The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
What should she wear? White? No, everybody would, because it was hot. Green? She shook her head. Anne would be sure to. The blue thing. Reluctantly she decided against it; she loved it, but she had worn it too often. There was that cobwebby black net touched with orange, which she had bought last spring in a fit of extravagance and never worn, because on getting it home both she and Anne had considered it too décolleté, and too outré. Anne’s words, “There’s not enough of it, and what there is gives you the air of something about to fly,” came back to her, and she smiled and she decided that she would certainly wear the black net. For her it would be a symbol. She was about to fly. (56)
This passage neatly demonstrates how Larsen uses the seemingly simple act of getting dressed to signify racial self-representation. Helga’s initial rejection of white as conformist emphasizes bourgeois Harlem’s tacit acceptance of the white authority it claims to subvert, and her dismissal of green and blue reveals her desire to break with her previous conformity. The orange and black net dress recalls the black girl in the orange dress at Naxos, thereby indicating the similarity between Naxos and Harlem despite the “contempt and scorn” thatHelga’s Harlem friends heap “on Naxos and all its works” (43).[11] In her ongoing plea for color, for racial acceptance, Helga wants “different, strange places, among approving and admiring people, where she would be appreciated, and understood” (57). While being accepted in Harlem requires Helga to closet her white ancestry, she hopes her mother’s Danish homeland will supply the inclusion she craves. The black and orange net dress thus symbolizes the hopefulness of her impending departure.
As she attempts to straddle the color line, Helga also confronts interracial sexual relations. The intersection between race and sexuality is particularly complex in Harlem, where mixed-race interaction at nightclubs and parties produces the specter of miscegenation. The night she wears the black and orange dress, Helga’s sexual and racial discomforts merge when she finds cabaret music stirring: “She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra” (59). When the music ends, however, Helga feels ashamed of having enjoyed “savage” music and “the jungle” of sensual movement it produces (59). It is tempting to read Helga’s insistence that she is not a “jungle creature” (59) as resistance to racist notions of black female sexual voracity, but her denial also indicates repression. As discussed above, the black and orange dress, which Anne once deemed “too décolleté, and too outré” (56), indicates Helga’s frustration with Harlem, especially Anne. Helga’s dissatisfaction is confirmed by Anne’s “cold hatred” of the mixed-race socializing that occurs in the cabaret. Anne particularly censures Audrey Denney, whose “shivering apricot frock” with “extreme décolleté” (60) is not unlike Helga’s own dress.[12] Though she envies Audrey’s “assurance,” “courage,” and ability “to ignore racial barriers and give her attention to people” of both races (Larsen 62), Helga lacks the confidence to behave in the same way. Restrained by her discomfort and isolated by her immobility, she feels “unhappy, misunderstood, and forlorn” (62), so that she is “a small crumpled thing in a fragile, flying black and gold dress” (62). Even after she decides to leave, Helga remains uneasy about Harlem’s hypocritical white mimicry, its sensual culture, and the interracial interactions that, insofar as they comprise her own family background, she has been instructed to deny. Her previously delightful outré black and orange net dress becomes a sign of loneliness.[13]
