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Helen Carby in Reconstructing Womanhood considers the very metaphor of the title of Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand: “it is a condition where individual struggle and isolated effort are doomed to failure. Helga’s search led to the burial, not the discovery, of the self.” (Carby 173). Indeed, this is what we find at the conclusion of Quicksand. After her “self-defeating” (Ahad 43) odyssey from the South in Naxos, to Chicago, New York, and Copenhagen, Helga Crane finally settles in an abrupt marriage to the “rattish yellow” (Larsen, 127) Reverend Mr Pleasant Green, in rural Alabama. There, she undergoes a spiritual and physical deterioration through her oppressive role as wife and mother, suffering through four successive pregnancies, the fourth almost killing her. She becomes a “reproductive machine” (Defalco 20), a role black women were expected to assume as the “soil” of the race (Macharia 259).  Helga’s body, once an object of desire, a commodity that served “as something on which to hang lovely fabrics” had become “used…up” (Larsen 132) through sex and childbirth. The novel ends as Helga “began to have her fifth child” (Larsen 145), which presumably ends her life. In this essay, I will examine the ending of Quicksand in its relation to the story as a whole, especially regarding the themes of African American nativism, primitivism, desire, and the implications and stereotypes surrounding the black female body. These themes, and the boundaries of such that Helga traverses, I believe to be the reason for our tragic mulatto’s downfall.

Breitzer defines African American nativism generally: “African Americans, unlike immigrants, were born in the United States and knew English and American customs, and therefore should be chosen over “foreigners” for good jobs and union membership” (Breitzer 272). Black nativism had increased post-World War I after an increase in necessity for black labourers. There was a strong belief that African Americans were a part of the “soil” that made the “very foundation on which the table could stand” (Macharia 258-259), the “table” in question being a reference to the Langston Hughes poem I Too. This idea of being “children of the soil” (Macharia 259) ties African Americans to the South “the place of the “soil,” as the authentic New World origin of African Americans.” Macharia concludes that if this is the case, black women’s bodies must be “identified with the South. Women’s bodies become the soil from which children spring.” (Macharia 259). If this is true, we can read Larsen’s ending of her novel as a critique of black nativism in America. Helga begins in the novel, despising the South and the hypocrisies of Naxos. She, like many others during the Great Migration flees to Chicago in search of a larger sense of freedom away from the “machine” (Larsen 5) Naxos had become. She finds a sense of liberation in Harlem amongst other black intellectuals, but ultimately finds the circle suffocating, criticizing the white race, whilst adopting “their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living…” (Larsen 51). Helga rejects this black community therefore betraying nativistic codes “which understand race as family” (Macharia 261) and flees to the white community in Copenhagen. Copenhagen confuses her further, and she finds herself “homesick, not for America, but for Negroes” (Larsen 99), shortly returns to New York, and then, after a brutal rejection from Dr Anderson, flees back to the South to rural Alabama with Reverend Green Pleasant. Spatially, and physically, she returns to the “soil” of her “ancestral belonging” (Macharia 259), if one is to follow nativistic tendencies. However, Helga has previously made it clear she has no roots in the South – in her conversation when leaving Naxos with Dr Anderson, he claims: “Financial, economic circumstances can’t destroy tendencies inherited from good stock. You yourself prove that!”, to which Helga replies, “… My father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married. As I said at first, I don’t belong here.” (Larsen 23). Larsen here uses Helga’s complicated past to demonstrate the “exclusionary logic of black nativism” (Macharia 271). Perhaps, if Helga was of “good breeding”, she would have thrived in the all-black “primitive flock” in Alabama, but rather, it is almost as if the very “soil” rejects her. She loses her passion for aesthetics and vivacity: “there was no time for the pursuit of beauty” (Larsen 132), her surroundings transform from beautiful exotic colours of “blue Chinese carpet… bright covers of the books… shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums… oriental silk” (Larsen 1) we find Helga in at the very start of the novel, to “her brown ugly house” that is soon filled with “disorder… emptied medicine bottles… constant debris of broken toys… unceasing litter of half dead flowers…” (Larsen 130-133). Rural Alabama has realised she does not belong in the ancestral home, and she begins to wither like the “half dead flowers” that adorn her plain home. Helga is further emphasised as the tragic “despised mulatto” (Larsen 19) in this way, by not being of pure breeding, tainted by her white mother in Alabama, only seen by her black father in Copenhagen, black nativism rejects Helga’s efforts to assimilate herself, through her marriage and children, into a community that she doesn’t belong. Her “soil” becomes futile, and her fourth “sickly infant” (Larsen 141) perishes along with her spirit.  

