultuous. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarland speak to this sense of dislocation as one of "those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid of our beliefs and assumptions" (Bradbury 19). This sense of modernity as crisis clearly marks the works of white modernist writers such as Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While their fiction often interrogates and critiques the old, established order, they can also be read as angst-ridden elegies for its passing.

<5> But as Richard Elman and Charles Feidelson argue, Modernism was a "dialectic of contradictions," encompassing both "an apocalyptic sense of crisis and a belief in a new beginning." While Anglo Americans experienced the crisis, another segment of American society seized upon this moment of ideological upheaval and social disruption as their opportunity for a new beginning.

<6> The critical cultural and ideological project of African American Modernism, especially as expressed during the Harlem Renaissance, was arguably nothing less than the wholesale renegotiation of African American social identity and place. But neither the cultural moment nor the aesthetic movement represented a single, unified vision of the new African American subject and that subject's place within American society. As Locke and DuBois championed the New Negro and the Talented Tenth, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance's first wave, and second wave writers, including Hurston and Hughes, foregrounded the Folk, they figuratively captured the crucial question of the period for Americans of African descent: would African American subjectivity and place be forged through a process of cultural assimilation and social integration or through a commitment to cultural continuity and social justice?

<7> Larsen certainly seems to adhere to the tenets of first wave thought. In both Quicksand and her second novel, Passing, she recreates the world and, too, the world weariness of the New Negro/Talented Tenth; her characters are distinctly bourgeois; their stories are shaped by their upper middle class affiliations and aspirations, aspirations which are inflected, quite often tragically deflected, by racial prejudice and discrimination. Quicksand's protagonist, Helga Crane, is clearly a member of the educated black elite, the Talented Tenth, charged by first wave thinkers with uplifting the masses, the Folk, by displaying for white America the cultured sensibilities that would disprove the pejorative claims which had relegated African Americans to the margins, to the psychically and socially segregated space of the Other.

<8> Moreover, Helga is the product of an interracial union – her mother is white and her father, black – so the novel can readily be read as a tragic mulatto tale, a mainstay of first wave literature. The physical site of racial transgression, psychically racked by the seemingly irreducible binary of "black" and "white," the tragic mulatto became an iconic figure in the first wave's ideological and political project of renegotiating, at times deconstructing, racial categories in an effort to reconfigure America's social order and African Americans' place within it.

<9> Despite the ideological and political efficacy of the tragic mulatto figure, which Larsen does undoubtedly employ in the novel, to read Quicksand simply as a tragic mulatto tale is critically shortsighted. [4] Such a reading neglects the intricate interplay of race and gender in the text and in Larsen's treatment of black/biracial female subjectivity; it is this interplay that makes the novel both a canonical work of the Harlem Renaissance and a quintessentially modernist text.

Larsen was always on the cusp of the modernist transformation [. . . .] just as she always was positioned or deliberately positioned herself on the precarious racial boundary that recent studies suggest was crucial to literary modernism. (Hutchinson 11-12)

Larsen's achievement in Quicksand is the creation of a richly layered novel that must be read as multiple texts, each one complicating, if not altogether disrupting, the others. The novel reads first as a simple quest narrative; Helga Crane may certainly be situated as the archetypal modernist protagonist, an alienated picaresque, estranged from those around her and thus engaged in the classic quest, through various communities, for a sense of place and a people to whom she might belong. Larsen also uses these communities as narrative spaces through which she explores certain critical dynamics – difference and conformity, acceptance and belonging, othering and objectifying – that define and/or disrupt the idea(l) of community. Moreover, these would-be communal sites serve as the sociocultural microcosms through which Larsen examines the impact of categories of and dynamics related to race, class, and gender on the formation of black/biracial female subjectivity. Finally, Quicksand may be read as a subtly crafted psychological study of one woman and her tragic inability to experience the very thing for which she subconsciously searches, a relational subjectivity.

