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This is my sandbox. I am going to be bold.

I am also going to learn how to bold letters and italicize letters.

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Plot summary[edit]

Crane is the aloof and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish white mother and a West Indian black father who died soon after she was born. Rejected by her European-American relatives and not raised with her West Indian father, Crane feels adrift and "without people." Over the course of the novel she travels throughout the United States and Denmark searching for people among whom she feels at home.

In her travels she encounters many of the communities which Larsen knew. For example, Crane teaches at Naxos, a black boarding school (based on Tuskegee University), where she becomes dissatisfied with its philosophy of sober racial uplift and accommodationism. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher, who advocates for Booker T. Washington-style racial segregation and warns black students that striving for social equality will lead them to become avaricious. Crane quits teaching and moves to Chicago. Her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Crane moves to Harlem, New York, where she becomes the secretory to a refined but often hypocritical black middle class woman obsessed with the "race problem."

Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic. Missing black people, she returns to New York City. Close to a mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and has a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converted her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.

The novel develops Crane's search for a marriage partner. As it opens, she has become engaged to marry a prominent Southern black man, whom she does not really love, but through whom she can become a part of the black elite. In Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for whom she is the embodiment of an exoticized African ideal. By the final chapters, Crane has married a black Southern preacher whom she finds physically revolting. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic. Disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, Crane fantasizes about leaving her husband, but never does.

Themes and Preoccupations[edit]

Quicksand functions as a semi-autobiographical novel as there are direct ties between Nella Larsen's life and the life of the fictional Helga Crane. Like Larsen, Helga is of mixed racial background, functioning as a psychological problem due to her failure to create a sense of self that fits into the community. She finds this process alienating, her only comfortable identity is as an outsider. Due to this, Helga Crane produces a peculiar relationship with happiness in which she doesn't know what it is, but she knows she doesn't have it.

The Tragic Mulatta [edit]

As in Larsen's sole other published novella Passing, the plight of the bi-racial woman in 1920s U.S. culture is central to the novel. Helga Crane's experiences of isolation and emotional exclusion in both black and white cultural spaces, her struggle to identify with both her Danish and African American families and communities, and her encounters with sexual oppression and exoticization resonate strongly with the trope of the tragic mulatta in American literature.

The "New Negro" Identity [edit]

Booker T / Du Bois - HR Debates

Black Female Sexuality and The Exoticization of the Black Female Body

"Helga is divided psychically between a desire for sexual fulfillment and a longing for social responsibility" - Mc Dowell, introduction xvii

Jim Crow Travel

Religion and Spirituality

Education and Racial Uplift

Awards

In 1928 Quicksand earned Larsen the second prize for literature from the Harmon Foundation, an organization which celebrated the works of black artists.[