The “Highly Important Matter of Clothes”: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Having been transported from Asia and Africa to Europe, these colors, fabrics, styles and textures recall imperial trade routes andthe international slave trade. Further, the descriptions of Helga’s acquisitions as “strange,” “odd,” and “dangerous” evoke primitivism. Draped in these exotic new clothes, Helga initially blushes when Danes on the street “sto[p] to stare at the queer dark creature, strange to their city” (69), but in time she gives herself up “wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired” (74). Helga interprets this attention as evidence that mixed-race blackness can be celebrated in Denmark, whereas in America, “Negroes were allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happiness, of security” (82). Though Helga thinks being “gaped at” is preferable to the oppression and limitations she faced in America, she eventually realizes that exoticism is incompatible with inclusion. People in Copenhagen delight in Helga’s appearance, but they see her as a foreign curio rather than a fellow Dane.[14] The consequences of exoticism crystallize for Helga at a vaudeville show, where two black men perform old ragtime songs she “remember[s] hearing as a child” (82). Helga sits “silent, motionless” while the Danes around her delightedly applaud music that, to them, is “new and strange” (82). She feels “shamed, betrayed,” and exposed, as if her Danish friends “had suddenly been invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget” (83). In Harlem it was Helga’s Danish mother who was hidden away, but in Denmark she has hidden her blackness beneath a fantasy of acceptance. The distance between Helga and the rest of the audience reveals the performative nature of her Copenhagen identity. Despite her Danish mother, Helga is separated from the rest of the audience by her racial phenotype. Far from accepting her, as she had hoped, the Danes have always emphasized her difference: “Else why had they decked her out as they had? Why subtly indicated that she was different?” (83). The Danish version of mixed-race aesthetics is too objectifying to lead to the group inclusion she seeks. Helga assumed that Danish pleasure in her individuated appearance was a form of acceptance, but she now realizes that, though celebrated, she has always been excluded. The color line’s divisions trump Helga’s familial connections and aesthetic effort: no matter what she does or what she wears, she will always be an outsider.