<10> Indeed, relational failure is at the center of Quicksand, creating the critical textual lacuna and sourcing the narrative's centripetal force. Larsen situates a present absence at the center of the novel, using it as the space in which to conduct a gendered exploration of the modernist failure of the relational, specifically in the formation of black/biracial female subjectivity. [5] This space, this present-absence, is the literal and figurative maternal feminine.

<11> In Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, Marianne DeKoven, arguing for a gendered reading of modernist texts, speaks to the radically different, indeed, diametrically opposed, manner in which male and female modernist writers, engaged in the cultural project of interrogating social orders and political systems, experienced the attendant anxiety, the "irreducible self contradiction" that she terms "sous rature": "[M]ale modernists generally feared the loss of their own hegemony implicit in such wholesale revision of culture, while female modernists generally feared punishment for their dangerous desire for such revision" (DeKoven 20). The recurring site of the negotiation of this gendered dialectic, according to DeKoven, is the maternal feminine. She argues that this principle, the source of the feminine's power and generative potential, serves as both the threat to the "patriarchal hegemony of reason" and as the means through which the feminine is controlled, "subdued into an icy reflection of masculine self-representation if it is to maintain itself" (DeKoven 32). DeKoven's gendered modernism intersects with the complicated racial identity politics and dialectics of the Harlem Renaissance to create a critical contextual nexus or matrix in which black/biracial female subjectivity is thwarted not only by the interpellations of race and the impositions of race prejudice, but, too, arguably more so, by the modernist failure of the relational and communal; in Larsen's Quicksand, that failure emerges through the enigmatic present absence of the maternal feminine.

<12> The relational matrix of parent and child and psychoanalytic models of subject formation serve as the critical context for Claudia Tate's "Desire and Death in Nella Larsen's Quicksand." Tate, offering what was perhaps the earliest expressly psychoanalytic reading of the text, takes as her points of departure, not only social categories of race and gender as critics before her tended to, but theories related to subjectivity and formative processes. She situates her analysis within a Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic matrix, theorizing African American subjectivity, specifically that of the novel's protagonist, Helga Crane, as both the site and product of a complex psychological, rather than strictly social, process of subject formation. [6] While conceding that Helga's subjectivity is shaped by the impositions of social interpellation, most notably by the oppositional constructions of race, Tate asserts that Helga's more fundamental subject formation is defined and ultimately thwarted by her father's abandonment and the attendant, albeit subconscious, psychic trauma. Helga's journey and her disappointing romantic encounters serve, then, both as metaphors for and the consequences of her search for the elusive father in whose eyes, according to psychoanalytic theories of subject formation, she must be reflected back to herself to become a fully realized subject.

<13> In the early 1990's Tate's psychoanalytic reading of the novel proved provocative. Applying theoretical lenses that had heretofore been deemed "too white" and Western to read African American literature, Tate took African American literary theory into new critical territory; African American characters, and so, too, their real life counterparts, were re-situated as complex subjects, rather than mere objects, hapless sites of the intersecting social forces, namely racism and its attendant prejudice and discrimination, that colluded to define, inscribe, and limit them. In this way, Tate's reading was liberatory.

<14> Still critically compelling more than a decade later, indeed canonical within the body of scholarship on the Quicksand, in "Desire and Death" a female-centered, proto-feminist text, one with, in Deborah McDowell's words, a "daring and unconventional heroine" whose narrative begins an exploration of black female sexuality that later generations of African American women writers would continue, seems to become a male-centered narrative, a text written around a Lacanian present absence that is decidedly masculine. Arguably, then, Quicksand becomes a text invested in the power of the patriarch(y), and Helga's quest becomes not a journey toward self definition, but rather patriarchal validation. In such a reading, Helga Crane's journey is framed as a quest in the name of the father, giving rise to a critical question: what about the name of the mother?

