English 272D
Fall 1998
Wollaeger
 
Searching For "The New Negro": Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance
Kristina Bobo
 

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement geared towards defining and recreating an identity for black Americans through art. The architects of the Renaissance resented both the labels placed on them by white America and those accepted by many black Americans, and sought to have African-Americans determine for themselves who they were and where they stood in American society. Some advocated representing the "better sort" of blacks in their work: those with money and higher education. Others looked for the "primitive" influences of the black have-nots. There were also differences in opinion as to how characters should be used: to show blacksÂ’ equality to whites, like Jessie FausetÂ’s novels; or perhaps to celebrate differences, as in Zora Neale HurstonÂ’s stories. Nella LarsenÂ’s short novels investigate the concrete, complex difficulties of self - identification for black women; Langston HughesÂ’ work discussed the real economic and sociological hardships of being marginalized. The question of representation was one that brought about much debate and eventually accelerated the end of the Renaissance movement. Nella Larsen, in her 1928 novel Quicksand, struggles with the issues that faced Renaissance artists and theorists in their quest for what Alain Locke called "the New Negro" through the character of Helga Crane, a young mulatto woman attempting to find her own niche in society.

The labels placed on the artists by whites, and the debates about what sort of art they should create, also extended to the black community. Jessie FausetÂ’s sentimental novels about Northern middle-class blacks (as well as LarsenÂ’s novels) were criticized as too bourgeois by some; Zora Neale HurstonÂ’s stories in dialect of poor, rural Southerners and Langston HughesÂ’ poetry of lower-class Northern city life were considered unacceptably stereotypical by others. Throughout the Renaissance, artists struggled to define which aspects of African-American life were figments of white AmericaÂ’s imagination and which were accurate, and what merited representation in art that was consciously attempting to define a "true" black identity, separate from stereotypes and stock characters. Wintz concedes that in the 1930s "black writers and critics either became disillusioned with the movement or else became convinced that the movement was a sinking ship, and they abandoned it" because "the movement never found any common ideology to bind together its adherents" (Wintz, 222). The controversy over representation and the impossibility of coming to any sort of "common" solution to it, was what eventually destroyed the movement. Those involved began to take sides against each other in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some advocating the celebration of the common man and others pushing the image of the more cosmopolitan, refined man as the one that should be represented to mainstream America. Eventually both sides abandoned the effort to consolidate and come to consensus on this issue, and went on to create their ideas of true representative art on their own, but so many African-American artists were never again so successful in mainstream America as during the Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance came into being at a time when it seemed absolutely crucial for African Americans to have a powerful, collective voice. After supposedly fighting for worldwide democracy in World War One, black soldiers returned to the United States to find their democratic status lower than it had ever been since the Emancipation. Political gains achieved during Reconstruction had been mostly revoked; Jim Crow laws were in full force; the Ku Klux Klan had become a strong unit once again; and lynchings and race riots were at an all time high. This time, however, blacks were not content to endure more injustice without a struggle. Cary Wintz, in his book Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, writes that "the pride engendered by their (African-AmericansÂ’) wartime service and the self-confidence resulting from their military training combined with frustration over apparently unending racial injustice to give birth to a new militancy among American blacks" (Wintz, 13). Emancipation had been possible because of the numbers of whites who argued for it; but in the 1910s and 1920s it was clear that African-Americans were not going to be assisted by a majority public which actively participated in or passively allowed such injustices. They would have to speak up for themselves and go on their own crusade for social equality. This ideology was what gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance.

The leaders of the Renaissance, especially W. E. B. DuBois, were often unfalteringly critical of the ideas attributed to the man celebrated as the leader of the black social crusade of the early 1900s, Booker T. Washington. Washington’s ideology was denounced as being too accomodationist and not assertive enough to achieve real social equality. He advocated training in agricultural and domestic work for African-Americans in the hopes that whites would learn to trust them and eventually be willing to share privileges with them. Whites enthusiastically backed Washington’s nonthreatening stance – he was even invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. Black Americans were impressed with the amount of majority support that Washington garnered, and began to view him as a great hero. Schools like the fictional "Naxos" in Quicksand, centered around Washington’s ideology, were enthusiastically built and funded by wealthy whites and administered by African-Americans who had also subscribed to his ideas.

