The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Despite her attempts to reject the “things” she has long pursued, in “the tiny Alabama town” where her husband is “pastor to a scattered and primitive flock” (118), Helga remains loyal to commodified aesthetics. She wants to transform “the clean scrubbed ugliness of her own surroundings to soft inoffensive beauty, and to help the other women to do likewise” (119). These changes will be accomplished using “what she considered more appropriate clothing” and “inexpensive ways of improving their homes according to her ideas of beauty” (119). Helga is aware of her neighbors’ poverty, yet she still believes in the transformative power of possessions. Moreover, her impulse to indoctrinate others with her own taste reveals aesthetics’ role in hierarchical power relations. Helga has rebelled against oppressive aesthetic control in Naxos, Harlem, and Copenhagen, but in Alabama she assumes aesthetic authority over others. Because the pastor’s wife is “a person of relative importance” (118) in the town, and likely because of her own regional, educational, and cosmopolitan background, Helga assumes that her taste is superior to that of her neighbors. Her judgmental approach to rural Alabama’s aesthetic reveals her faith in the commodities she claims to have rejected and her ongoing inscription within the systems of hierarchy she longs to escape.[18] She still wants an aestheticized life, but marital and maternal responsibilities severely limit her capacity for aesthetic self-expression. She soon abandons her improvement projects (121) and shows little interest in clothing. Here Larsen carefully distinguishes, as Meredith Goldsmith observes, “between the material self-fashioning of the black middle-class female self and the bodily realities of rural black women” (276). Just as detailed discussion of clothing once mapped Helga’s privilege-laden rejections of oppressive racial codes, the final section’s lack of attention to apparel demonstrates Helga’s subjugation to the patriarchal marriage economy and the hardships of racialized poverty. The sole description of her clothing in Alabama concerns “a nightgown of filmy crêpe, a relic of prematrimonial days” (129) that Helga wears while recovering from the birth of her fourth child. This nightgown represents the contrast between the luxurious freedom of Helga’s previous life, when she “had never thought of her body save as something on which to hang lovely fabrics” (123), and the reproductive responsibilities that now dominate her days. She has found inclusion within a black community, as the neighbouring women who once considered her an “uppity, meddlin Nothenah” (119) now look on her plight with sympathy (126), but this inclusion requires domestic subjugation. Her life has become a morass of corporeal needs, frailties, and fecundity (123). It no longer matters what she wears.
Although her artistic capacity for self-creation has dwindled, Helga continues to want nice “things.” In Quicksand’s penultimate paragraph she fantasizes about “freedom and cities, about clothes and books” as “agreeable, desired things” (135). These desires reveal her unabated belief in aesthetic commodities’ transformative capacities. By this point, however, these things and the dreams they signify – including integrative mixed-race identity – are out of reach and look to remain so. In the initial stages of her journey, Helga’s artistic practice facilitated admiration, but the color line’s divisions consistently made her feel out of place. Racial determinism and proscriptions against miscegenation forced Helga to closet her white ancestry amongst blacks, but the white people she encountered consistently fetishized her blackness. In Alabama Helga revisits the feelings of “dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation” she experienced in Naxos, Harlem, and Copenhagen (134), and she considers resuming her established pattern of departure. Though she longs for escape, she does not want her children to feel “lonely, unloved” as she did in childhood, though she “force[s] herself to believe” that abandonment would be a different experience for her children because they are not the products of biracial marriage (135). Significantly, Helga connects her sorrow to not only her unhappy childhood but also her racial heritage. Helga’s awareness of the placelessness of biracialism can also be seen in her firm stance against interracial marriage. When Olsen proposes, Helga refuses him in part because, as she tells him, “I couldn’t marry a white man. I simply couldn’t. It’s not just you […] It’s deeper, broader than that. It’s racial. […] if we were married, you might come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people” (88). She finds explaining this to Olsen “difficult” and “mortifying” because it brings up the pain she has experienced as a mixed-race person trying to find a space between the color line’s rigid divisions. At the end of her journey, Helga decides to stay in Alabama with her children; puts off the difficult task of finding a way out of the “bog into which she had strayed,” which she suspects will be fatal (134); and, as the novel’s closing sentence reveals, will soon “have her fifth child” (135). By concluding Quicksand with the onset of yet another pregnancy, Larsen emphasizes the distance between Helga’s earlier pursuit of aesthetic self-creation and her final submersion beneath the novel’s titular quicksand. Helga may still dream about beautiful clothing, nice things, and their expressive potential, but it seems unlikely that these fantasies will materialize. Although Quicksand’s ending has often been seen as disappointing,[19] I tend to agree with critics who treat the novel’s conclusion as part of its overall pattern.[20] The failure of Helga’s search for a satisfying aesthetic expression of mixed-race female identity is disappointing, to be sure, but this conclusion is part of Larsen’s canny indictment of exclusionary racial politics’ rigid aesthetics. In Quicksand, apparel is more than stylized detail, as Helga’s artistic approach to fashionable clothing plays a central role in Larsen’s exploration of how identity, like the clothing often used to represent it, functions as a commodity. Behind Helga’s aimless struggle and sad ending lies Larsen’s broader point: because they fail to challenge the color line’s rigidity, racial identities that maintain divisions between black and white displace mixed-race individuals like Helga.
