Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, remains one of the most well-regarded novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Its narrative of Helga Crane, a biracial Black American woman, who navigates both sides of the Atlantic, has sustained interests in the modernist turn in the narrative of the “tragic mulatta,” while also exploring the psychic depths of a woman struggling to establish herself within various Black and white communities. From the American South to Harlem to Copenhagen, Helga experiences brief moments of admiration and freedom that ultimately collapse into isolation and disillusionment. The novel ends with Helga trapped in an unhappy marriage and the unrelenting experience of motherhood, suggesting that her restless pursuit of self has led not to finding community but into publics that trap her in their logics. Although much has been made of her “Afro-Danish American” identity, throughout the novel, Helga never abandons her sense of being bound to a Black America.Footnote 1 Unlike more common tropes associated with biracial Black men and women, which suggest their sense of racial alienation as a metaphor for the irreconcilable nature of America’s racist white/Black dichotomy, Helga seems aware of within Black American society. This appears most evident in how Helga navigates various publics, where she responds to the forms of Black performance and their meaning to audiences across the color line. What matters to Helga is how blackness is presented. Ambivalent though it may be, this affinity for her Blackness is far stronger than her genealogical connection to the Danish side of her family or identity.
During Helga Crane’s second year in Denmark, the peripatetic and often melancholic heroine finds herself mesmerized by a Black vaudeville duo at the Copenhagen Circus (Cirkusbygningen). For Helga, blackface minstrelsy haunts the performance, revealing how the indelible specter of the antebellum practice remains within popular Black performance in the twentieth century. Even as she recognizes the traditions that the performers hail from, she is profoundly dismayed to discover how easily the Black duo captivates the Danish audience:
More songs, old, all of them old, but new and strange to that audience. And how the singers danced, pounding their thighs, slapping their hands together, twisting their legs, waving their abnormally long arms, throwing their bodies about with loose ease! And how the enchanted spectators clapped and howled and shouted for more.Footnote 2
Helga stands against the ready-made publics of Black performance. The world of the New Negro Movement, she tells us, is rendered not through originality but through constant citation; a world lacking originality and the possibility of cultural revival. Helga’s unease reflects the New Negro Movement’s growing efforts to distance and disassociate themselves from the blackface tradition throughout the 1920s.Footnote 3 Although Black performers had used techniques of minstrelsy since the 1850s, a search for what qualified as part of New Negro culture led a generation of writers to imagine alternatives to the “Old Negro.”Footnote 4 Yet Quicksand argues that the New Negro may not have distanced itself enough from the old. Too many remnants of the old, embarrassing figure remain. Although the Copenhagen Circus is the most obvious example in Quicksand, Helga constantly confronts how institutional spaces—ready-made publics—demand blackness perform in legible and recognizable ways for white and Black audiences alike.
Members of the New Negro Movement understood their cultural production as a civil rights project, arguing that commercial displays of Black literature and artistry were instruments that Black Americans, West Indians, Afro-Europeans, and their allies could rely upon when direct political action seemed foreclosed.Footnote 5 Many championed the importance of theatre-making for its politically transformative potential in white views of Black people, where Jim Crow blocked the ballot box. Claude McKay’s review of Shuffle Along is a case in point. He contended that more than a radical working class vanguard, Black performers themselves could prove to be powerful activists toward Black liberation.Footnote 6 Similarly, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston tried, in vain, to collaborate on Mule Bone, a play that would intimate the narrative power of Black American folkways. The literary editor of Crisis, Jessie Fauset, expounded on Negro comedy as a force for articulating the humanity of Black actors. And famously, Alain Locke used the language of theatre in describing the politico-cultural project of the New Negro. Yet one of the most well-received authors of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen, never directly addressed theatre-making, nor produced any theatre work herself. By the end of her short but illustrious literary career, Larsen published two novels, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and W.E.B. Du Bois recognized her novel Quicksand as superior to McKay’s Home to Harlem. Then she disappeared from the Renaissance following accusations of plagiarism in her story “Sanctuary.”Footnote 7 In her brief corpus, one would struggle to find a place where she theorized performance as directly as her contemporaries.
At least that is how it appears. Both of Larsen’s novels are deeply theatrical, concerned with performance and spectatorship. This is especially evident in Passing, with its characters in a constant state of performative deceits. A reexamination of Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, however uncovers a text deeply entwined with Black performance, critically engaging with multiple diasporic public spaces, including nineteenth-century uplift at the Tuskegee-inspired college of Naxos, the New Negro women’s lecture circuit, the movement of Black bodies in Harlem night clubs and the Danish vaudeville stage, and the speechifying of the storefront church.Footnote 8 Quicksand functions as a diasporic travelogue through sites of performance where Helga Crane disembarks to engage with performers, audiences, and the affective labor of the critic across these multiple Black publics. In so doing, she turns the novel into a kaleidoscopic revue, condensing performative publics into a single novel. Throughout, Quicksand models a deeply antagonistic attitude toward the theatre. The sites of performance produce estrangement and a sense of nonbelonging in Helga that keeps her moving geographically and propels the narrative into each site of performance.