The movement was partially a rejection of Washington and his philosophies. The leaders argued that his strategies would never bring about any change; they would instead insure that the racial hierarchy would continue, and blacks would remain on the lower rungs of the American social ladder. DuBois concluded that post-war America
 

decrees that it shall not be possible for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgement of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason . . . But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. (Lewis, 4)

The widespread acceptance of Washingtonian philosophies relegated blacks to positions of servitude and inferiority. DuBois recognized the unlikeliness that whites would eventually grant full equality to blacks, and took their suspicious reactions to more assertive questioning of the social hierarchy as proof of the futility of this effort.. If African-Americans were to gain equality, they would have to force white Americans to look at them immediately as independent equals that deserved and even demanded respect, not as a lowly, helpless group that would need to rely on whitesÂ’ benevolence in order to be uplifted. The way to achieve this was to begin an artistic movement that would highlight black AmericansÂ’ history and culture and allow them to determine their own identity.

The benevolence of wealthy white Americans, providing financial, social, and even political support, was actually what made it possible for many of the artists of the Renaissance to create, share, and preserve their works, and this situation, "the major dilemma of the Harlem Renaissance" (Wintz, 189), often created serious conflicts. "Unselfishness and sincerity could not always prevent misunderstandings between black writers and white patrons, nor could it prevent white support from imposing restrictions, as unintentional as they might be, on black literature," (Wintz, 189). The artists were attempting to create an identity in a space separate from the stereotypes and labels of whites, and several found it impossible when their livelihood was supported by people who held some of the stereotypical views and beliefs about blacks. Some of the patrons were very patronizing in their attitudes towards blacks; overly fascinated by what they deemed the "primitiveness" of black art, and imploring their artists to show what they (patrons) thought was black reality -- "the soul of Africa or the jungle rhythms" (Wintz, 183) -- or attempting to assimilate the artistÂ’s work to resemble the "high art" of Europe; and the artists were very aware and resentful of these restrictions. Wintz also recounts that some writers, including Langston Hughes, eventually ended relationships with their patrons or publishers because of conflicts over the content of their work.

Hughes was supported by philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason. Mason, who insisted that her young protégés call her "Godmother", had spent years supporting various artistic and social movements, and she threw herself with full force into the Harlem Renaissance movement, providing Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other artists with financial and emotional support. Hughes and Hurston both admitted virtually worshipping the elderly woman whose "power filled the rooms" (Wintz, 181) of the house to which age confined her. "She was an amazing, brilliant, and powerful personality," Hughes wrote (Wintz, 181). In awe of her power, influence and determination, he was originally content to write on themes that she deemed appropriate for him. Mason, like many other well-meaning patrons and supporters of the Renaissance, had her own stereotypical notions about black life that she gently but firmly imposed upon her writers. Hughes wrote of her, "She felt that there was mystery and mysticism and spontaneous harmony in their souls, but many of them had let the white world pollute and contaminate that mystery and harmony, and make something of it cheap and ugly, commercial and, as she said, ‘white’ (Wintz, 181). Mason insisted that the writers she supported focus on being "America’s greatest link to the primitive," (Wintz, 181) and write stories dealing with the supposed "primitive" part of themselves. Interestingly enough, Mason had to teach and "impress" Zora Neale Hurston "with the significance and beauty of primitive cultures" (Wintz, 180). Despite her upbringing in a poor, rural, Southern black town, Hurston apparently could not recognize this supposedly inherent link to the "primitive" in herself – it had to be shown to her by an elderly, wealthy white lady on Park Avenue.

As a young writer, HughesÂ’ works often did contain configurations of "the primitive", especially as it was to be found in modern Harlem life. His poem "Jazzonia" from The Weary Blues begins with an incantation to the mystical "shining rivers of the soul" (Hughes, 25) and then moves on to link ancient women Eve and Cleopatra to a contemporary cabaret dancer. The title joins the present and the past: the jazz of the 1920s with the ancient cities of the past, like Macedonia. His poems often begin in a current setting, move to the past and them return, demonstrating how the modern era is inseparably interwoven with threads of the past. The word "jungle" appears time and time again in this collection, as well as references to various aspects of jungle imagery: trees, rivers, flowers, etc. Most of the poems take place during a dance of some sort; chorus girls or nightclub crowds sway sensually to the sounds of the jazz band. Hughes attempts valiantly in this collection to connect 1926 Harlem to history and by so doing, connect its inhabitants to their "primitive" roots.

