Tara Ekmekci
Prof. Wexler
English 436
14 August 2010
We are all "Helga Cranes"
Everyone compared to a specific Subject is considered to be the “other subject”. The Subject can be one person, a group of people, or a whole race. The Subject compares itself to the “other subject” who can also be a person, group, or race. In this essay the dominant Subjects are the Western hegemonic ideals, the majority who follow these ideals and the imperialized English speaking culture. The “other subjects” are the minority, the oppressed, the subjugated, the marginalized, and silenced voices who are “… a class of colonial subjects often burdened by a double consciousness and by divided loyalties” (Leitch 28). The minority ethnic groups in North America include Africans, Asians, Native people, Hispanics and Middle Easterners. Each possesses their separate values, cultures, customs, habits, and languages. As major changes begin to take place in 20th century United States, many minority groups are still unable to break through the stereotypes that type-cast their roles in society.
One such type-casted group in American society are the African Americans. During the Harlem Renaissance there were competing notions of black identity. The New Negro concept at the heart of this movement is the key to reading Nella Larsen’s, “Quicksand.” Larsen has a more complicated picture of the New Negro. The protagonist in the story, Helga Crane, is constantly fleeing from restrictive notions of identity in a time when all African Americans unconsciously “… participate[d] in the process of carrying the traumatic past forward into the future…” (Stringer 3). Are the identifications of the Old Negro—before the Reconstruction — completely buried six feet under? The New Negro, epitomized by the protagonist, Helga Crane, in Larsen’s “Quicksand,” is struggling, but unable to identify herself with Alain Locke’s new modernized, self-dependent African American self.
Following the end of the reconstruction African Americans were magnetically pulled toward the Northern urban areas due to an increase in work production. After United States entered World War I in 1917, there were industrial vacancies on account of white soldiers who had gone to fight the war. African Americans started to fill these vacancies as they began migrating North to New York City, specifically Harlem. There was a new generation of African Americans who were a product of the great migration and civil war period. There was the belief that the New Negro would emerge when slavery was abolished. The New Negro represented a triumph of ideals and new identity that were in the making a hundred years before.
Helga Crane is the “product” of an African American father and white mother. Immediately this is crucial in understanding her ambiguity towards belonging to both colored spectrums of the American race. Nella Larsen begins “Quicksand” with the protagonist, Helga Crane, sitting in her room in Naxos. Helga is a teacher in Naxos “… at the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country, north or south…”(Larsen 1087). She is in her room because she refuses to attend work. Helga dislikes her work environment, because she doesn’t accept complying to an unreciprocated relationship with an educational institution that gives nothing in return. She feels like an insignificant part in a factory, producing Naxos products¾the products being African American students abiding to white hegemonic ideals. Booker T. Washington created this school for all African Americans to gain education, but the only thing Helga sees are white views imposed upon them all. She dislikes feeling implicated in a system breeding and producing inequality. Larsen describes Helga’s sensitivities toward Naxos by writing, “The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all. Strange, too, for this was the thing which she had ardently desired to share in, to be part of this monument to one man’s genius and vision.” (Larsen 1088) She does not find satisfaction in Naxos any more. She is ready to hastily leave it all behind, and begin a new hopeful journey of identifying with less conformed surroundings.
Nella Larsen immediately depicts an African American woman who is unhappy with the environment she is living in. While the concept of freedom was still expanding, attending a university, or holding a teacher’s position was an extreme luxury for African Americans in the 1920s. It is interesting to understand the reasons behind Nella Larsen’s motifs of creating a character like Helga Crane. Helga’s identity is complicated. In the first three pages, she refuses to identify herself with the people of Naxos, because “This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine” (Larsen 1089). It is evident that Helga holds strong feelings apropos denying individualism and new innovations.
Alain Locke was a very influential writer during the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote “The New Negro,” describing what he thought would be the new spirit among black Americans. Helga Crane, is one of the many ignored voices that Alain Locke leaves out while talking about a developing definition of the African American race. For Locke, the Old Negro is humble, submissive, and self-deprecating. He defines the New Negro as an African American who has a sense of self-respect, self-reliance, independence and Americanism. Locke says, “…the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy” (Locke 984). Helga Crane is still a “creature of moral debate and historical controversy.” (Locke 984). Helga flees from Naxos¾an institution which produces and feeds New Negroes¾because she rejects conforming to the New Negro ideals. In her eyes, the larger implications the authorities running Naxos have is to produce Naxos products still confined to belong to the hierarchy of color.