This article argues for the idea of a “ready-made public” to make sense of Larsen’s depictions of these sites and sights of the New Negro Movement. To be a member of a public, Michael Warner states, “is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”Footnote 9 Yet here, “ready-made” focuses on the pre-fabrication of Black public spectacle that speaks less to the idea of a “New” Negro and more to the persistence of the manufactured “Old.” Be it the minstrel tradition in its various cultural or political guises, the idea of the African primitive latent in the Black unconscious, or the staying-power of the Black church, Larsen continuously presents her readers with environments that at first seem exciting and dynamic, but eventually betray themselves to already be purpose-built by historically pre-constituted ideas of Black life, ideas hardly altered for a renaissance.
Although Helga remains perpetually searching for her own place in the world, she is more critical than a “Black flâneuse,” a term offered by Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega to describe the detachment of a Black woman’s observation of the world: “the flâneuse is supposed to be emotionally removed from the city scene to observe it and record it.”Footnote 10 If the flaneuse observes, the critic judges, often harshly, and not only interprets staged acts but also connects them to a historical past and possible future trajectories. Helga views various kinds of performance through their precedents and their often calcified institutionalization. She continuously sees a world of ideas—“all of them old”—that do not contribute toward building/forming a New Negro, but a Black culture fixed in the past and one made less for a new generation of Black artists than passive audiences, both white and Black. These ready-made publics fail to resolve the political nadir of Black life; instead, they stabilize the Old as persistently claiming pride of place.
Larsen is deeply skeptical of any sort of New Negro public that could be produced in or by means of performance. With each spectacle, Larsen contests Alain Locke’s claim that “hope rests in the revaluation of white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective.”Footnote 11 Instead, Helga’s journey exposes the persistence of the Old. Such disaffection was an unintended outcome of the era’s Black literature. McKay and Hughes would turn away from the promises of Harlem by the 1930s. And to be sure, Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (also 1928), Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of Spring (1932), and Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (written between 1928 and 1933 and posthumously published in 2008) were critical and often satirical in their views of the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance. Still, Larsen’s critique of the New Negro Movement’s public reception, made in the midst of its greatest creative burst in the 1920s, is one of the earliest. It is all the more powerful because it comes from a woman existing within sites where the New Negro was being publicly performed and extolled.
When Helga returns again and again to watch the vaudeville duo, she feels herself also become a part of the existing spectacle:
She was filled with a fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt shamed, betrayed, as if these pale pink and white people among whom she lived had suddenly been invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget.Footnote 12
Her reaction appears on three registers: she feels tethered to the two performers in their racial identity, her interiority exposed to the Danish audience by their staged acts, and alienated from their performance and its reliance on minstrelsy to speak about Black life. Her world feels misrepresented by the dancing duo, and yet she feels inextricably connected to them, feeling their fate tied to hers. Helga’s response to Black performance extends the DuBoisian sense of watching oneself “through the eyes of others.” By refusing to take Black arts practices as original, she repeatedly looks to interpret how Black performance might seem outside of its seductive pull. Yet Larsen promotes a wider range of understandings of what performance can dislodge and fix for Black women across boundaries unimagined by her male compatriots.Footnote 13
Charles Scruggs suggests that for Helga, “the [Black vaudeville] performers are both on display, as she is in Copenhagen, and naked, revealing something that should be concealed. The spectacle recalls a racialized past that embarrasses her.”Footnote 14 Scruggs goes on to argue that Helga does not see that the spectacle is just a performance. Rather, Larsen is powerfully aware that such performances rebound onto Black female audience members intensely, as it does on Helga. The unease Helga expresses is born out not only of the white-dominated practice of blacking up but also its effects on Black American performance culture, which often used the burnt cork as their own entry point onto mainstream stages.Footnote 15 Despite her traveling away from the United States and believing she has escaped the “twoness” of Black American life, Helga succumbs to the Danish stage exactly in what she has tried to escape, the vulnerability produced by the spotlight on Black life. What emerges from Quicksand is a feeling of crisis, a desire to find a place where Black culture is produced, where it can claim originality, and a separate sphere of influence from whiteness. This search, latent in the narrative, motivates Helga’s movement throughout the novel.
