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The character of Helga Crane from the novel Quicksand by Nella Larsen is a very complex character, struggling with racial identity, social class and sexism. Helga Crane is a twenty-three year old schoolteacher that comes from a mixed racial background. Her birth mother was a Danish woman, while her birth father was of West African descent. In the novel, she is depicted as a very exotic, beautiful and intelligent looking woman. Her racial dilemma however has left her lonely, alienated and psychologically uncertain to her belonging in the world. While growing up, due to her significant dark-skin and European features she was ostracized by both the Caucasian and African American community. In order to find herself a place in the world, and feel at home she traveled from the South, to cities such as Chicago, Harlem and even the European city of Copenhagen in Denmark. When it came to her travels, everywhere she would go she stated a strong opinion on her belonging. With that being said, I would like to focus this paper on three passages regarding her life at Naxos, in Harlem, and in Copenhagen.
To begin with, Helga Crane starts off in the novel as a twenty-two year old teacher at Naxos, which is a significantly black boarding school. She does not remain there for long however due to her
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dissatisfaction of being around those with the negation of racism. She enjoys teaching, but due to her mixed racial background she finds it difficult to feel neither content nor constricted. She finds herself frustrated with the way the overall black society is portraying themselves to her. I believe Helga is right to feel frustration and have the desire to leave before her personality washes away. Since she comes from two different racial backgrounds it is hard to comply with the negativity towards one of them and the intense preaching of the other. It is understandable to recognize her feelings towards this when she states that the black community “is complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society” (Larsen). For her, Naxos was just the start of another place where she did not belong. The environment at Naxos left Helga feeling ineffective to her racial standards. In the passage, Larsen exclaims “But she was powerless. In Naxos between teacher and student, between condescending authority and smoldering resentment, the gulf was too great and too few had tried to cross it (1726). Helga found the African American community’s passive acceptance and efforts to appease the Caucasian community increasingly intolerable. Her fiancé, James Vayle, was also of African American descent and taught at Naxos. However, his family did not approve of Helga due to her mixed Danish ancestry. Larsen states “—The general atmosphere of Naxos, its air of self-rightness and intolerant dislike of difference, the best mediums for a pretty solitary girl with no family connections. Helga’s essentially likeable and charming personality was smudged out (1726). Therefore, regardless of her engagement with James, she left Naxos to find a place and to find a community where she can genuinely belong. Helga’s decision to leave the negativity of Naxos and its people was a great choice. I agree with it, because as long as she was to stay there she would have felt distant from her Danish/Caucasian ancestry due to the negativity surrounding it. Furthermore, Helga Crane moved up north to the city of Harlem, New York. Predominantly white, she became apart of a system filled with stereotypes about the life of a white New Yorker. “Like thousands of other Harlem dwellers, she patronized its shops, its theaters, its art galleries, and its restaurants and read its papers, without considering herself a part of the monster. And she was satisfied, unenvious. For her this Harlem was enough of that white world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference” (1749). Understandably, a lifestyle considered somewhat lavish can be addicting in a way where one might find nothing wrong with it. Helga Crane I believe experienced that lifestyle in Harlem. However, while she was surrounded by a significant amount of “white folk” she could not help feeling yet again, out of place. Her dark-skin color and physical features categorized her into African-American stereotypes viewed by upper class “white people”. Although she mingled with the black bourgeoisie, and was approached by bachelors at the plenty, it did not remain her forte for very long. At this point, not only is she ambivalent about her racial identity, but her social class as well. Moreover, I believe that once she traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark where her mother’s side of the family resided, she felt a unique sense of enjoyment while still not being content. In Copenhagen, she lived with her very proper European aunt and uncle. She was ultimately viewed her as an exotic, and exquisite woman. She gained the attention of those around her very quickly, and resided with a set of artistic people. I believe that spending time with her family gave her a sense of feeling like she had a home. Her aunt and uncle were not of immediate family, but they were all she had since her birth father had abandoned her and her birth mother had remarried. Subsequently, she was viewed as a beautiful, intelligent woman that also stood out to the societal norms of Denmark. “She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it and even while gave herself wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired” (Larsen, 1766). She felt significant in Copenhagen, which made her feel good about herself, but did not fulfill the everlasting emptiness of belonging.