[A] fair Scandinavian girl in love with life, with love, and passion, dreaming and risking all in one blind surrender. A cruel sacrifice. [. . . . ] Helga visualized her now, sad, cold, and – yes, remote. The tragic cruelties of the years had left her a little pathetic, a little hard, and a little unapproachable. (emphasis added 23)

With this description, Helga's mother makes an early "appearance" in the text, a "cold," "remote," "hard," "unapproachable" figure in her daughter's memory. Such a portrayal of the text's first mother signals, quite rightly, that the maternal principle will be a troubled, even transgressive one in the novel. Larsen does indeed eschew conventional narratives to interrogate and, arguably, indict the space of the maternal feminine, locating it as the site wherein the agentic, potentially generative feminine is not only "subdued," to use DeKoven's word, but is made to "surrender" and "sacrifice" itself.

<15> While this image of Helga's mother "appears" briefly in the novel, her name, the name of the mother, is all but absent from the daughter's text. Helga speaks her mother's name only once. In this critical scene, early in the novel when Helga has left Naxos for Chicago, she meets her Uncle Peter's new wife for the first time. She speaks her mother's name both to identify herself to the woman and to legitimize her relationship to her uncle. In an absurd, yet wrenchingly cruel exchange, the name of her mother fails her.

[She] came forward murmuring in a puzzled voice: "His niece, did you say?"
"Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his sister, Karen Nilssen."
"Well, he isn't exactly your uncle is he? Your mother wasn't married, was she? I mean to your father?"
"I – I don't know," stammered the girl, feeling pushed down to the uttermost depths of ignominy. (28)

The moment is evocative. The name of the mother – "Karen Nilssen" – is spoken, but not only does it fail Helga, rather than rendering her "legitimate," the name points to her possible illegitimacy and denies her claim not only to her uncle, but in a significant sense, to her mother as well. In this scene, Larsen underscores the tenuousness of Helga's quest for a relational subjectivity, as the maternal feminine, the first relational site and the supposed source of the feminine's power and generative potential, is negated. For with the "aunt's" utterance, the name "Karen Nilssen," inscribed but once in the novel, is arguably erased. With this erasure of the name of the mother, the daughter's text becomes palimpsest, a narrative written upon and around a present absence, that absence being the maternal feminine.

<16> Indeed, by allowing Karen Nilssen only a shadow presence, the text itself seems to obey the injunction imposed upon Helga when she arrives at the next point in her quest, Harlem. Mrs. Hayes-Rore, her benefactress, cautions her.

And, by the by, I wouldn't mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won't understand [. . . . ] what others don't know can't hurt you. I'll just tell Anne that you're a friend of mine whose mother's dead. That'll place you well enough and it's all true [. . . .] She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and anyone curious enough to ask. (41)

With this, Mrs. Hayes Rore makes Helga an accomplice in the disappearing of her mother, and the most curious textual "gaps" develop around the enigmatic present absence of Karen Nilssen, both as Helga's mother and as the signifier for the maternal feminine. This present absence then serves as the center both of Helga's narrative and Larsen's treatment of female relational subjectivity.

<17> Certainly Karen Nilssen's virtual absence from her daughter's narrative holds significance in and of itself, paralleling as it does her absence from Helga's life in a way that must serve as the critical point of departure for an examination of the failure of the relational in the novel. Karen Nilssen's name appears but once in the novel whereupon it is immediately erased; her story, however, appears twice, but in both cases, she is less the subject in her own narrative than a figure in the stories others tell. There is the "tragic" tale of the "fair Scandinavian girl," a romantic, even melodramatic, Martyred Madonna tragedy, refracted through the lens of Helga's memory, revealing the daughter creating a narrative in an effort to understand and, thus, lay claim to an otherwise unfathomable, "unapproachable" mother. Later, when Helga leaves Harlem for Copenhagen, her aunt Katrina, Karen's sister, casts her into another story, that of the Devouring Mother.

Your mother was a fool. Yes, she was! If she'd come home after she married, or after you were born, or even after your father – er – went off like that, it would have been different. If she'd left you when she was here . . . [But] she wanted to keep you, she insisted on it . . . she loved you so much, she said. – And so she made you unhappy. Mothers, I suppose, are like that. Selfish. (78)

In both narratives, the Martyred Madonna and the Devouring Mother, the maternal feminine emerges less as powerful, generative potential than as a force of negation, turned inward to create an emotionally and relationally damning despair or expressed outwardly in "selfish," all consuming mothering.