Counter to Scruggs’s reading of Helga Crane, Cheryl Wall has stated,
throughout the novel, Helga has pondered her ‘difference,’ which she perceives as a personal flaw that makes her unable to take advantage of the opportunities she is offered. In truth, the flaw is Helga’s accurate perception that to succeed on the terms she is given, she must play herself false.Footnote 16
Highlighting the concept of a ready-made public gives a sense of the false representation in Black women’s spectatorship. The Danish episode chronicles what Larsen has in fact done with Helga throughout the novel: analyze and critique acts of Black performance. Helga’s view aligns with that of performance artist and scholar Stephanie Leigh Batiste: “Performance provokes much in the space of the unspoken and unspeakable. It offers an effective play with and playing upon. […] Blackness is its own performative scenario, a powerful characteristic of social life and experience.”Footnote 17 What Quicksand activates is a long-form engagement with the affective power of performance on its audiences, and Larsen uses Helga to guide the reader through the scenes of Renaissance literature, both North and South, American and European, cosmopolitan and rural. And like the theatre critic, Helga finds herself engaged in observation, contextualizing the appeal of the performances she finds before searching for the next venue. In each case, immersive experiences of spectatorship are, for Helga, generally negative. Helga develops an orientation toward spectatorship modeled not on the typical experience of an audience member but rather on the theater critic: detached, apart, and judgmental.
It is telling that Denmark is Quicksand’s revelatory axis of symmetry, as the most explicit moment of racialized performance occurs there halfway through the novel. The scene throws into relief the critiques of performance that Larsen has been engaging in prior to the staging at the Circus and primes readers to look for further critiques as the novel continues. This pivotal point also creates a symmetrical axis of the Great Migration: Deep South ➔ Urban North ➔ Cosmopolitan Europe ← Urban North ← Deep South. This article takes on these other moments of racial performance within Quicksand to understand the power performance has in dictating Black life. In each setting, white and Black individuals perform blackness to Helga’s dissatisfaction, pushing her away from one life path and into another. In focusing on Helga’s journey, I also draw on Larsen’s contemporaries, McKay and Hurston, to draw out how Renaissance writers promote sites that Larsen finds wanting. By the end of the novel, I suggest, Larsen transfers Helga’s critical voice to the Black Southern women who watch over Helga’s debilitated body. Her critical posture breaks down at the end of the novel with this Black female chorus. Here, the spotlight she has cast on others is reflected back on her, where she is figured as a performer, susceptible to critique by an audience that she has felt superior to. Their voices as they tend to the slowly wasting protagonist suggest at once a rebuke of Helga’s perceptions of Black performance as well as the power of communal voices that foretell the polyvocal narrative of Go Tell It on the Mountain as well as the works of Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison.
1. Ready-made scripts
Repetitive performances of blackness pervade Quicksand and are not limited to Black entertainers. The novel begins with Helga’s required attendance at a sermon by a white preacher at Naxos, where the preacher suggests that Black Americans are most fitted to roles in the South.
If all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste. He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know when and where to stop.Footnote 18
The language of the preacher parrots the frequent patronizing attitude that many white Americans held of Black advancement, especially in the wake of the white supremacist Dunning School (Foner Reference Foner, Smith and Lowry2013). Yet it also ventriloquizes Booker T. Washington’s message of uplift. Helga recollects that the preacher “had spoken of contentment, embellishing his words with scriptural quotations and pointing out to them that it was their duty to be satisfied in the estate to which they had been called, hewers of woods and drawers of water.”Footnote 19 Like Washington’s call that Southern Black Americans and their white supporters to “cast down your buckets where you are,” the preacher asks his audience to be satisfied with their existence within the American South.
Houston A. Baker Jr. suggests that Washington’s racial uplift responded to the discursive power that minstrelsy held in the American mainstream and that such language could be redeployed as a performative political strategy. Baker describes Washington’s language as procuring a method of survival for Black Americans “by stepping inside the white world’s nonsense syllables with oratorical mastery.”Footnote 20 Washington, he contends, used “a liberating manipulation of masks and a revolutionary renaming” toward political gain.Footnote 21 And yet, as Cheryl Wall makes clear, such false constructions prove quite dangerous toward self-discovery and racial solidarity. Helga is aware of the political incompetence of Washingtonian uplift, and that a white preacher matches such language creates an evident racial and temporal quandary: is the preacher steeped in racist circulations of imagined black servitude and Jim Crow era authoritarianism, or is he indebted to Booker T. Washington’s model of reconciliation? Coming decades after Washington’s hold on the racial consciousness of the nation, this public performance implies that the preacher believes himself to be reading from a popular script to a familiar audience. The white preacher highlights the slippage made possible in Washingtonian constructs that permit the preacher to appropriate and imitate back a passive political theory for Black life steeped in the racial stereotypes of minstrelsy. Regardless of its source, Helga revolts against the preacher’s implication that Black Americans should be happy with their second-class status within the American body politic.