She was even proposed to by a popular white, Danish artist and rejected his proposal, explaining to him “I simply can’t imagine living forever away from colored people” (Larsen). In Denmark, although she was admired she was not a fellow being, but more considered a supra being. Her racial identity continuously restricted her from finding a middle ground where she felt content. In her position, it can be comprehensible to feel as if one does not belong no matter where they go. Either she is an actual outsider, or genuinely feels like
one. To conclude, Helga Crane eventually settled back in the South after meeting, converting and marrying Reverend Green whom she also had three children with. In the beginning of her married life she was enthusiastic, and prepared to be a good wife and have a place to call her home. However, later on she faced the realization that the lifestyle she is living is ill suited for her. She feels used up, and drained by her home life. Her once semi-lavish lifestyle does not exist. She traveled from one city to another to find herself and ended up back in the South where she started out. She plunged into the feeling of never genuinely belonging whether it came to her social class or her mixed racial identity. In the end, it did not matter whether she lived in Harlem or Copenhagen. She still became prone to depression and drowned into the “Quicksand” of her racial identity issues and social class. The title of this novel, Quicksand genuinely holds a true meaning to the story. She spent all of her life trying to figure out where she fits in, but continued to slowly sink away due to her racial background and social class. Ultimately, she fell into a depression where she sank into the “quicksand” due to the same struggles she spent a lifetime trying to over come.
In the passages “Red Cranes” by Jacey Choy and “The Friefly Hunt” by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, the authors present two characters that share many characteristics. The authors portray two different characters that come together with the main thought of imagination. Through this imagination, the characters can be seen as very similar. After careful analysis of both passages, the reader can decipher how each attribute of each character can be related back to each other.
Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” depicts a young woman who lives her life around her dyer need to find her place in society. In the setting of Quicksand, discrimination is a key factor in the text because Helga Crane, who is a biracial woman, is expected to settle in a race in which she does not necessarily call her own. With this said, Crane maintains her status as an outsider in both the white and black community, and is never content with her surroundings. She also disregards her peer’s philosophies on life as annoying or absurd. She is constantly looking for a “better” life that will bring her self-fulfillment, but to her misfortune she never finds it. In the text Quicksand, Helga Crane shows great dissatisfaction with her life because of the racial barriers she has set for herself psychologically. She has formed these barriers in her life to keep distance from facing racial discrimination and conformity. Crane fights to keep differentiation between herself and the rest of society, and makes a life choice to not repeat the same mistakes as her given mother. While trying to find her own happiness, Helga Crane looks towards her materialistic views which prove to dissatisfy her in every situation.
Within Rhys’s novel, he incorporates the normality of the West Indies during the nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries. Antoinette, the main character, who happens to be a white Creole, is mistreated and discriminated because of her identity. Throughout the text, characters are victimized by prejudices. For example, Antoinette and Annette become victims of traumatic experience as they face numerous kinds of mistreatment. Antoinette had to deal with an arranged marriage, which results her becoming distressed. Throughout this marriage, she was treated irrationally by her husband, Rochester and servants. She was unable to relate to Rochester because their upbringings were incompatible. She had to stomach the trauma of being shunned because of her appearance and identity. She was called names, mainly “white cockroach”, and was treated as an
Hodes article places itself in the theoretical framing of Fields, Holt, and Stoler to argue “the scrutiny of day-to-day lives demonstrates not only the mutability of race but also, and with equal force, the abiding power of race in local settings.” By examining Eunice’s day-to-day experience, Hodes seeks to show how even though the identifiability of race may change from place-to-place and period-to-period, the power of race to effect lives is not challenged. Eunice’s story is an interesting one to highlight the changing nature of race construction. After the death of Eunice’s first husband, she found herself forced to do work she previously saw as work of black women. This helps strengthen Hodes’ argument of the power of race because just as Eunice was forced to work these jobs to survive, so...
In Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Helga Crane passively opts out of situations; her actions are consistently reactionary. Helga’s anxiety is the figurative “quicksand” in which she sinks throughout the novel: Helga is too afraid to commit to a decision and thus flees geographically, failing to realize she can not find happiness through avoiding decisions.
While Helga identified herself with African-Americans while living in Harlem this idea quickly fades as she becomes exasperated with some of the societal norms that come with living in Harlem. She hates how focused everyone is on “the race problem” and wishes to get away from it. “Even the gentle Anne distressed her. Perhaps because Anne was obsessed by the race problem and fed her obsession.” (p. 50-51) When Helga first came to Harlem she really admired Anne for her intelligence and aesthetic sense when it came to interior decoration. But the longer she stayed in Harlem among purely African-Americans, the more hypocritical she found Anne to be: “Anne’s insinuations were too revolting. She had a slightly sickish feeling, and a flash of anger touched her. She mastered it and ignored Anne’s inadequate answer.” The more intellectual side of Helga becomes annoyed with Anne because she contradicts herself constantly when it comes to “the race
As much as race does not matter, it does. Morrison leaves out the race of Twyla and Roberta to inadvertently expose the role of learned racism in the world of “Recitatif.” Upon entering St. Bonny’s, Twyla is placed in a room with a girl from a completely different race and assesses the situation, “And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny.” (Morrison 1). Twyla’s first observation of Roberta, her skin color, is immediately indicative of the environment she has lived in, as the basis for her racial
---------------------------------------------------------------------- This essay will compare the ways in which the novels "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen deal with relationships, paying particular attention to how this aids the characterisation of Esther Greenwood and Helga Crane, the central characters respectively. It will explore their relationships with other characters in the novel, especially how the authors use relationships to fulfil their writing aims. It will also discuss the relationship between the protagonist and the reader, and how successfully this is achieved through the novel's language. Finally, it will attempt to compare the ways in which they relate to the world around them, which is particularly fascinating as although both novels could pass as fiction, they are largely autobiographical, raising the question of why the author's chose to tell their own life stories in this relatively detached way.