Hurston retained good relations with Mason throughout her literary career, but as Hughes grew from a primitivist writer in the 1920s to a social writer of the Depression, his relationship with his patron became increasingly fractured and strained. Mason strongly disapproved of his political poetry. "ItÂ’s not you," she reportedly told him about "Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" (Wintz, 183). What she considered to be "him" were things dealing with what she considered the "primitive"; poetry about the jungles of Africa or the inherent wildness of American blacks, not about economics or social injustice. Hughes, declaring that poems like the "Advertisement" did indeed represent his reality as a black man in America, refused to compromise. "I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be," Hughes wrote (Wintz, 183). He and Mason broke off relations in 1930.

HughesÂ’ later works about lower-class black life differed from that of the pure "primitivist" authors in its focus. Writers like Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston wrote to praise and validate what they viewed as the "exotic and earthly qualities of the black peasantry" (Stoff, 127). Those who toiled in the fields were closer to the land, closer to the natural and essential in their lives. Their stories were written in opposition to DuBoisÂ’s "Talented Tenth" theories, to protest that showing poor blacks was as necessary and truthful as showing middle-class ones.

"Langston Hughes, in The Big Sea, was to see the movement as a time when fun was to be had by all, but also as a rebirth whose good news the ordinary black never heard of -- and would not have had much time for anyway." (Kent, 48) This neatly sums up the attitude Hughes took to his poems as the nation moved towards Depression. All the talk of culture and uplift was very well and good; but how did it benefit the hungry and homeless masses in the fields of Alabama and on the streets of Harlem? HughesÂ’ later work was in protest of upper-class literature, as well; but, more importantly, it was in protest of upper class life. The poor may be full of profound wisdom and beauty, his work argues, but that is because they suffer so many injustices, none of which are beautiful, admirable, or, in a country where some have so much, necessary. It was with these sentiments that he wrote "Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria", a bitter satire of the grand opening of the famed luxury hotel in the midst of the Depression. "All you families put out in the street:/ Apartments in the Towers are only $10,000 a year. (Three rooms and two baths.) Move in there until times get good, and you can do better. $10,000 and $1.00 are about the same to you, arenÂ’t they?" (Hughes 2, 268). In a manner reminiscent of the nineteenth-century plantationÂ’s singing black slaves, who often encoded messages of rebellion in their seemingly joyous songs, Hughes uses humor and outward light-heartedness to veil dissatisfaction and recognition of injustice. Later sections of the poem explicitly mention the poor laborers on whose sweat the hotel was built, sarcastically inviting them to come and try to partake in some of its luxury. "Advertisement", as well as many of HughesÂ’ later poems, serves as an uncompromising reminder to the wealthy of those they exploit.

Jessie Redmon FausetÂ’s four novels There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy, American Style are all populated with well-to-do and middle-class black communities in Philadelphia. It was the sort of environment in which Fauset spent her girlhood and about which conservative Renaissance traditionalists like DuBois thought more novels should be written. Wintz notes that DuBois lauded Plum Bun as a novel that "will not attract those looking for filth in Negro life, but it will attract those looking for the truth" (Wintz, 146). FausetÂ’s books, while addressing issues particular to black life, generally sought to links blacks and whites in an atmosphere of comparable situations. In her preface to The Chinaberry Tree, she explicitly states that she aims to wirte about those blacks "not being pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudices, Ignorance, and Economic InjusticeÂ…And behold he is not so vastly different from any other Americans" (Sato, 67). In FausetÂ’s novels, poverty and racial injustice take a backseat to questions about the roles and status of all women in American society. There is no "jungle rhythm" throbbing in the blood of FausetÂ’s characters; they are all highly educated and genteel. The "race question" for them, while important, is merely an abstract concept in their sheltered worlds.

