Sexuality In Quicksand

Sexuality vs. Race in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Helga Crane a character in Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand confronts the challenge of embracing her emotions and feelings and of falling into the danger of being painted as a primitive, exotic, sexualized black female. The nightclub scene is arguably the most aesthetically striking scene in the novel. It is full of color, rhythm, and movement which illustrate the physical, psychological, and sexual characteristics of Helga Crane and further emphasize the struggle between sexuality and race for Helga Crane. Progressively, Helga Crane’s double consciousness in which she is unable to embrace white or black culture or her sexuality pushes her deeper into depression and angst as she does not feel in

People “violently” move their bodies, but they are also “ambling lazily” and softly “whirling like leaves.” The tone shifts from revolted to admiring; Crane is “drugged” but then “sustained” and “lifted.” She is “ripped,” “beaten,” “blown” but by something “joyous” and “murky” that is in between, ambiguous. The scene’s use of nature imagery, the leaves, and the streaming rhythm, combined with the wild display of dancing and music to present the motifs of primitivism Harlem symbolizes. The scene’s violent characterization reveals the threat primitivism holds for Helga. She is “drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra” (59). This quote emphasizes the forceful affect the music has over Helga, who feels contempt for the “childishness of it all” and feels “singularly apart from it all” (59; 58). Yet Helga does not wholeheartedly condemn her experience but rather leaves feeling “a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, that she had enjoyed it” (59). These opposing feelings of wanting to enjoy the club scene and the shame she feels for doing so characterizes Helga’s internal struggle between wanting to fit in and her

However, the diversity overwhelms her. “For the hundredth time, she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair; straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces. But she was blind to its charm, purposefully aloof and a little contemptuous, and soon her interest in the moving mosaic waned.” Helga’s isolated condition allows her to observe how color and texture function in the perception of race and cultural identity. Not only does this section generate the stifling pressure of the weight of being caught in the middle of two races, but the isolated character highlights individuality and difference within one category “black.” Helga keys in on the “gradations” within her “oppressed race,” and she brings to light and describes a variety that others seem to look over. The diversity that she sees, that complicates identity and existence, overwhelms