The first encounter with Helga Crane, Nella Larsen’s protagonist in the novel Quicksand, introduces the heroine unwinding after a day of work in a dimly lit room. She is alone. And while no one else is present in the room, Helga is accompanied by her own thoughts, feelings, and her worrisome perceptions of the world around her. Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that most of Helga’s concerns revolve around two issues- race and sex. Even though there are many human character antagonists that play a significant role in the novel and in the story of Helga Crane, such as her friends, coworkers, relatives, and ultimately even her own children, her race and her sexuality become Helga’s biggest challenges. These two taxing antagonists appear throughout the novel in many subtle forms. It becomes obvious that racial confusion and sexual repression are a substantial source of Helga’s apprehensions and eventually lead to her tragic demise.
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.
There certainly was a divide between the two races, but now it was more of a passive aggressive approach. Biracial coupling and children were especially uncommon in this time, therefore society didn’t know how to react to it. Since it was so uncommon, society decided that if you weren’t a part of the norm, you wouldn’t be treated that way. The normal was to be of one race and to grow up, live, and die within the community of that race. Helga being from a mixed background did not fit it or conform to society’s norm in “Quicksand”. In Helga’s perfect world she would like to live in a community of both white and black people, and eventually hope that in the new generation would be a breed of mixed children like herself. Unfortunately this was not the society Helga was born into, therefore she could never find a true place to call home. She would move back and forth between both races. When she lives among blacks, she longs to experience the white side of her soul, but when she lives among whites, she misses being around black people. For this reason, Helga is always tempted to leave her current residence to go someplace else. Eventually Helga begins to give in to society out of exhaustion from trying to reject and break its rules. Larsen reveals this by writing “And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.” Larsen is telling us how Helga gives in to society, even if it is in a seemingly positive light, she is depicting for us, her surrender to society and it’s rules. Once she realizes that she is giving in, she does all she can to try and escape doing that again. Although she tries to escape society’s claws and find herself a home, she discovers it is a lot more difficult that it was when she was
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston breaks from the tradition of her time by rejecting the idea that the African American people should be ashamed or saddened by the color of their skin. She tells other African Americans that they should embrace their color and be proud of who they are. She writes, “[A socialite]…has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges,” and “I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (942-943). Whether she feels “colored” or not, she knows she is beautiful and of value. But Hurston writes about a time when she did not always know that she was considered colored.
Helga feels most out of place when she has to confront the eroticism of the clubs in Harlem and her disassociation from sexuality. For example, Helga realizes how the music moves her in the club, “… the music died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but she had enjoyed it…” (Larsen, 59). Helga also feels social disconnection from Anne Grey who’s hypocritical of the culture she participates in. Anne Grey makes her hypocrisy clear when she says, “That’s what’s the matter with the Negro race. They won’t stick together. She certainly ought to be ostracized”, while at the same time participating in white society and even enjoying the music and other cultural products (Larsen, 61). Due to Helga’s alternative views to that of the Harlem and New York City society she leaves for Denmark where instead of feeling appreciated she’s fetishized and put on display like a freak show. Helga realizes she’s being made into an eroticized version of herself when Herr Olsen says, “…You have the warm impulsive nature of Africa, but, my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a prostitute. You sell yourself to the highest bidder, I should of course be happy that it is I…” (Larsen, 87). For this and other reasons, Helga leaves Denmark and moves back to New York City but this is not her final
Throughout all the sinful things Hester Prynne has done, she still managed to obtain good qualities. Hester was an adulterer from the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester was looked down upon by the citizens of Boston because of the sin she and another person committed, but no one knew who her partner in crime was because she refused to release his name. Towards the very end of the story Hester’s accomplice confessed and left Hester and Pearl feeling joyous, because now they didn’t have to keep in a secret. Hester is a trustworthy, helpful, and brave woman throughout The Scarlet Letter.
In Fenstad’s Mother, by Charles Baxter, character is a very essential element to the story. The main character, Harry Fenstad, is a complicated person, but it is his mother, Mrs. Clara Fenstad, who I feel is a more important and complex person. In this brief paper, I will explain why it is my opinion that both of these characters play a crucial role in the story by complementing and developing each other’s character.