Helga does not adamantly oppose Washingtonian politics openly, but she disdains the Tuskegeeian education model offered at Naxos. “It was only a show place in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the black man’s inefficiency […] It was, Helga decided, now only a big knife with cruelly sharp edges, ruthless cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern.”Footnote 22 In this first performance of the novel, Larsen unmasks the white supremacist logic that is unmaking Black life in America, buried in the heart of an institution founded on promoting Black citizenship and providing upward mobility for future generations. The political messages promoted at Naxos are from the end of the previous century. Designed by Washington for white audiences and redeployed by a white speaker, they reinforce Black socioeconomic inferiority. This “pattern” reveals its role as not only producing a prefabricated idea of the Black individual but also shows Larsen’s adept figuring of this Black education model as an (al)ready-made public. “The banal, the patronizing, and even the insulting remarks” suggest not only that Helga is watching a performance of white condescension but that the preacher is returning the minstrel mask back to those he thinks own it.Footnote 23 Following Baker, the preacher’s speech suggests that he sits in a multilayered exchange of racial performance, staging Washington for a Black audience. The applause he garners absolves the preacher of any prejudices, and, as Helga later learns from James Vayle, Naxos continues to thrive. This early performance in the novel inverts the racial makeup of Helga’s experience at the Copenhagen Circus—a white performer in front of an all-Black audience—yet, the outcome is much the same: the audience applauds, and Helga is left to reckon with the way such performance circumscribes Black life.
As evidenced by Du Bois’s critiques of Washington and Baker’s scholarship, Black politics is wrapped up in public performance. Mitch Kachun has spoken to the power that white performers wield over conceptions of blackness. Indeed, many in the nineteenth century believed that white Americans had a clearer sense of authentic Black performance than Black people themselves, further reinforcing Black Americans’ second-class status.Footnote 24 That is, if Black voices could not even be expected to represent themselves as members of the free public, they could only be shadows of the citizen.Footnote 25 Du Bois’s critiques of Washington bear this out, and Helga Crane, eternally an audience to and critic of prescribed ideas of race, lives a life constrained by this dictum.
Despite her departure from Naxos, the ready-made Black public reappears almost immediately when she becomes the secretary for Mrs. Hayes-Rore. A representative of the bourgeois model of the New Negro Woman, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, exemplifies the mobility of the ready-made. Her speeches are described as “ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences and paragraphs […] lifted bodily from previous orations and published works of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and other doctors of the race’s ills.”Footnote 26 Aware of Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s political ventriloquism, the narrative ironizes the speech as a culinary recipe, “seasoned […] with a peppery dash of Du Bois and a few vinegary statements of her own.” But even here, Helga knows it to be “the same old thing.”Footnote 27 After critiquing prominent Black (and white) men’s racial discourses, Larsen shows how their repetition within the work of a Black woman is a troubling extension of their discursive power. Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s plagiaristic masquerade has the effect of a political performance that elides her own relationship to racial justice. Like the white preacher at Naxos, her work is infused with already accepted and repeated concerns of racial uplift. And that such language is not only reproducible but consumable, even if made flavorfully acidic by Mrs. Hayes-Rore, suggests that Black politics has been forced to be should be easily recognizable and digestible by Black and white audiences. This subtle critique implies that more challenging concepts of Black politics cannot be broached and perhaps cannot even be recognized within the available frame. With the white preacher and Mrs. Hayes-Rore, Larsen brings attention to the circuits of Black ventriloquism across the color line. Helga abandoned the world of Washingtonian politics for Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s similarly contrived script. Despite her change in location and employer, Helga is exposed to a similar performance. Although they speak to different publics (the white preacher in the South; Hayes-Rore in the North), they effectively signal the lack of new thought emerging from both white and Black voices. The implied success of both likewise indicates that both sites contain willing audiences who seek these political performances out over possible challenges to the status quo.
2. A public creature
Once Helga arrives in Harlem, after being in the employ of Mrs. Hayes-Rore, she begins to see a possible path for her to move positively through; “she had had that strange transforming experience, this time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home. Harlem, teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and lulled her into something that was, she was certain, peace and contentment.”Footnote 28 Helga’s Harlem is much like Jake’s in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Both describe a place of various shades of Black life. Yet where Jake easily moves through the spaces of Harlem, Helga’s happiness fades quickly. “Little by little the signs of spring appeared, but strangely the enchantment of the season, so enthusiastically, so lavishly greeted by the gay dwellers of Harlem, filled her only with restlessness.”Footnote 29 This is an abrupt shift in the novel, coming just as Helga had begun to imagine marriage to “one of those alluring brown or yellow men who danced attendance on her” and having “a home and perhaps laughing, appealing dark-eyed children in Harlem.”Footnote 30 Yet in her transitions between contentment and discontentment, Larsen expresses a key change in Helga’s disposition: her ability to analyze. Once the tool of the critic is activated, Helga’s disenchantment builds a wall between herself and the public life she began to imagine.
In his review of Quicksand and McKay’s Home to Harlem, Du Bois makes evident his own awareness of Black visibility and the sense of the performing Black body for a public. His estimation of the novels mirrors Helga’s concerns: how are Black people seen, and what are the effects of their visibility? McKay, he contends, gives in to the demands of white readers and publishers “to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.”Footnote 31 For Quicksand, Du Bois frames his praise similarly in terms of a public viewing: “White folk will not like this book. It is not near nasty enough for New York columnists.”Footnote 32 Both novels depict Harlem as a burst of diasporic color and, to McKay’s credit, he vividly evokes Black folkloric tradition with tall tales of Harlem nightlife. Larsen encapsulates the high and the low and is critical of both. Helga’s affective responses to the opposing worlds of the social reform lecture hall and the cabaret, boredom and shame, respectively, expose their limitations.