This critique of black nativism is interesting and certainly introduces complex themes of African American’s attempts to truly belong in a country that has repeatedly rejected them, however, as Hortense E. Thornton suggests in Sexism as Quagmire: Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand”, perhaps Helga’s “tragedy was… more a result of sexism than of racism.” (Thornton, 288). Whilst this is true to an extent, Helga’s inability to sexually express herself, as constantly observed as an object of desire, decoration, and reproductive machine (Defalco 20) certainly leads her to her tragic conclusion, however, racism is intertwined with sexism, particularly regarding the black female sexuality. Sexual repression is established early in the novel through Miss MacGooden, a “‘lady’ from one of the best families”, who refused to marry owing to “things in the matrimonial state that were of necessity entirely too repulsive for a lady of delicate and sensitive nature to submit to.” (Larsen 13). This repulsion, though mocked by Helga, is a constant theme throughout the story. But does Helga find sexuality disgusting because she refuses to “submit” her “delicate” nature, or rather, to avoid crude racist stereotypes that portray black women as having a ravenous animalistic sexuality? Primitivist discourse observed the black female body as hypersexual, and exoticization of black women was common, with figures like Sarah Baartman subjected to fetishization and being paraded for white observers to objectify. White observers wove the primitive and the prostitute, pictured strikingly in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which depicts five prostitutes donning primitive masks (Defalco 20). Additionally, history clearly shows white masters continually raping their female slaves. This fetishization of black women was understood by the female writers in the Harlem Renaissance, and many tried to tackle this in their own ways, with several female protagonists relying on marriage to excuse their sexuality. Carby praises Larsen’s boldness in portraying Helga’s sexuality:

“…the representation of black female sexuality meant risking its definition as primitive and exotic within a racist society. Larsen attempted to embody but could not hope to resolve these contradictions in her representation of Helga as a sexual being, making Helga the first truly black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction.” (Carby 174)

Barnett comments on this, stating that Helga only “fully enjoys her sexuality for a brief part of the narrative.” (Barnett 598). Whilst Carby finds Helga’s sexual exploration liberating to an extent, critics like Defalco find Helga’s sexuality that “sprang like rank weeds” (Larsen 131) as a submission to the “primitivist assumptions of black female bestiality” (Defalco 34), the “rank weeds” of her sexuality in question displaying Helga’s black female fertility, however it is tainted, perhaps by Helga’s white-tainted blood, given “within nativistic logic women are fertile soil, charged with propagating the race, they are… weed free” (Macharia 269). Barnett furthers this, identifying “this is no blooming rose.” (Barnett 598). It is clear that Helga’s “sex is her undoing”, and her “tragic life reaches its summit” (Thornton 300) after this. However, this is due to her race, and the primitivist implications of submitting to sexual desires, rather than her sex. We see white female figures like Edna Pontellier in Chopin’s The Awakening find liberation after sexual awakenings, with an equally ambiguous ending that could be read as death, or complete freedom depending on the critic (Xianfeng Mou believes Edna’s final swim was open for a new beginning (Mou 118)). Helga’s fate, however, is tied to her race, made only more oppressive by her sex. By enjoying her sexuality, she is punished for submitting to primitivist discourse surrounding her black body. Quicksand constantly shows Helga’s body as an exotic “visual spectacle” (Balshaw 315) – we see her complete exoticization in the Copenhagen saga, strikingly through Herr Olsen’s portrait, depicting Helga as a “disgusting sensual creature”, with Olsen proudly claiming, “my picture is, after all, the true Helga Crane.” (Larsen 96). Perhaps this is the point at which Helga decides to submit to her primitivist sexuality, no longer trying to distance herself from the crude racist stereotypes that have stalked her throughout her life, “After all, there was nothing to hold her back. Nobody to care.” (Larsen 125). Larsen’s female protagonist meets her tragic fate of oppression, childbirth and illnesses because of her submission to primitivism. Larsen successfully embodies the black female sexual struggle, and highlights the fact that unfortunately, there is no way out or happy ending, despite Helga’s continuous battle.