In Plum Bun, her most famous novel, light-skinned Angela Murray "passes" for white after the deaths of her parents in an attempt to obtain "all the things which she most wanted" (Fauset, 73). She declares that while she is black she will do nothing but suffer, while being white "will bring me the greatest happiness, prosperity, and respect" (Fauset, 80). After boldly renouncing the only family she has and risking being caught passing, Angela still finds herself in the position of the submissor. She soon ends up dependent on a man, white Roger Fielding, for her happiness, and realizes that "everything was for men, but even the slightest privilege was to be denied to a woman unless the man chose to grant it" (Fauset, 229). Angela realizes that the only real power white women have is their ability to marry and possess white men, who are in power. Unlike characters in many of the "primitivist" texts, Angela never has to deal with poverty, and after she "passes" early in the novel, AngelaÂ’s racial problems are overshadowed by the hardships she faces as a woman. Fauset abandons notions of the "primitive" in order to express a problem of inequality that affects all groups in society. By using black female characters, the hopelessness of the womanÂ’s situation is amplified. Not only is she prohibited from gaining her own power, the men of her race, those she is allowed to marry, are also barred from advancing very far. The problem of self-definition for single women recurs as a major theme in There is Confusion and The Chinaberry Tree. The womenÂ’s color is presented as an additional barrier to their dreams, and class is another obstacle for other characters, but gender is the defining characteristic that keeps them all oppressed.

Nella LarsenÂ’s first novel, Quicksand, was published in 1928, when the Renaissance movement was beginning its decline. Like FausetÂ’s novels, LarsenÂ’s character do not suffer from poverty or even much social injustice; but the source of LarsenÂ’s HelgaÂ’s problems is not her gender but her racial background. The fact that she is of both black and white parentage in a country that insists on the separation of the two makes it impossible for her to determine who she wants to be. The plight of LarsenÂ’s protagonist, Helga Crane, mirrors that of the Renaissance. Helga is also torn between her connections to white and black society, connections that make it difficult for her to define herself on any terms. Though the two factions are often presented as vastly different and alien bodies, Larsen demonstrates how they are actually inseparably interrelated and connected in American society, and the impossibility of detaching oneself completely from either or from both.

The novel, like the movement, begins in an atmosphere of Washingtonian philosophies. Naxos, the school at which LarsenÂ’s Helga teaches is entrenched in ideas of white superiority and attempts by blacks to show whites that they deserve civil rights. "This great community, Helga thought, was no longer a school. It was now a show place in the black belt, exemplification of the white manÂ’s magnanimity, refutation of the black manÂ’s inefficiency" (Larsen, 4). From the school name (an anagram of "saxon") to the "holy white man of God" (Larsen, 2) who visits and smugly congratulates the students and faculty on "knowing enough to stay in their places" (Larsen, 3), the school teaches the students to be meek "hewers of wood and drawers of water" who stay quietly "in their place" (Larsen, 3). The dormitory matron a person who would be an important role model for young girls away from home uses nearly every available stereotype to describe the young women she supervises. She apparently considers her students beneath her, denouncing them as "savages from the backwoods" (Larsen, 12) "from homes where you werenÂ’t taught any manners", declaring that "none of you can tell the truth" (Larsen, 11). She then demands that they "try to act like ladies" (Larsen, 12) as if it is impossible for them to be ladies. The students of Naxos are constantly reminded by authority figures from within and without that they are naturally inferior social beings that have to be uplifted from their lowly status by quietly and unoffensively learning to emulate whites.

Like the political leaders of the Harlem Renaissance who were against WashingtonÂ’s methods of racial uplift, Helga violently opposes the accomodationist atmosphere at Naxos, the "trivial hypocrisies and careless cruelties which were, unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos policy of uplift" (Larsen, 5) considering it oppressive and destructive to the studentsÂ’ development. She finds her minor attempts to break out of the Naxos mold viewed with "the hawk eyes of dean and matrons" (Larsen, 18) filled with the suspicion and mistrust that DuBois describes in his essay. The staff is ruthlessly disapproving of her slightly different wardrobe and her endeavors to befriend and interest the students. HelgaÂ’s only recourse is to abandon the world of Naxos and try to create an identity in another space. She follows the trail of the Renaissance artists from the South and its accomodationist schools north to Harlem.

