The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
From the first pages of the novel, Larsen reveals the materiality of Helga’s self-creation. At Naxos, Helga’s personal belongings exude luxury: her reading lamp, “dimmed by a great black and red shade,” illuminates a “blue Chinese carpet,” numerous books, a “shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums,” and a stool covered in “oriental silk” (1). Within this decadent space, Helga wears a sensuous “vivid green and gold negligee and glistening brocade mules” (2); her skin is like “yellow satin” (2). The precedence of Helga’s possessions in this description indicates the importance of her aesthetic self-creation, and narratorial appreciation of Helga’s “rare and intensely personal taste” (1) engenders readers’ pleasure in Helga’s appearance. Such admiration contributes to readers’ sympathy for Helga’s rejection of the Naxos aesthetic, which uses unobtrusive color to make blackness less visible. The school’s dean of women declares, “Bright colors are vulgar” (17), and the female teachers wear a monotonous palette of “[d]rab colors, mostly navy blue, black, brown, unrelieved, save for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks” (17). The Naxos doctrine of self-effacement is perhaps best summarized by a visiting white preacher who praises the Naxos blacks because, he says, “they had taste. They knew enough to stay in their places and that […] showed good taste” (3). The Naxos taste emphasizes unobtrusiveness, propriety, and implicit acceptance of white cultural authority. In order “not to offend” (18) – in other words, to maintain the appearance of imitation that enables group inclusion – Helga limits her appetite for extravagance to items that others will not see, such as the luxurious lingerie and slippers concealed within the private space of her bedroom. At the same time, Helga publicly signals her objections to the repressive Naxos aesthetic through individuating clothing choices: she wears “dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft, luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks” (18). Unlike the colorless garb mandated in Naxos, the rich tones and textures of Helga’s clothing accentuate dark complexions. In this way, Larsen uses clothing, Helga’s art, to articulate the need for a racial discourse that can celebrate blackness rather than efface it.[8] This desire for color flows through the narrator’s description of colorful clothing: “One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress, which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer” (18). The student was too noticeably black in her bright dress, and according to the Naxos taste, both must be transformed. Larsen also uses Helga’s longing for colorful clothes to critique Naxos’s ideology of uplift: “These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous laughter” (18). Why, she wonders, “didn’t someone write A Plea for Color?” (18). The text Helga seeks may not exist, but its plea is figured in her artistic approach to apparel. She longs for a celebration of color that will not exclude mixed-race individuals. In Naxos Helga is very conscious of her own “lack of family” (8); as a result, she dresses in ways that demonstrate material affluence and group identification in order to facilitate inclusion. At the same time, Naxos’s assimilationist approach to race brings out Helga’s desire for individuation, and she dresses accordingly.
In Chicago, Helga’s clothes reflect the socio-economic stratum she seeks to maintain. On the first day of her job search, she dresses “carefully, in the plainest garments she possessed, a suit of blue twill faultlessly tailored, from whose pocket peeped a gay kerchief, an unadorned, heavy silk blouse, a small, smart, fawn-colored hat, and slim, brown oxfords, and chose a brown umbrella” (31). By using her artistic skill to select such modest attire, Helga signals her intention to uphold the educated, middle-class status she held in Naxos, but she soon encounters racialized limitations. She is a trained teacher, but it is the wrong time of year to secure a teaching position, and she lacks the specialized education to work in a library (32). Helga has knowledge and ability with regard to material aesthetics, but “the shops didn’t employ colored clerks or sales-people [sic]” (32), and she lacks the skills for jobs that are considered racially appropriate: “She couldn’t sew, she couldn’t cook” (32). Because clothing conveys socio-economic status, there are few descriptions of Helga’s attire during her period of sustained unemployment and growing desperation in Chicago. Elsewhere in Quicksand Larsen uses detailed descriptions of Helga’s clothing to mark her search for self-definition, but in the Chicago section of the novel, Helga is more concerned with survival than identity.