<18> As Karen Nilssen emerges as a present absence, by turns an erasure, a gap, and a dark maternal archetype in Helga's narrative, Larsen seemingly decries the maternal feminine as the source of potential and power for women, instead rendering motherhood a text which holds the potential to negate female subjectivity. Voiceless, nearly nameless, represented only in relation to others, cast as abandoned lover and distant, selfish mother, Karen Nilssen becomes a cipher, a signifier, a marker for that space, the space of the maternal, that Helga herself must negotiate in the process of becoming a self defining subject and, too, in her quest toward a relational subjectivity.

<19> Helga's subconscious search for a subject position which encompasses the relational moves her through many communities, each one seemingly disallowing difference and requiring conformity, especially conformity to gender imperatives, in exchange for the communal. Her constant changing of milieu might well be read as a series of movements away from the conventional scripts which so failed her mother, a quest, then, not in search of the father, nor in the name of the mother, but a journey away from the space of the maternal feminine.

<20> Marianne Hirsch explores this movement away from maternal identification in The Mother/Daughter Plot. "In conventional nineteenth century plots of the European and American tradition the fantasy that controls the female family romance is the desire for the heroine's singularity based on disidentification from the fate of women, especially mothers" (Hirsh 10). But, according to Hirsch, this process of maternal denial moves inevitably toward affirmation. "In modernist plots, this wish is supplemented by the heroine's artistic ambitions and the desire for distinction which now, however, needs to include affiliation with both male and female models" (10). Quicksand, an early twentieth century text, arguably serves as an intermediary work, one that incorporates the transition from the conventional nineteenth century romance to the modernist narrative plot. Helga Crane, the transitional daughter-artist figure, moves through disidentification from, to affiliation with, and finally to total, tragic consumption by the space of the maternal feminine. [7]

<21> In the final section of Quicksand, Helga becomes a mother, three times over, in the course of twenty months. Her hasty marriage and move to the rural South having propelled her into what Kimberly Monda refers to as "a nightmare of domestic self-sacrifice," Helga finds herself spiritually and psychically spent, exhausted from a continuous series of pregnancies and childbirths and, too, from her role as mother; "the children use her up." In labor with her fourth child, she suffers a physical and mental collapse.

While she had gone down into that appalling blackness of pain, the ballast of her brain had got loose and she hovered for a long time somewhere in that delightful borderland on the edge of unconsciousness, an enchanted and blissful place where peace and incredible quiet encompassed her. (128)

When she returns from this borderland, she looks at her life and sees it as a "quagmire," a "bog" into which she has allowed herself to slip. The text's final tableau suggests that she has indeed slipped, falling into a literal and figurative space from which she will not escape: "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child" (135).

<22> Hortense Thornton writes, "[Helga's] womb entraps her so much that through childbearing she is left a tragic, lifeless shell" (Thornton 300). As the novel concludes, along with Helga Crane's quest, the womb becomes synonymous with the "quagmire," the "bog," the titular quicksand, and it becomes clear that they are all merely ways of naming the space of the maternal feminine.

<23> In her second novel, Passing, Larsen continues to interrogate the maternal feminine, arguably troubling it ever further when she has Clare Kendry, one of the female protagonists, say of her daughter, "children aren't everything." [8] But according to theories of subject formation, for the child, especially the girl child, the mother is everything. Feminist object relations theories of female identity formation offer a compelling psychoanalytic lens for reading the mother-child relational matrix and the formative processes that take place within it, holding that the daughter's identification with the mother anchors the female child's developmental process. According to such models, the girl child experiences herself as the same as the first other, the mother, continuous with her and, thus, with the objective world, or other others. This process leads to a sense of self for which attachment and relationship are intrinsic aspects of subjectivity itself. Although Helga's fate is that, with her final change of milieu – her impetuous marriage to the Reverend Pleasant Green and move to his parish in rural Alabama leads to a seemingly endless cycle of physically grueling and psychologically and spiritually ruinous, pregnancies and childbirths – she is consumed by the same script and space that negated her mother, her tragedy actually begins with the lack of attachment and identification with her mother during the critical developmental process. [9]