Alain Locke would have a hard time understanding the complex psyche behind Helga Crane’s constant dissatisfaction in her environment. Locke believes that by determination African Americans as a nationalistic race can come together and leave behind the repressed oppressions of the past. Even though Helga is determined to identify with certain groups, she is unable to define herself with the Old Negro or New Negro characteristics. She rejects the New Negro development in Naxos, and ends up in Harlem. Harlem is also the focal point of development for the New Negro concept. Helga arrives in Harlem searching for her mother’s brother, Uncle Peter. Her uncle’s new wife opens the door to their home, and tells Helga that she is not welcome in their house. Larsen writes that “[Helga] saw herself for an obscene sore in all their lives, at all costs to be hidden” (Larsen 1103). Helga had confidence in her uncle, and now he was just another individual who she was unable to form a relationship with. She was neither fully black, nor fully white, but her skin color automatically determined the perception that every white American had of her. Helga Crane had the hue of an African American, but knew that “She didn’t, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people” (Larsen 1119). She knew she had to leave Harlem to a place where her color played no role in her social casting.
Helga is only able to find contentment in isolation, because she is unable to get “… past controversy… and settle down to a realistic facing of facts” (Locke 986). Locke also argues that the African American is “taking a flight” from “medieval America to modern” (Locke 986). Helga Crane is fleeing from both worlds. Locke cannot universalize the experience of all African Americans to his concept of the New Negro. Helga does not perfectly fit into Locke’s description, because her psychology is too complex. Helga decides to leave Harlem to live with her Aunt Katrina in Denmark, Copenhagen.
Helga is on a quest of leaving behind yet another society she is unable to belong too. Her optimism and faith in assimilating to this new land, Copenhagen, has summited as Larsen emphasizes that “[Helga] liked it, this new life. For a time it blotted from her mind all else” (Larsen 1126). She finally receives the attention she is craving in Copenhagen, but instead of being objectified as a worker, like in Harlem and Naxos, she is objectified as merely an icon of beauty. One of the first things Helga’s aunt tells her is that, “You must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things. You must make an impression” (Larsen 1126) For the first time in her life she no longer had to be the one looking after her personal interests. Her Aunt Katrina took it upon herself to tend to Helga’s needs. This was new to Helga. It seemed ideal at first, but sooner or later she begins to realize that in “[Copenhagen] she was, a curiosity, a stunt, at which people came and gazed” (Larsen 1129). Helga Crane is unable to identify herself as an adorned decoration. Her life in Copenhagen meant little to her after two years of serving only one purpose¾a perfect image to be sold to the highest bidder.
Helga’s struggles with identity are more complicated than the notions of W.E.B. Dubois’s double consciousness, because Helga does not only define herself through her eyes, and eyes of white Americans. She tries seeing herself through the eyes of African Americans in Harlem, African Americans in Naxos, the society in Copenhagen, Anne, Aunt Katrina, and all her possible lovers. Larsen reminds us that “She could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity” (Larsen 1091). She suffers from competing notions of black identity deeper than double consciousness. When she looks in the mirror, there’s a reflection of the New Negro appearance she tries conforming to, but she constantly sees herself craving for the Old Negro traditions. Each time she rejects submission, she yearns for tradition and each time she rejects tradition she temporarily accepts conforming to the new territory she is in. As time passes, Helga does not “… see the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery of hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy nerves’…and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride…” (Locke 989). Helga is not a product of the New Negro individual who is able to achieve complete independence from notions of African American consciousness, through self-determination. She did not have Locke’s view of the African Americans thriving during the Harlem Renaissance in America. Helga vocalizes her resentment for America by emphasizing, “Go back to America, where they hated Negroes! To America, where Negroes were not people. To America, where Negroes were allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happiness, of security” (Larsen 1135).