Helga’s attendance at the Black bourgeois meetings leaves her sneering at the constant and repetitious focus on racial uplift: “Why, Helga wondered, with unreasoning exasperation, didn’t they find something else to talk of? Why must the race problem always creep in? She refused to go on to another gathering. It would, she thought, be simply the same old thing.”Footnote 33 It is telling that these conversations among the Black intelligentsia receive the exact same phrase that is used for Mrs. Hayes-Rore, which is also similar to the description of the vaudeville duo; they are old. As Cheryl Wall states, “in Larsen’s interpretation, the ersatz culture marketed to blacks as their own was clearly insufficient.”Footnote 34 Although the conversation varies between Garveyism, a discrimination lawsuit, and Black life in France, Larsen makes clear that for Helga, these are not new conceptual thoughts but the continued circulation of the old. Although they are detached from the Old Negro and, indeed, point to the immediate politics of the 1920s in Harlem, Helga finds these concerns passé. They appear to her as news-of-the-day being passed on as part of a conversation, not as an active or engaged public debate.
Despite its supposedly new and freeing dimensions, the cabaret proves no better. Although she was initially hesitant to attend, the movement of Black bodies slowly draws her out.
She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra […] And suddenly the music died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her.Footnote 35
Helga’s ecstatic dancing is marred by her sense that enjoying and participating in jazz is a devolutionary shame. Larsen describes Helga’s sense that she became something other than what she wants to be, something nonhuman or at least primitive. As seductive as the cabaret may be, whatever defenses Helga had to hold her against the masses only temporarily slipped away. The implication in Helga’s experience is one of a sensual aural seduction. Importantly, her sense of shame is not simply in her actions but in what she became, and that she struggled to return to who she was.
This moment for Helga presents a rejoinder to Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” published the same year as Quicksand. Footnote 36 Like Helga, Hurston narrates her blackness in the midst of an explosive jazz performance, when she finds herself imagining a primitive African past: “I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai [spear] above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way.”Footnote 37 Yet when she leaves the imaginary jungle, she returns “to the veneer we call civilization.”Footnote 38 For Hurston, civilization is an edifice, and at least some part of her is attached to her African ancestry. But for Helga, the connection to a primitive is a shameful embarrassment that should be foreclosed: “She hardened her determination to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.”Footnote 39 This pull into participation hints at the danger public performance holds for Helga’s self-perception. If she could simply observe, she would be able to draw out the complications of Black performance. Yet, once within the performance, her sense of self is lowered into the communal experience, a feeling she detests, marking such performances as either old—suggesting the “Old Negro”—or primitive.
Although Larsen does not describe what associations the jungle holds for Helga directly, later in the novel, she confronts her portrait by her Danish lover, Axel Olsen. Helga rejects the painting’s purported representation, arguing that it, “wasn’t … herself at all but some disgusting sensual creature with her features.”Footnote 40 After depicting Helga as judging others, Larsen likewise confronts Helga with how she is perceived. In coming face-to-face with her portrait, she cannot accept that she could be rendered truthfully by Olsen. Just as dancing expressed an element of her subconscious understanding of herself, she denies Olsen’s depiction of her. That this moment occurs in parallel to the dancing duo reaffirms Helga’s fear and sense of being misapprehended. Although a different experience of staging—sitting for a painting—the sense of being observed and falsely rendered continues the sense of a public already in possession of her.
Whatever forms of individuation that seemed possible when Olga is alone are lost in others’ experiences. Larsen’s heroine fails to integrate herself into the very real political spheres that offer not only racial uplift but belonging. The obvious place that scholarship has taken Helga Crane (as well as Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry, and Larsen herself) is her status as a biracial woman.Footnote 41 Yet, throughout Quicksand, Helga never denies her blackness. Larsen’s contribution to our understanding of Black performance is to show how dissembling it can be for the Black spectator to be swept into public performance and to be seen and interpolated as a visible subject. Helga has already shown herself to dislike the representational power of performance. Once taken in, the spectator-turned-performer loses critical distance and finds herself not only swept into engaging with performance but enmeshed within its race-making potential. As Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez articulate, “Hurston allows black performance to be in dialogue simultaneous with itself, the world around it, and the lives of black people.”Footnote 42 Yet for Helga, the simultaneity that she is swept into denies her an articulation of her as-yet defined self. That is, the performance keeps her from articulating and defining her own identity separately from the performance. Although Larsen never explicitly states as such, it appears that Helga cannot pass and her identity as a Black woman is a persistent part of her identity throughout the novel. And as she finds herself again and again an audience to Black performance, or indeed is called to perform herself, it is the constant feeling of being included in these networks that so actively disgusts her.