<24> In Tate's reading, framed by Lacanian models of subject formation, had Helga received patriarchal validation, she would have been able to complete the mirroring stage of the developmental process, lay claim to her image, as reflected in her father's eyes, and thus become a fully realized subject. In striking contrast to such drive oriented theoretical approaches whereby successfully navigating the process of subject formation leads to the emergence of the individuated subject, object relations based feminist psychoanalytic theories may be used to identity Helga's tragic flaw as a pronounced, even pathological, individuation. Furthermore, her failure to negotiate a viable relational subjectivity and subsequent failure to enter into relationship or community stems not from the absence of the paternal, but rather from the failure of the maternal, more specifically the failure of the mother/daughter identification and affiliation process central to, indeed critical to, the formation of female subjectivity, more specifically, a relational female subjectivity.

<25> Feminist psychoanalytic theorist Nancy Chodorow, one of the leading figures in the crafting and articulation of these female-centered models of development, posited that elementally different relationships with and to the mother create developmental processes for males and females that are so distinct as to ultimately yield altogether different psychological beings. "The selves of women and men tend to be constructed differently –women's self more in relation and involved with boundary negotiations, separation and connection, men's self more distanced and based on defensively firm boundaries and denials of self-other connection" (Chodorow 2).

<26> In focusing on the mother in the developmental process of subject formation, feminist object relations theory breaks in a profound way from traditional male-centered models of development which are invested in the power of the father. In these traditional models, notably Freud's monolithic mythology-psychology, the Oedipal Complex, the mother is allowed but one critical moment in the developmental lives of her offspring, and, then, only her male offspring. In the resolution of the Oedipal Complex, the male child not only confronts and resolves his desire for the mother, he separates from her, not only to identify with the father, but to become an autonomous being. He achieves in this process, the desired outcome of the identity formation process according to traditional Western ideals; he becomes the separate, individuated self. In the process, the relational complex itself is, as Chodorow puts it, "smashed to pieces" (156).

<27> Object relations theory, on the other hand, posits that it is the relationship with the mother that creates this individuated male person. The male child experiences himself as "different from" rather than the "same as" the first other, the mother, and thus develops a sense of self that is defined by separation and autonomy. The female child, however, experiences herself as the same as the mother, continuous with her and, through her, with the objective world. Unlike the individualized subject that emerges from drive theory oriented models and even from object relations theory models when the subject is male, for the female subject the processes of attachment, identification, and affiliation lead to a relational self. In a way that is in direct contrast with drive theories' individuated self, created through detachment and the negation of identification, for the female subject, a relational subject, the very experience of connection and relationship with others creates and defines subjectivity.

<28> In the case of Quicksand, however, the theory does not hold. Nothing if not an alienated, detached individual, Helga embarks upon a quest that is arguably defined by her desire for and inability to experience a sense of relatedness with others. Such a seemingly damaged subjectivity suggests that the process of attachment, identification, and affiliation with the mother was at best a flawed and at worst, a failed one for Helga Crane. It is no wonder, then, that the journey she undertakes throughout the novel, the one for which she is psychologically and emotionally ill prepared, if not altogether unequipped, is to find a place to belong, a people to whom she might belong; it is quite simply the quest for relationship and community.

<29> During the course of the novel, Helga's journey takes her from the New South to Chicago to the New Negro era Harlem, to Copenhagen, back to Harlem, and finally to the rural South. As she moves from one place to the next, Helga defies the implicit edict in women's quest narratives that requires women to experience their quests psychically, rather than physically. According to that script, women's quests must take place within the relational and communal matrix of the families and communities to which they belong by birth or through marriage. Helga travels across both psychic and literal landscapes; her physical movement reflects her emotional and psychological states. But while it is initially tempting to read this mobility as liberating – feminist literary critical approaches might certainly posit such defiance of social and cultural scripts as an assertion of agency –that liberty, paradoxically, signals a lack. Helga has neither family nor community to call her own, so she simply does not have the option of engaging in her quest within such spaces. Her denial of the female quest script, then, is not a matter of choice but a symptom of the absence of the relational and communal in her life.