If Helga’s saga in Copenhagen is the catalyst for Helga’s submission into sexuality, then it is important to regard Otto Rank’s theory of The Trauma of Birth. Rank’s analysis, summarised by Badia Sahar Ahad in The Anxiety of Birth in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, considers the mother as:

“… the primary locus of anxiety and neurosis for the child… Rank believed that the womb was a protective space, not only from the social world but also from the father. Once the mother gives birth, the child is no longer protected and the act of delivery comes to represent abandonment, or, more, betrayal.” (Ahad 46).

It makes sense then, that there is a general human longing for belonging, especially when it comes to Helga, who was betrayed and abandoned by her white mother, for a man of the same race. Helga, as briefly touched upon before, is unable to escape her mother’s whiteness in the black space of Harlem, and once in Copenhagen, is unable to relate to her mother’s whiteness: “Rather than leave Denmark with a renewed affection for her mother, she comes to reject that space and the whiteness it represents…” (Ahad 50). Helga feels contempt towards her mother for breeding with a black man, thus creating an unfair world for Helga to traverse in. Helga’s “pattern of self-destructive behaviour” (Ahad 46) can be understood further through Rank’s theory. She relentlessly searches for “surrogates for her dead mother and absent father.” (Ahad 52), but is rejected continually by her white uncle, the white Copenhagen and Robert Anderson. So, she converts to Christianity, into the arms of the patriarchal church-womb into which she is welcomed, the sins of her past to be wiped. She gives herself up to “the paternal… Oedipal paradigm” that she has attempted to avoid, finding the masculine-led church, and eagerly makes the leader her husband to act as her paternal figure. She attempts to fulfil her birthright to appease her new paternal figure, but fails, unable to handle her new responsibilities: “their pastors house went unswept and undusted, his children unwashed…” and she receives a different type of rejection from Reverend Pleasant Green, who “had lost any personal interest in her, except for the short spaces between the times when she was preparing for or recovering from childbirth” (Larsen 133). Helga practically kills herself attempting to appease her husband, psychologically affected by the abandonment of her parents, her journey for belonging is futile, and although she makes weak plans to escape, she has already submitted her body to the cause of replacing her birth trauma with her own, death is her only reprieve (Ahad 59).

Helga’s tragic denouement in an oppressive role as wife and mother in rural Alabama is abrupt, and entirely sympathetic. She endures a spiritual death before her physical death, all her morals and views have dissipated, instead replaced with a last desperate attempt to finally belong. The epigraph by Langston Hughes,

“My old man died in a fine big house,

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I’m gonna die,

Being neither white nor black?”

reflects the story of Quicksand, and Helga’s search for a home. She wants to die in a place she truly belongs, yet she comes to understand that because of her mixed heritage, this is impossible. In her final moments in the novel, she reflects upon her life, the “dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation” she experienced in Naxos, New York, and Copenhagen. She feels an incredible amount of shame, she had been “The damnedest kind of fool. And she had paid for it.” (Larsen 143-144) She understands the intrinsic unfairness of the black woman in America, prejudiced, objectified and oppressed in any social group. The bitter conclusion has a depressing message, the black woman has no place in the world other than to reproduce, and to be observed. A mere body to be used. Death, for Helga, and for any black American woman, is the only relief.