Racial Identity In Quicksand

I really enjoyed “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen, it is a story about biracial woman, Helga Crane, whose mother is Danish and father is black man. Both of them are gone or dead, so she kind of have been passed around her whole life. As an adult she is looking for fulfillment and a place where she feels like she fits in. The title “Quicksand” gave me an idea about how the story works, Helga repeatedly decides to go somewhere to move on with her life and hopefully be happy, but she would eventually get

In the “Imitation of Life” and in Nella Larsen’s novellas, Quicksand and Passing, the issue of passing is presented and developed. In Passing, regarding Irene, “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly” (Larsen 157). Both versions of the film and both novellas portray black women who come face to face

as the means to reinforce racial, sexual, and cultural parameters. Starting early into the twentieth century, the New Negro movement rapidly took off and fostered a grand shift into black-oriented and specialized uplift and renown, from within the black community. During this

The entertainment of a Harlem cabaret hypnotizes Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. She loses herself in the "sudden streaming rhythm" and delights in the sexually suggestive moves of the dancers. Helga is "blown out, ripped out, beaten out by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra" in a moment suggestive of a sexual climax. But when the music fades, Helga returns to reality and asserts that "she wasn't, she told herself, a jungle creature." Helga feels this struggle between sexual

The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context

Through their individual works, Nella Larsen and Ralph Ellison both work to approach and refute commonplace understandings of “blackness”, while also highlighting the social constructs which facilitate its existence. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, the character himself is fully aware of his societal invisibility as a black man, manipulating it to his own advantage. In stating, “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves,” the reader becomes aware

experiences of people living in ethnic enclaves have long attracted the attention of many scholars, journalists and writers because they want to understand how these communities are formed, and how the residents of these neighborhoods perceive their identity. This discussion included in this paper will be based on the analysis of literary and scholarly works. For instance, it is possible to refer to such authors as Nella Larsen and Yomme Chang who describe isolated ethnic communities. Furthermore, one

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Quicksand by Nella Larsen? Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know ============================== How does the author's treatment of relationships effect the characterisation of the heroines in "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This essay will compare the ways in which the novels "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen deal with relationships

The Worst of Both Worlds, and the Best of Neither Helga Crane's racial mixedness as a mulatto in Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand divides her socially, emotionally, and geographically, and suspends her in a perpetual "in between" status. Her uncanny role results from a combination of qualities that simultaneously identify her with, and distance her from, each side of her ancestry. Helga's identity becomes taboo because it leads her "diverging in two contrary directions"(Freud 24) that

modernists would have understood the term. But even in this, its first cultural sense, passing is far more complicated than the notion of Wearing a mask or of assuming a fraudulent identity would suggest…Passing—actual and Imaginary, conscious and unconscious—at once produced profound shifts in thinking About the boundaries of identity and aroused ambivalence about those shifting, unstable Borders” (Caughie 387). This Quote is from Pamela Caughie‟s article “Passing as Modernism” which defines the reason