<30> For Helga this lack of place is an unfortunate birthright; suggestions of illegitimacy and abandonment serve as the subtext for her story. Like the author who created her, Helga is the daughter of a Scandanavian mother and a black father. She is obviously uncertain about the facts of her birth when confronted with her Uncle Peter's wife's illogic and allusion to her illegitimacy, and earlier in the novel, she rejects another character's praise of her dignity and breeding with a seemingly self-loathing remark: "The joke is on you . . . my father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married" (21).

<31> Helga feels deeply this uncertainty about the circumstances of her birth. The issue of abandonment is clear. As she herself says, her father deserted her mother. Later her aunt, her mother's sister, mentions, with obvious embarrassment, her father "er--[going] off like that." Once her mother dies, Helga is quite thoroughly abandoned by the majority of her white relations, save her Uncle Peter who sends her to a school for African Americans. For Helga, her possible illegitimacy and her resounding lack of familial ties account for everything: "No family [. . . .] If you couldn't prove your ancestry and connections you were tolerated but you didn't 'belong'" (8). This profound lack of family, of "belonging" drives Helga's quest for the relational and communal.

<32> Because of her lack of legitimacy, Helga is in many ways socially dis-placed. She is, however, also culturally disconnected. Helga has no relationship with or connection to a black community for much of her life. She is raised, albeit as an outcast, in a white family. Not until her mother's death when she is fifteen does Helga come into real contact with other black people when her uncle sends her to the "school for Negroes, where for the first time she could breathe freely, where she discovered that because one was dark, one was not necessarily loathsome, and could therefore, consider oneself without repulsion" (23). But as is the case for Helga throughout her life, happiness "[eclipses] always into painful isolation."

As she grew older, she became gradually aware of a difference between herself and the girls about her. They had mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters . . . They went home for vacations . . . They visited each other . . . She was glad almost when these most peaceful years which she had known came to their end. She had been happier, but still horribly lonely. (24)

Always Helga is aware of this difference between herself and others. Along with the themes of illegitimacy and abandonment, the themes of difference and displacement run through Helga's early life story and establish the context for her quest for the relational, but it is her point of departure that determines the trajectory of her quest, a quest that is ultimately doomed because she is developmentally stunted, psychically incapable of experiencing the very thing for which she searches – connection, relationship, community.

<33> Helga's failure to develop a relational self, rooted in her earliest separation from her mother and her pariah status in her white family, leads to her "lack somewhere," her tragic inability to move beyond the margins, no matter the milieu. As a tenable biracial subjectivity is not available to her as a person of mixed race in the early twentieth century, Helga's racial identity is read on and onto her body; ultimately, socially, she is a black female subject. Her white Danish mother, then, not only cannot serve as the mirror for her daughter in the critical mother-daughter developmental process that would have allowed Helga to emerge as a relational subject capable of identification and connection with others, she is the very person who initiates Helga into difference. Ultimately, "Karen Nilssen" is the name of the mother, the white mother of a black daughter. She is, then, the original reflection and embodiment of that daughter's difference, her otherness, both as a (bi)racialized being and a flawed, overly individuated, female subject. [10] It is this otherness which dooms the daughter's quest for the relational before it even begins, indeed, with the very first words of the novel: "Helga Crane sat alone in her room."

<34> And, in the novel's final section, after having given birth to "two great healthy boys," Helga, herself, becomes the mother of a girl child, a "delicate" daughter, "not so healthy," nor, more significantly, "so loved." With this, the maternal feminine fails for a new generation, falling away to reveal the present absence that the daughter will have to negotiate in her own quest for a relational female subjectivity, for, as Quicksand concludes, "Helga Crane" has become the name of the mother.

 

Works Cited

Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. "The Name and Nature of Modernism." Modernism, 1890-1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978. 19-55.

