Isolation And Isolation In Quicksand

One is the Loneliest Number

The feeling of never truly belonging wherever you are and whomever you are with can be paralyzing. That feeling can affect every part of your life. As the band, Three Dog Night, so eloquently put it: “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” Everyone feels lonely and sad at times throughout his or her lives, but when that feeling is never satisfied, it becomes like an illness. Trying to desperately find where you fit in and feel at home can be exhausting and in some cases never ending. In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, there is a constant theme of isolation and alienation, which subsequently affects every aspect of the main character, Helga Crane’s, life throughout the novella.

When we first meet Helga in the beginning of Quicksand we right away get the sense that she is unhappy where she is in her life. Helga very quickly decides to leave her teaching job at Naxos to move to Chicago. Continually all through most of the rest of the novella, Helga makes impulsive choices just like this one and moves somewhere else to try to find something that she can never find. She always believes that the next place will bring her happiness and the feeling of truly belonging that she longs for. Larsen explains Helga’s feelings of discontent with her life:

But it didn’t last, this happiness of Helga Crane’s. 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. Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of someth...

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...h century, when there was a very conservative society that had explicit gender and race roles. Through these themes in Quicksand, Larsen could be pointing out her own feelings towards her bi-racial heritage and life.

Nella Larsen wrote Helga to be ahead of her time. She’s a fiercely materialistic and intelligent woman of bi-racial ethnicity in a time that did not allow for bending of social norms and roles. Because of these strict societal barriers and her own self-doubt and internal struggle, Helga continually lets herself drown in the quicksand that is her isolationist feelings and life.

Bibliography

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Print.

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