The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Larsen’s detailed attention to apparel resumes after the novel’s settings shifts to Harlem, where Helga delightedly discovers people with “tastes and ideas similar to her own” (43). Larsen’s word order here is significant: Helga’s affection for Harlem is based primarily on aesthetic taste. She takes deep pleasure in her new acquaintances’ social niceties and material possessions: “Their sophisticated cynical talk, their elaborate parties, the unobtrusive correctness of their clothes and homes, all appealed to her craving for smartness, for enjoyment” (43). Harlem’s appeal crystallizes in Anne Grey, whose “impeccably fastidious taste in clothes” (45) provides Helga with a model for the imitation that can assist group inclusion. Although she initially feels that she has “found herself” (44) in Harlem, Helga gradually realizes that her new friends’ opinions about race clash with her personal experience (Hutchinson 229-230). Helga is particularly troubled by Anne’s imitation of upper class white aesthetics. As with Naxos, Larsen uses clothing and other aesthetic commodities to delineate Harlem’s racial politics. Helga’s Harlem friends dress and decorate in ways that complement their mannered detachment. Anne, who is “beautifully dressed in a cool green tailored frock” (41-42) during her first meeting with Helga, uses clean lines and cool colors to convey sophistication and reserve. Her “cream-colored” (41,44) house features “silver-hued” carpet, furniture “to which tremendous age lent dignity and interest,” and material remnants of Orientalism: “a lacquered jade-green settee with gleaming black satin cushions, lustrous Eastern rugs, ancient copper, Japanese prints” (44). Anne’s use of historical and imperial items to invoke aesthetic authority demonstrates her fondness for historically ascendant white culture. Her style parallels her politics, and even her last name, Grey, marks her combination of black identity and white preferences. Anne “hate[s] white people with a deep and burning hatred” but nevertheless “ape[s] their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living. While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she yet dislike[s] the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race” (48). Anne’s hatred of whites conflicts with Helga’s unspoken memories of maternal love, and Anne’s aping of white taste maligns the black culture that Helga seeks to celebrate.[9] Consequently, Helga is “distressed” (48) and “irked” at “racial ardor in one so little affected by racial prejudice as Anne, and by her inconsistencies” (49). Helga’s frustration with Anne is a central component of her growing dissatisfaction with Harlem, which she expresses by switching from an imitative style of dress to more individuating apparel.
Helga turns away from Harlem’s conceptualization of black identity because, in addition to wearing cool green frocks and admiring Japanese prints, admission into Harlem society requires that Helga hide her white parentage. Just before introducing Helga to Anne Grey, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, who hired Helga as an assistant in Chicago and brought her to New York City, advises her to conceal her background. Mrs. Hayes-Rore says, “in a too carefully casual manner: ‘And, by the way, I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you’” (41). As George Hutchinson notes, “Helga’s introduction to elite black society is predicated on her denial of her mother” (230), who has been her only source of love (229). Despite the pain of this denial, Helga follows Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s instructions, and her white mother is “hidden away from brown folk in a closet, ‘never,’ she told herself, ‘to be reopened’” (45). Larsen’s use of the closet image is worth noting: Helga’s Harlem identity is a costume used to conceal her ancestry, which remains locked in a closet like an inappropriate frock.[10] Closeting her white mother prevents Helga from developing a racial identity that could acknowledge her mixed-race background. After deciding to travel to Copenhagen to see her mother’s family, Helga signals her rejection of Harlem’s style, and thus its racial discourse, through apparel. As she considers her clothes one summer evening shortly before leaving Harlem, Helga wonders,