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

DeKoven, Marianne. Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Ellman, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr. The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Hostetler, Ann E. "The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand." PMLA 105.1 (1990): 35-46.

Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Johnson, Barbara. "The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut." The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 37-60.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Larson, Charles R. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand and The Stories. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

---. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1993.

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Monda, Kimberly. Self-delusion and Self Sacrifice in Nella Larsen's Quicksand. African American Review 31.1 (Spring1997): 23-39.

Tate, Claudia. "Desire and Death in Quicksand, by Nella Larsen." American Literary History 7.2 (1995): 234-60.

Thornton, Hortense. "Sexism as Quagmire: Nella Larsen's." CLA Journal 16 (March 1973): 285-301.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Modern Novel, 1914-1945. Boston: Twayne Publisher, 1990.

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

White, Evelyn C. "Passing Glory: The Re-Examined Life of a Harlem Renaissance Luminary." Washington Post 21 May 2006: BW14.

 

Notes

[1] In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line was named 2006 Booklist Editor's Choice, received the 2007 Christian Gauss Award for literary scholarship or criticism from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was recognized in both the 2006 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award Competition (Honorable Mention, Biography/Autobiography) and the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Finalist, Biography). [^]

[2] Quoted in Evelyn C. White's "Passing Glory: The Re-Examined Life of a Harlem Renaissance Luminary." (see Works Cited) [^]

[3] Before Hutchinson's treatise, Thadious Davis's Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Revealed was the literary biography of record on Larsen. Her monograph, the first of its kind upon its publication in 1994, was long held to be the authoritative source along with, to a lesser extent, the work of Larsen editor and biographer, Charles Larson. Hutchinson, writing in the Introduction to In Search of Nella Larsen, noted that, despite the critical reception their biographical works, especially Davis's, received, "at critical junctures the evidence seemed lacking and the conclusions unwarranted," especially as related to Larsen's autobiographical accounts and her racial self-positioning (3); his project is both a literal search – his location of and use of archival records is remarkable – and a figurative one, as he attempts to locate a figure who "like her most important fictional characters, nearly always occupied a space between black and white, by necessity and by choice [. . . .] That space, her fiction itself testifies, is hidden" (9). [^]

[4] Also see Cheryl Wall's Women of the Harlem Renaissance for a critical examination of Larsen's manipulation of the tragic mulatto figure. [^]

[5] Helga's individual relational failure may also be read as a cultural analogue for the broader communal failure that Larsen locates in the black elite's inability to forge authentic relational and communal ties with the Folk, the black masses for whom they were notionally responsible, and their mannered and moribund approach to renegotiating African American identity and social place. [^]

[6] Barbara Johnson also conducts a psychoanalytic reading of Quicksand using Lacanian theory to explore Helga's journey as a quest for validation through the completion of the mirroring phase. [^]

[7] Linda Wagner-Martin reads Helga's descent as a way of surviving by, in Annis Pratt's terminology, "growing down, not up, as the female bildungs roman creates a different pattern of coming to maturity than that of the male" (86). [^]

[8] Clare's comment provokes an astonished response from the novel's other protagonist, Irene Redfield, the ego to Clare's shadow: "you know you don't meant that, Clare [. . . .] I know I take being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys [. . . .] I can't help it" ( ). It's worth noting that Irene, like Helga Crane, is a mother who loves her sons unabashedly; like Clare, Helga is the mother to a daughter who she is conscious of loving to a somehow lesser degree. Arguably it is the mother-daughter dyad, so much an influence in her life, that is at issue in Larsen's literary work; her interrogation of the maternal feminine is gendered, then, not just a matter of the mother's gender, but also of the child's. [^]

[9] The textual evidence of Karen Nilssen's absence from her daughter's life, first emotionally and then, upon her death when Helga is fifteen, physically, is overwhelming, beginning with Helga's remembrance of her mother as "cold and, yes, remote [. . . .] a little hard, and a little unapproachable" (23). [^]

[10] Anne Hostettler attends to the commodification of Helga's dialogical otherness in "The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand." [^]

 

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