Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing

The fictions of Nella Larsen have long been understood as daring explorations of black women’s sexuality and subjectivity. Deborah E. McDowell is one of the earliest and most influential exponents of this idea, suggesting that Larsen portrays “black female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic” (xvi). According to Hazel V. Carby, Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) is “the first explicitly sexual black heroine in black women’s fiction” (“It” 471). Similarly, Cheryl A. Wall claims: “Both Quicksand and Passing contemplate the inextricability of the racism and sexism that confront the black woman in her quest for selfhood” (89). The association between Larsen’s work and black women’s subjectivity was so entrenched by the time that Judith Butler wrote on Passing (1929) that she hesitates before applying psychoanalysis to the novel: “There are clearly risks in trying to think in psychoanalytic terms about Larsen’s story, which, after all, published in 1929, belongs to the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance, and ought properly to be read in the context of that cultural and social world” (173). (It becomes clear from Butler’s subsequent remarks that the “context” she has in mind is primarily racial, particularly in her claim that “both stories revolve on the impossibility of sexual freedom for black women” [178].) More recent studies have maintained this view of Larsen’s fiction, bearing such titles as “Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2011) and “The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2008).¹

I mention but a few of the many examples of the critical tendency to take for granted that Larsen was chiefly concerned with black women, but they suffice to reveal what strikes me as an “elephant in the room” in Larsen studies: that all of her heroines are racially ambiguous, if not explicitly biracial. In numerous ways, Larsen takes pains to show that something about her major women characters significantly sets them apart from the less ambiguously black women around them, whether it be that they can pass for white or that they have a white parent.² If Larsen had intended to explore the experiences, psychology, or sexuality of black women specifically, it seems odd that she should have chosen to do so, in both novels she wrote, through such ambiguously raced women. Why did she not concentrate instead on a woman like Felise Freeland, a spirited supporting character in Passing whose “golden” complexion and “curly black Negro hair” (Larsen, Passing 226) mark her, in Ann duCille’s words, as “unmistakably colored” (107)? Why make the fact of these women’s dual racial origins so central to the plots?

The details of Larsen’s novels establish clearly that she did not make her characters biracial only to lighten their skin and thereby endow them with the cultural cachet denied darker women. In distinguishing her heroines from the black women around them, Larsen draws a line within the color line, pressing us to take seriously her heroines’ racial liminality. The tendency in criticism to do otherwise is understandable for a number of reasons. For one, in the United States, people known to possess any trace of African blood almost always have been classified as black, a habit that preceded Larsen and still endures in our time. Moreover, critics have been wary of imposing the essentialist “tragic mulatta” template onto Larsen’s work, an archetype that surely would have weakened any message that the author had been attempting to send. Further, Larsen was rediscovered at a moment in history when the peripheral status of African American literature might have made such a distinction appear balkanizing. I suspect that this concern is what motivated Barbara Christian, one of the pioneering scholars of black women writers, to downplay the white heritage of both Larsen’s characters and Larsen herself.³

However, now that Larsen’s place in the canon is secure, the time seems ripe to consider the likelihood that she did not mean for her mixed-race protagonists to serve as...