The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Footnotes
[1] Racial passing, which is a key theme in Larsen’s work, is only possible because the color line’s divisions are based on appearances. On Larsen’s depiction of passing, see Martha J. Cutter. I would note that Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing also includes detailed attention to clothing, though the role of clothing within that novel must remain the topic of another essay.
[2] In his recent biography of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson calls for more scholarly attention to the role of mixed-race identity in Larsen’s life and works. To be sure, as Thadious M. Davis notes, Larsen uses Helga Crane to “grappl[e] with the complexity of being a modern black female” (209); nevertheless, focusing on Helga as a black woman, rather than a black woman of mixed-race ancestry, can leave otherwise insightful analyses incomplete. Following Hutchinson, this essay focuses on Larsen’s depiction of the “space between black and white” (Hutchinson 9).
[3] Although identity necessarily includes gender, sexuality, class, physical ability, and so forth, this paper will focus on Helga’s struggle to establish racial identity.
[4] Mike Featherstone identifies the aestheticization of everyday life in modernist projects, notably Dadaism and Surrealism, that sought to blur the distinction between art and the everyday; in the cultural project “of turning life into a work of art” (51); and in the increased presence of aesthetic commodities in day-to-day modernity (52). This third aspect of the aestheticization of everyday life is the most salient with regard to Larsen’s novel. For further discussion of avant-garde artists’ views on fashion, see Radu Stern.
[5] Ongoing stylistic novelty was greatly facilitated by industrial production, which expanded access to clothing that was fashionable rather than functional, and this shift is particularly apparent in rapidly growing cities (Wilson 12, 27). Veblen also links fashion to large modern cities’ “relatively mobile, wealthy population[s]” (176).
[6] Ann E. Hostetler distinguishes between Larsen and her protagonist by claiming, “Nella Larsen was an artist, whereas Helga Crane never rises to the challenge” (37). Unlike Hostetler, whose argument presumably rests on more traditional definitions of art, I do consider Helga an artist. By recognizing the interdependence of ‘high’ modernist art and modern mass culture, we begin to see the need for broader understandings of modern artistic production.
[7] McDowell also identifies the journey and the symbology of clothing as significant themes; all three appear in Larsen’s Quicksand.
[8] The wide color range of clothing in Naxos is an excellent of example of how, as Kimberley Roberts notes, Larsen’s attention to fashion’s colors facilitates discussion of race “at a symbolic level” (109). Similarly, Hostetler argues that Larsen’s attention to color “advances a thematics of race” (35), though neither Roberts nor Hostetler addresses Larsen’s particular focus on mixed-race symbolism.
[9] Interestingly, Wall describes Larsen’s portrayal of Harlem culture, particularly the jazz club, as an examination of the “popular imitations” (98) that are part of “manufactured blackness” (99). Helga consumes these racialized commodities, like she does clothing, as part of her own effort to create black identity.
[10] The closet trope has frequently been used in queer theory, most notably in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity. Sedgwick’s discussion of the interdependence of heterosexuality and homosexuality (8-10) may provide a useful model for understanding how the color line’s binary structure invalidates the experience of being mixed-race.
[11] Meredith Goldsmith discusses the similarities between Naxos and Harlem by focusing on Anne (272), but Larsen’s use of clothing also serves to emphasize this point.
[12] Hutchinson observes that Helga’s dress is, significantly, “something like Audrey’s dress covered in a net that restrains flight” (231).
[13] The shifting meaning of Helga’s dress underscores the mutability of fashion forms and the arbitrary nature of the sign: a frock that once symbolized resistance to Harlem’s racial discourse later becomes a symbol of timidity.
[14] In her analysis of primitivism in Quicksand, Amelia DeFalco argues that by performing primitivism in Copenhagen, Helga becomes “an ethnographic exhibit” similar to Sarah Bartmann, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (23-24). In a similar historical comparison, Wall likens Helga to Josephine Baker and notes that while Baker “was able to mock the role of exotic primitive even as she played it to the hilt” (105), Helga is unable to subvert the trappings of exoticism for her own gain.
[15] Goldsmith details Helga’s attempts “to attain a middle-class African-American identity through consumption” (266) but does not explore consumption’s relationship to Helga’s search for a specifically mixed-race black identity.
[16] After Helga declines his sexual advance, Olsen proposes marriage as a “reward” for her refusal (86). He believes she has “the soul of a prostitute” who will sell herself to “the highest bidder” (87). It is worth noting that this is not Helga’s first connection to prostitution; while she searched for work in Chicago, “[a] few men, both white and black, offered her money, but the price of the money was too dear” (34). In her analysis of Larsen’s representation of prostitution, Kimberly Roberts argues that Helga’s simultaneous status as consumer and commodity “suggests how bound she is to the system: a system that first enslaved her ancestors, continues to exploit the bodies of darker peoples through their under-compensated labor, and figures her as an object for consumption, a figurative prostitute” (115).
[17] Helga encounters Reverend Green in a church where he is conducting a distinctly ecstatic service. Helga’s bare arms, bare neck, and “clinging red dress” (112) lead to her being labeled a “‘scarlet ‘oman’” and “‘pore los’ Jezebel’” by a woman in the congregation (112). Here, clothing is a marker of sexuality.
[18] Through the juxtaposition of Helga’s aesthetic standards and her Alabama surroundings, Hostetler argues, “Larsen refuses the picturesque depiction of poverty at the same time as she renders Helga’s aesthetic version of racial ‘uplift’ ludicrous” (44).
[19] Helga’s sudden marriage to Reverend Green, which seems to break from the novel’s trajectory, has been a source of disappointment to readers and critics alike. Hutchinson perceives critical charges “that Larsen does not provide sufficient narrative preparation” for the novel’s sudden shift as attacks on Helga’s characterization. “That is to say, Helga’s personality lacks unity and coherence – it lacks identity” (Hutchinson 224). Demands for cohesion seem to overlook the novel’s recurrent breaks and departures, the titular motif of disappearance, and, crucially, Larsen’s intent: Helga’s character remains fractured because binary racial definitions prevent her from establishing an identity that acknowledges her mixed-race ancestry. This, of course, is precisely Larsen’s point, and, as Lillie P. Howard notes, “[t]he pain the reader is made to feel at the end of the novel is for the death of Helga’s search and thus the death of Helga” (226).
[20] The title Quicksand, as Jacquelyn Y. McLendon observes, is a “self-revelatory metaphor, one that captures the essence of Helga’s struggle and foretells her fate” (157). In a similar line of argument, Pamela E. Barnett argues that “the impossibility of resolution is the impetus behind the book; Helga’s fate is, I think, a deliberately constructed failure” (599).
