Rewriting White, Rewriting Black: Authentic Humanity and Authentic Blackness in Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary”

In 1930, Nella Larsen published a story in a mainstream magazine that effectively ended her career. Three months after “Sanctuary” appeared in The Forum—a magazine that had never before published a story by a black author—the editors published one of many letters they had received that accused Larsen of plagiarizing the work of a prolific British author named Sheila Kaye-Smith. Forum reader Marion Boyd’s claim that “aside from dialect and setting, the stories are almost identical” was just a polite way of saying what Harlem socialite Harold Jackman put more bluntly: “The only difference is that Nella has made a racial story out of hers”; she “has just changed it to make it colored” (qtd. in Hutchinson 345). Larsen’s story was derided by both white and black readers as an imitation of white writing whose particular blackness was insufficiently artistic (as indicated by Boyd’s “aside” and Jackman’s “just”). Because accusations of imitation and particularity were regularly used to denigrate African American art at the time, Boyd’s and Jackman’s comments thus suggest that the scandal that followed had less to do with plagiarism than with the underlying racism of the period’s aesthetic double standards.

Harlem Renaissance-era white critics often measured artistic value in terms of a work’s supposed universality, but they barred black art from being considered universal in two ways: first, by dismissing such work as imitative whenever it looked too much like white art (either in style or in characterization); and second, by dismissing it as primitive or racially particular whenever it was recognizably black. As a result, African American writing was placed in the impossible position of having to be both universal enough and black enough at a time when the so-called universal was solely associated with Western classics and whiteness. Because Larsen in “Sanctuary” managed to imitate a white literary source in such a way that her only apparent innovation was to introduce black characters and dialect into it, her story would have appeared artistically inauthentic on both grounds. Not only was “Sanctuary” a mere imitation of so-called universal white art, but its innovative use of black characters and dialect was itself too particular to count as universal.

Although judged by this paradoxical logic, Larsen’s story also disrupts it. On the one hand, the fact that the two stories were considered “almost identical” indicates the universalizing gesture of Larsen’s rewriting: Larsen’s retelling of Kaye-Smith’s story “Mrs. Adis” (1921) points to the clear common ground between black and white experiences. This constitutes a direct challenge to the era’s investment in essential racial differences, both in life and in literature. On the other hand, the strong implication that Larsen considered “Mrs. Adis” worthy of retelling in a black context indicates the particularizing gesture of her rewriting, despite the resemblances. Larsen’s act of rewriting suggests that she must have seen her story as different from Kaye-Smith’s because it was about black characters, speaking in black dialect, about specifically black problems. By making these universalizing and particularizing gestures simultaneously, the story renders inseparable the recognition of human experiences as both shared (universal) and unique (particular). Although “Sanctuary” failed to force this recognition upon its readers, the story still can be understood as an attempt to overcome the exclusion of black art from Western universalism by insisting on both its universality and its particularity.

African American authors of the period were fully cognizant of the way that so-called universal values—in ethics, politics, and art—depended, in practice, on the exclusion of African Americans from ethical, legal, and aesthetic consideration. For these writers, demonstrating that the universal should include both black and white aesthetic objects and that white aesthetic objects were just as particular as black ones directly refuted the suppositions of racial inferiority that functioned to restrict black participation in American democracy. After all, the association of universality with whiteness stood directly in the way of the political hope that W. E. B. Du Bois attached to...