3. “The thing became real”
Larsen’s novel begins and ends in religious ready-made spaces: the Naxos church and the storefront church in Harlem. Where Naxos earns Helga’s derision, she is unable to muster a similar response when she is almost baptismally washed into the Harlem church by a rainstorm. Once inside, whatever sense of alienation that fostered her analytic eye is washed away. “Her nerves were so torn, so aching, her body so wet, so cold! It was a relief to cry unrestrainedly, and she gave herself freely to soothing tears.”Footnote 43 Larsen makes clear that whatever boundaries Helga has previously relied upon have slipped away:
Helga Crane was amused, angry, disdainful, as she sat there, listening to the preacher praying for her soul. But though she was contemptuous, she was being too well entertained to leave.Footnote 44
Helga is captured by the performance. Yet continuing from her previous experiences of participation, engaging with performance is a form of erasure. Her experience of the storefront church is a marked departure from the positive associations with Black religious practices that flow throughout Black literature. A year after Larsen’s novel, Hurston’s The Sermon in the Valley attempted to capture a Baptist religious service on stage. Rebecca Kastleman has argued that Hurston was a keen theorist of Black performance, especially as it intersected and owed much to Black religious experience. As Kastleman states,
Hurston’s anthropologically informed performance theory constructs a core idea of theatre making by proposing that drama is generated through the dynamic relationships between participants and observers. […] Hurston finds an egalitarian ideal in performance situations that create flexible models of participant–observer relations, in which participants turn out to be observers and observers readily transform into participants.Footnote 45
Larsen similarly suggests such relationships are at the heart of her own theory of Black performance. If Hurston’s work is filled with admiration for the power of Black religious performance, Larsen suggests that they can lead to a powerful unmaking: “Life seemed to expand, and to become very easy. Helga Crane felt within her a supreme aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness, a happiness unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known.”Footnote 46 For once, Helga is fully swept into Black performance and commits to a(nother) Black life; no longer a spectator, she is a willing participant. Here, Larsen points to the repeated experience of the publics Helga traversed. That she can regain a happiness that previously left her and that she experienced many public lives prior to this moment, signals to readers the repeated entrée Helga has had throughout the novel as an interlocutor and critic.
Despite Helga’s momentary contentment, Larsen’s ambivalence toward the storefront church prefigures the power of religious fervor and conviction of the Harlem church so powerfully invoked a generation later in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. For Baldwin, there is power in the speechifying sermon to create community and collectivity.Footnote 47 At the same time, the church can unmake its members. Larsen demonstrates this through language that mirrors the way she describes Helga’s previous experience of the cabaret: “And as Helga watched and listened, gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about.”Footnote 48 Unlike her experience in the Harlem cabaret—the last time she gave in to a performance—Helga’s religious conversion proffers a moral calling, one that does not reflect on African primitivism. If Hurston suggests that religious spaces offer an egalitarian possibility for spectators and actors, then Larsen argues that, instead, the church is too enticing, too seductive to allow the observer to retain a critical distance. Moreover, Larsen depicts the church as more threatening because it is so all-encompassing. Unlike the spatially and temporally contained theatrical spaces Helga has previously visited, her experiences in the storefront church pull her into a mass movement that she cannot escape.
Indeed, the performance that had given her so much in the moment inevitably lets her down, as so many Black performances had before. Her almost radical acceptance of the church and her move into a Black Southern religious community in Alabama return her to a state of mental and physical isolation. The performance of preacher’s wife, mother, and Southern Black woman slowly destroys her subjectivity. Helga is left bedridden, exhausted, and alienated from her own body. In attempting to perform, she is undone.
4. Performing motherhood
So much of Helga’s journey through the novel mirrors the role of the critic. She appears at a performance and casts judgment over the staged acts. She never sits long in these ready-made publics before she is dissatisfied and moves on. No performance represents the possible futures of the New Negro well enough for her to linger and, like a travelogue, Quicksand continues on to new sites of performance. And yet, her move to Alabama turns Helga into a fixture of the town, a spectacle. Quickly, Helga realizes that as a preacher’s wife and a new mother, she must perform. At first, it appears that she could continue to cast her critical eye on the Alabama stagings by “subdu[ing] the cleanly scrubbed ugliness of her own surroundings to soft inoffensive beauty, and to help other women to do likewise.”Footnote 49 Yet behind her back, it becomes clear that she is the source of their entertainment. Helga finds herself unwittingly staging the stereotypical “uppity, meddlin’ No’the’nah,” in the eyes of the women of her community.Footnote 50 She is now caught in the eyes of a different set of critics. Indeed, the Southern women fix on Helga as an outsider and as a bad performer, judging her ability to fit in their society rather than accepting her model of proper Black performance.