Before leaving Copenhagen for America, Helga refuses Axel Olsen’s hand for marriage. He hands her a gift, a self-portrait of Helga. She automatically denies any form of resemblance with the portrait. The picture symbolizes a sensual depiction of Helga. She calls it a “tragedy” foreshadowing the fate she put out for herself ever since the beginning of the story. Dorothy stringer writes how, “Helga describes the resemblance, not in terms of greater or lesser artistic skill… It was not, she says, ‘herself’; she is disappointed and contemptuous because the painting is not ‘herself’…reveals that Helga’s only desire is for ‘herself’” (Stringer 76). She could not see herself in the painting, because she did not have a grasp of her own perception of herself. Helga has the tendency of rejecting everything old and new, therefore she will certainly deny this sensual depiction of herself.
After rejecting Copenhagen, Helga has no choice but to return to America for the second time. In America, Helga chooses to take a different route, and marries Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. She moves to the cores of the South, and after a few years of working on a farm and producing five children, she once again resents her life of labor and religion. Larsen states that “From the prejudiced restrictions of the New World to the easy formality of the Old, from the pale calm of Copenhagen to the colorful lure of Harlem” (Larsen 1144). Helga is not able to find cheerfulness. Through failed experiences of molding into the New Negro, her final choice is to move South, a place which represents all the Old Negro depictions, and none of the New Negro ideals. The only thing Helga achieves through her indecisive actions is moving backwards. She was not content with having the best of both worlds, therefore she is now stuck in the antiquated word in the South.
While trying to construct her own definition of the New Negro individual, she finds herself striving for an unattainable black and white ideal self that she cannot fulfill. Stringer writes “[Helga] isn’t there; you cant see her. She is the only one to see herself…” (Stringer 76). Her identifications with the Old Negro attributes were never buried. Her insecurities about being both black and white seizes her from moving forward and allowing herself to move with the flow of society.
Helga tries to be a feminist, a Marxist and a perfect example of an African American unable to naturally adapt to white values, completely reject them, or even blend into them. Simone de Beauvoir, a French 20th century feminist emphasized the lack of effort put by women as whole to stray away from the title of the “other.” For Beauvoir, women are constantly looked as the “other,” next to men. Men are the “absolute,” the “supreme” and Beauvoir aimed to eliminate the unequal relationship between men and women.
In Nella Larsen’s, Quicksand, Helga is a tragic character who belongs to the African American race that was used, tortured, and reduced to mere commodity. On top of coping with repressed scars from the past, she is also an example of a woman unable to find herself in a male dominated Western society. Beauvoir would definitely be proud of Helga’s choice of leaving Copenhagen, a place that expected her to play that role of a desirable woman waiting for a man to make her his ornament. The idea of wearing the best dresses and owning the most expensive accessories falls under the implications of capitalism and the ways in which owning the grandest and greatest of products can make you presentable for the male species who will carefully choose purchase and own you as well!
In her travels to Copenhagen she rejected to mold into societies pressure of the perfect adorable housewife, but somewhere along the way Helga was not able to stand her own ground. She fell apart and resorted to needing a male to be the steady rock in her life. When she chose to marry the Reverend and move South, she took the role of the housewife she rejected to be a part of in Copenhagen. Her inferiority complex definitely took over and she placed herself in a life she never dreamt of.
Gloria Anzaldua, a Mexican American writer, writes about the differences of multicultural identity portraying the “Helga Cranes” still eminent in the modern world today. She writes to reach out to the suppressed Spanish voices in America, but her writing echoes all the voices of marginalized ethnic groups. Anzaldua says “culture’ is a ‘story to explain the world and our participation in it, a … value system with images and symbols to connect us to each other and to the planets” (Anzaldua 2096). In a world where “the dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (Anzaldua 2097), hyphenated Americans should begin by wanting to preserve their own culture and then working to remind all “Helga Cranes” that with unity and compliance hybrid identities can coexist in a dominating white society.
Work Cited
Anzaldua, Gloria. “From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. 2nd ed. New York: NY, 2010. 2095- 2109. Print.
Larsen, Nella. “Quicksand.” Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Gates, Henry L., and Nellie Y. McKay. 2nd ed. New York: NY, 2004. 1086-1167. Print.
Leitch, Vincent B. “Introduction to Theory and Criticism.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: NY, 2010. 27-29. Print.
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed.Gates, Henry L., and Nellie Y. McKay. 2nd ed. New York: NY, 2004. 984-993. Print.
Stringer, Dorothy. “Not Even Past”: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in
Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten. New York: Fordham, 2010.3-87. Print.
