The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Helga goes to Copenhagen in order to reconcile her white ancestry and black identity through contact with her mother’s Danish family, the Dahls. Rather than recognizing Helga as half-Danish, however, the Dahls encourage her to emphasize racial difference. Their enthusiasm for an exoticized racial aesthetic makes the Copenhagen section of Quicksand even more focused on clothing than the rest of the novel. Helga initially interprets the Dahls’ celebration of her blackness as familial recognition and consequently conforms to their wishes. As she dresses for tea on her first afternoon in Copenhagen, Helga reaches for “a severely plain blue crêpe frock” (68), but Aunt Katrina suggests a “shining black taffeta with [. . .] bizarre trimmings of purple and cerise” (69). Unconsciously echoing Anne, Helga protests that this dress is “too gay . . . Too – too – outré” for afternoon tea (68). In Naxos the dress would be considered too bright, in Harlem the dress would seem too sensual, but in Copenhagen Aunt Katrina tells Helga, “you’re a foreigner, and different. You must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things” (68). Deliberately accentuating racial difference leaves Helga “dubious” (69) because “[h]itherto all her efforts had been toward similarity to those about her” (72). The Naxos and Harlem aesthetics sought to minimize racial difference; assimilation was the dominant strategy in the former, replication in the latter. In both places, Helga initially pursued group membership by dressing according to convention before choosing more daring apparel in order to set herself apart. At first, Helga’s bold Copenhagen costume may seem like individuating acceptance, since accentuating brown skin can be read as celebrating blackness, but by dressing according to her aunt’s wishes, Helga resigns herself to the Dahls’ plans for social advancement. Following Aunt Katrina’s instruction to “make an impression” (68) results in, ironically, another version of pursuing inclusion by adopting a specific group’s aesthetic. Helga conforms to the exoticism endorsed by the Danes just as she had previously conformed to Naxos’s drab effacement and Harlem’s cool sophistication.
Shortly after arriving in Denmark, Helga declares her desire for “not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things” (67). Helga does acquire many “things” in Denmark, but the Dahls’ use of apparel to emphasize Helga’s racial difference also enacts objectification. Although Helga recognizes that she is a “decoration” or “curio” (73), her desire for acceptance leads her to acquiesce. In one way, Helga’s plea for color has been answered, and while shopping with Aunt Katrina and the painter Axel Olsen, Helga amasses
batik dresses in which mingled indigo, orange, green vermillion, and black; dresses of velvet and chiffon in screaming colors, blood-red, sulphur-yellow, sea-green; and one black and white thing in striking combination. There was a black Manila shawl strewn with great scarlet and lemon flowers, a leopard-skin coat, a glittering opera-cape […,] turban-like hats of metallic silks, feathers and furs, strange jewelry, enameled or set with odd semi-precious stones, a nauseous Eastern perfume, shoes with dangerously high heels. (74)