If Larsen’s novel had previously presented Helga as the sole critic, the return to the South gives the Black Southern women a turn as a critical chorus. They reject Helga’s “meddlin’” and critique her own performance of Black womanhood. When Helga imbues her performance of Black femininity with more direct expressions of her newfound Christian faith, she begins to receive their approval,
This utter yielding in faith to what had been sent her found her favor, too, in the eyes of her neighbors. Her husband’s flock began to approve and commend this submission and humility to a superior wisdom. The womenfolk spoke more kindly and more affectionately of the preacher’s Northern wife.Footnote 51
But Helga lacks the stamina to maintain that role, and her disillusionment emerges repeatedly each time she attempts to rise to the role of mother. Helga is an unmotivated performer, and her audience can tell. They applaud her when she can muster strength, but are frequently reminded of her outsider status when she fails. Although the literal stage disappears by the end of the novel, Larsen continues to see performance in her relationship to her new community, where the performance of the everyday and the spectacle of the stage blur.
None of Helga’s critiques of ready-made publics can prepare her for motherhood, and she is unable to find another public on which to model her performance or share her experiences. Helga looks to other women and cannot understand their performance: “How, she wondered, did other women, other mothers manage? Could it be possible that while presenting such smiling and contented faces, they were all always on the edge of health? All always worn out and apprehensive? Or was it only she a poor weak city-bred thing[?].”Footnote 52 Motherhood is a performance that Helga does not understand, even as she attempts to perform it herself. Her nameless children run underfoot, through her pregnancies, she is unable to cook due to a sensitivity to smell, and her husband frequents other houses while she remains at home. As if interviewing a performer in the wings of the stage, she asks “several women how they felt, how they managed?”Footnote 53 In Helga’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood, Larsen demonstrates the artifice of a formidable Black mother. Women, Patricia Hill Collins states, who “to remain on their pedestal […] must continue to place their needs behind those of everyone else.”Footnote 54 The promise of trusting in “de Lawd” does nothing for Helga other than make evident her inability to match their devotion. Recognizing her failure, Helga sees herself apart from these women: “Looking at the confident face of the little bronze figure on the opposite side of the immaculately spread table, Helga had a sensation of shame that she should be less than content.”Footnote 55
For Helga to be fully enmeshed in a community requires more than judgment; it necessitates engagement, and Helga fails to sustain the act for long. Even more so, her sense of shame challenges the free movement that privileged Helga throughout the novel. In a bitter twist on the Naxos preacher’s words, she finds herself needing to cast down her buckets where she is. Yet where the students and faculty at Naxos understood the Washingtonian call to immediate service, Helga cannot find meaning in the environment that she now finds herself in.
The response from the community of Black women is a noticeable break in the novel. It is the first appearance of sustained Black vernacular discourse, and it is the beginning of a choral response to Helga’s presence. It is in the small Southern community that Larsen gives voice to women talking about Helga. Where the novel had previously given glimpses of how others perceived Helga, this chorus of women overwhelms Helga in their determination to prescribe her role in their town. Where Helga responded to stages, pulpits, and dance floors, the women speak among themselves, creating consensus on how to act and how Helga fails to perform the role of Black mother. This women’s chorus counters Helga’s critical cosmopolitanism. Likewise, they challenge the institutions that seek racial uplift. Again, recalling the novel’s beginning in the prestigious Naxos, these informally educated women know more than Helga and escape the commands of the white preacher who sought to use Booker T. Washington’s compromise to put Black Southerners in their place. Hsiao-Wen Chen comments on the ways that Naxos perpetuates a normative control over Black women through “its homogenizing regulations geared toward transforming ‘savages from the backwoods’ into ‘ladies’.”Footnote 56 But these women escape either category. Helga fails to match their devotion to their families and domestic life because she lacks their motivation. Through Helga’s diminution, the novel tracks the movement away from the New Negro individual to the more grassroots knowledge of those outside of the ready-made publics that she navigated.
By the end of the novel, Helga slips in and out of consciousness after an especially difficult fourth pregnancy: “She found it surprisingly easy to sleep. Aided by Miss Hartley’s rather masterful discernment, she took advantage of the ease with which this blessed enchantment stole over her. From her husband’s praisings, prayers, and caresses she sought refuge in sleep, and from the neighbor’s gifts, advice and sympathy.”Footnote 57 This appearance of “enchantment”—recalling Helga’s view of the white patrons at the Circus—reveals the irrevocable changes in Helga’s perception of the world. It is her nurse who can discern, and it is Helga who escapes reality to avoid the community she is surrounded by. When she is visited by her husband or guests, she attempts to ignore their gaze on her body through sleep. The spotlight on Helga does not end when she wills it. And the role of critic has been completely surrendered to the community around her.
