Rebelling and Resisting Oppressions: The Depiction of Waking, Dreaming, Drowsiness, and Sleeping in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

CLA JOURNAL 103 Rebelling and Resisting Oppressions: The Depiction of Waking, Dreaming, Drowsiness, and Sleeping in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand 1 Sharon L. Jones In the final chapter of Quicksand (1928), Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance period novella, the protagonist Helga Crane (a mother and minister’s wife from a biracial background) engages in sleeping and dreaming in response to and as a form of resistance against the racial, gender, and class oppression she experiences in a tight-knit Alabama community during the early 1900s. Larsen writes,“She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then afterwards, she could work out some arrangement.So,she dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking,letting time run on. Away” (125). Here, resting and sleeping are presented as affording the possibility for revitalization and rejuvenation. Throughout the novella, Larsen depicts Helga Crane as a woman who must negotiate the tension between conforming to and/or rebellion against societal expectations that she finds happiness and fulfillment in wifehood, motherhood, and Christianity.Her experiences in a variety of geographical locations and regions, including the southern United States, Chicago, Illinois, New York, and Denmark call attention to the challenges she faces due to race,gender,and class identities.The final chapter of Quicksand demonstrates the challenges that Helga Crane faces as a wife, mother, and member of a small religious community. Nevertheless, despite her troubled emotional, psychological, emotional, and spiritual state at the end of the novel, the depictions of sleeping, drowsiness, dreaming, and /or awakening in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand reveal Helga Crane’s agency physically, psychologically, and emotionally. In this way, Helga Crane’s plight at the end of the novel could be viewed as triumphant in the sense that she still retains a sense of empowerment. Although scholars have written about the importance of sleep in literature, it remains an under-discussed or unexamined area of analysis in relation to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand despite the numerous references to sleep in the novella. For example, Peter Schwenger’s At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature (2012), Simon Morgan Wortham’s The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (2013), Benjamin Reiss’s Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World (2017), and Michael Greaney’s Sleep and the Novel: Fictions of Somnolence from 1  “Rebelling and Resisting Oppressions: The Depiction of Waking, Dreaming, Drowsiness, and Sleeping in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” is a revision of an essay that the author presented on November 10, 2017 at the Midwest Modern Language Association Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. The earlier version of the paper has the title “Seeking Belonging: Representing States of Being and Levels of Awareness in Quicksand by Nella Larsen.” 104 CLA JOURNAL Sharon L. Jones Jane Austen to the Present (2018) analyze the function of sleep and related states from historical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and literary perspectives. In At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature, Peter Schwenger focuses on the states of awakening, becoming drowsy, and encountering difficulty falling asleep and suggests that when a person transitions from one state of consciousness to another it represents an example of liminality.2 Schwenger contends that literary works are useful when trying to understand liminality, citing how in philosophy Hegel and Nancy appropriated metaphors to explain concepts or ideas relevant to sleeping and awakening.3 Schwenger contends, “Liminality is not a weird exception to the normal state of existence; it is that state. These states at the border of sleep are simply more dramatic ways of reminding us of that” (xiii). Although Schwenger examines liminality and sleep in literary works by writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, and Franz Kafka,4 there is no discussion of the works of Nella Larsen. Like Schwenger’s At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature, Simon Morgan Wortham’s The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (2013) provides an examination of sleeping, awakening, and dreaming from philosophical, psychoanalytical, and literary perspectives. Wortham suggests that “the image of sleeptraversesanincreasinglyrecognizable—if intenselydense—setof possibilities. These range from sleep as largely a physiological condition and question (thus, somewhat marginal to philosophy) to the idea of sleep as at bottom the expression of a‘self’ or‘mind...