The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
In addition to satisfying Helga’s dual desires for group inclusion and individual distinction, fashion is key to her participation in modernity. Like other forms of modernist art, contemporary fashion has roots in modernity’s industrial production, urbanization, aestheticization of everyday life,[4] and prioritization of change. Indeed, the very concept of “fashion” is predicated on continuous changes in style.[5] Fashion’s constant changes follow a cyclic pattern of aesthetic innovation, its widespread adoption, and gradual extinction once a style has become too commonplace to be considered fashionable. Simmel characterizes fashion’s “transitoriness” (547) as contributing to an appealing sense of the contemporary (547). The feeling of contemporaneousness that fashion conveys would seem to accord with what we now identify as one of modernism’s primary tropes, a preoccupation with the new. Modernity’s break with the past reinforces increased attention to the present, which augments the appeal of fashionable change. Jean Baudrillard similarly cites the notion of change as part of fashion’s relationship to modernity. Fashion is an ideal signifier for modernity, Baudrillard argues, because whereas other modernist media proclaim radical breaks from tradition, fashion “very clearly and simultaneously announces the myth of change” (90). Fashion’s constant changes occur within a cycle that feeds into modern desires for ongoing novelty. Change itself becomes the constant, as “the new” continually refers back to the past against which it defines itself even as cultural consciousness remains focused on novelty. Along with its capacity to satisfy dualistic needs for both group inclusion and individuation, fashion’s fantasies of reinvention – which, as Baudrillard observes, do not truly break from the past – are key to its representative potential within Quicksand.
Helga’s project of self-creation is a distinctly modernist endeavour: her journey of individual self-discovery is couched in modern preoccupations with novelty and aestheticization. Indeed, Helga’s fashion practices can be read as a form of modernist art.[6] Deborah McDowell’s discussion of the black female artist as a prominent theme in black female writing[7] includes creative acts that fall outside art’s conventional parameters. Understanding these practices, such as caring for clothing and crafting household decorations (McDowell 194), as art is particularly important for characters whose access to traditional artistic media is limited by racial, gender, or economic barriers. Cheryl A. Wall describes Helga as “an artist without an art form” (109), but I would argue that Helga’s clothing is her art form. As Linda Dittmar observes of Helga’s artistic practice, “the fact that it occurs in the ordinary course of living does not make it any less of an art” (141). I see Helga as an artist who uses fashion as an artistic medium to represent – that is to say, to create – her identity. Though her art oscillates between individuation and imitation, Helga’s sartorial artistry consistently focuses on establishing her place within the color line’s strictures. Helga self-identifies as black, but memories of her mother prevent her from ignoring her white heritage. She seeks membership in black communities in Naxos and Harlem but finds their perspectives on race stifling, and the white people she encounters, particularly in Copenhagen, see her as an exotic outsider. Throughout her travels, Helga changes her clothing in order to blend in with or stand out from those around her; together, these competing aesthetics of identity speak to her position between the color line’s divisions. By using fashion’s inherent duality as a symbology for mixed-race individuals’ simultaneous inclusion within and separation from racially specific communities, Larsen uses Helga’s sartorial artistry to signal the complexity of modern, mixed-race identity.