Allison Berg reads Helga’s persistent state of pregnancy as a form of entrapment for a woman who, although dissatisfied, moved freely through different spaces, using her body however she pleased. Berg insists that although Helga “expresses her artistry chiefly through her selection of clothing and her artful manipulation of her surroundings, her efforts represent a longing for a self-constructed identity, an imaginative refashioning of the parameters of race.”Footnote 58 Such attempts have isolated Helga from the Black community around her. Although Berg focuses on Helga’s experiences of motherhood, Helga’s isolation from any community is a continued feeling since her failure to find refuge in Naxos, Copenhagen, and Harlem.
Helga’s vision of herself as cosmopolitan, and therefore a Black authority, is undermined by her attempts to perform wife and motherhood. Where she had previously looked at other performances as failures in her estimation, she now finds herself failing in front of a set of critics with far more power in the community. Finally, this chorus of women makes their claim as a knowledgeable group of insiders, not only as mothers, but also implicitly as Black women in communion. Even if Helga is a mother and attempts to join these women, she remains an outsider—not just because she is a “No’the’nah,” but because the women around her reject the New Negro as not just an aesthetic but a way of life. Even though Helga is a mother and strives to follow in the example of the women around her, Larsen makes clear that part of her failure to fit in is the motivation she is unable to muster to perform motherhood. In trying to model her life after the women around her, she discovers a community that has put its faith not only in the Christian God but in the promise of the afterlife. Yet despite her critique of this community, one which Helga views through the lens of performance, she is still the one who lacks the strength and community to continue.
And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this childlike trust in full compensation for all the woes and privations in ‘kingdom come’ […] How the white man’s God must laugh at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly almost, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky by and by.Footnote 59
Although Helga and, indeed, perhaps Larsen, are pessimistic about the role that Black motherhood can serve within and beyond the New Negro Movement, it is the Black feminist literature that has most effectively challenged the notions of Black passivity that Helga derides at the end of the novel.
This shift in the novel presents interesting conceptions of Renaissance literature and its view toward women as critics of performance. Up until she arrived in Alabama, Helga was the New Negro woman, cosmopolitan, urbane, globally minded, adaptable, and adventurous.Footnote 60 Her identity appears entwined within the ethos of the overall New Negro Movement despite the failures that abound around her. Helga is tossed into several Black environments that leave her uncertain that she can participate in, let alone contribute to, the African diaspora’s culture. That she attempts to escape the United States altogether for Copenhagen, only to find a cavorting duo, reinforces the fact that the New Negro Renaissance was a troubled transnational movement, haunted by its past even as it searches for new geographies. This pessimism proffers no method of escape for Helga by the end of the novel, but it does expose the way the New Negro remains haunted by the Old. Larsen’s approach assesses the possibilities of the era and the legacies of performance through a critical lens not often associated with her.
Among the Black women writers of the New Negro Movement—Fauset, Hurston, but also contemporary playwrights like Georgia Douglas Johnson, Mary Church Terrell, Angelina Grimké, and Alice Dunbar Nelson—many were involved in the creation of publics, through editing, hosting salons, translating folklore, and the publication and performance of plays. Larsen is unique in her apparent rejection of the collaborative and collective approach to the New Negro. She thus seems an unlikely choice as a thinker with whom to reconsider the publics of the New Negro. However, Larsen illuminates an important lesson about the limitations of the public as a space in which authentic expression can unfold for Black female subjects. The chorus of Southern Black women proffers a counter public to the New Negro Movement by creating and maintaining a different kind of space. Meanwhile, the ready-made New Negro publics Helga encounters fail to produce a meaningful shift in Black life. For Larsen, Helga models a skepticism and a pessimism toward publicity itself.
In the generations since Quicksand’s publication, it has been Black women in the community who have challenged the individualist cosmopolitanism of Renaissance literature. It is telling that, while Quicksand ends with its protagonist bedridden and judged by Black women, later Black Renaissance-inspired authors would turn to these communities not as antagonists but as a wellspring against white supremacy and the grinding pessimism of American life. Not only would James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain contain generational revelations through the same church structure that Helga critiques, but Toni Cade Bambara would likewise set the scene of a Black woman’s healing within a Southern community in The Salt Eaters with its provocative first line, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”Footnote 61 Larsen’s novel opens up critiques of various sites of the Renaissance, suggesting that through the lens of performance, one can perceive the failures of various elements of Black cultural life to effectively challenge white supremacy. Yet these more contemporary Black novels have proffered that the communities that Helga languishes in would and could stage the kind of performances that could challenge the stereotypes and norms of Black life. Still, the power of Larsen’s novel is not simply its ever-growing criticisms but its clarity in perceiving how spaces of performance can undo racial progress. Quicksand has not been viewed as a part of a Black performance theory, but it expands our understanding of how the New Negro generation imagined the role of performance. That each of Helga’s locations proves more entertaining than challenging to racial norms, proffers a lasting provocation of how performance can move beyond making race legible for an audience, but to take that audience toward more liberatory practices of racial performance.
Acknowledgments
In Memory of Cheryl A. Wall.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: Paul J. Edwards
Open access