In Harlem, Larsen’s heroine tries to establish her position in society among the very race-conscious black bourgeoisie. The people she meets there and the social events she attends are much like the ones described in accounts of life among the black intelligentsia of Harlem – much debate over race, politics, and art. In this space – dominated by creative, aggressive young blacks – Helga initially feels "that magic sense of having come home" (Larsen, 43) and thinks that she will be able to easily figure out where she stands, unimposed upon by white standards. She soon realizes, however, that even in this space, identity issues cannot be simply resolved; white and black culture are so intertwined in all facets of American society that it is impossible even in Harlem to avoid feelings of ambivalence to either side. The most forceful embodiment of this ambivalence is the character of Anne Grey, a woman who viciously condemns blacks who associate with whites, but, Larsen tells us, personally much prefers European art forms and standards to those of African or African-American ones. "Like thousands of other Harlem dwellers," Larsen writes about Anne’s relationship to white New York, "she patronized its shops, its theaters, its art galleries, and its restaurants, and read its papers, without considering herself a part of the monster" (Larsen, 45). Anne is unconsciously celebrating a culture which she so forcefully and consciously endeavors to reject by making use of the things which create it: stores, art, and the media. Anne Grey and the rest of Helga’s black Harlem contemporaries face the same problem that many Renaissance artists faced, confusedly trying to distance themselves from white society while at the same time buying into many ideas traditionally considered "white".

The inability to separate black identities from those imposed by white society that plagued many of the Renaissance artists follows Helga from Harlem to Copenhagen. In Harlem, Helga’s friends, notwithstanding the messages they had been taught by the dominant culture about what constituted "real" art, had the option of embracing either European or what they considered African standards of reality; in Copenhagen, among an entirely white society, Helga has no chance to determine her own identity. The persona that she displays – "attractive, unusual, in an exotic, almost savage kind of way," is how the Danish women describe her (Larsen, 70) -- is controlled by "patrons" in exchange for financial support. Her Danish family insists on exaggerating her physical differences and making her appear as exotic and erotic as they could imagine, much as some of the patrons of Renaissance writers insisted on the appearance of exoticized primitivism in their writings. These writers depended on the support of their patrons for ensuring their livelihood as much as Helga relies on her family to feed, clothe, and house her. In Copenhagen, much as in Naxos, Helga finds herself in a space in which she can only exist in a certain prescribed role, and she once again has to escape to Harlem to try at self-determination.

But Helga never achieves her goal of establishing her own identity. She ends up trapped unhappily in another role, with no chance for escape: that of the rural, religious black Southern housewife. The end of LarsenÂ’s novel indicates a fear that the Renaissance movement will get so trapped in its ideological strife that it will self-destruct. Helga Crane is so very concerned throughout the novel with trying to find an identity that she becomes obsessed with her quest, and falls into this role in the hopes that it will at least be one she can live with. The late period of the Harlem Renaissance, as noted earlier, was also mired in attempts to define its position in American society. Writings about the lower class, the rural and urban poor, were becoming very popular among the younger authors like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and works by authors like Larsen were coming under attack as being too genteel and unrealistic. HelgaÂ’s entrapment and mental destruction as the wife of a country preacher may have been LarsenÂ’s way of warning against the current wave of writings. She may have seen them as potentially destructive to the movement socially and intellectually as her depiction of HelgaÂ’s move to the rural South was. HelgaÂ’s Northern bourgeois society is as much to blame for her degradation as the Southerners; they donÂ’t attempt to reach out and help her when she is trying to find her way in New York. Larsen may have been arguing that more traditional writers were not helping the movement any by ignoring or merely criticizing the new writers, and would be just as responsible for the demise of the Harlem Renaissance as the youngsters were.

LarsenÂ’s novel critiques on one level the color and race issues confronting a young woman of biracial ancestry. In a broader context, Helga CraneÂ’s problems are easily transferable to black society as a whole, which is undoubtedly "mixed" with that of white society, and vice versa. Helga cannot successfully accept or reject either society as a narrow, separate entity, and neither could the architects of the Harlem Renaissance movement. The most satisfying and complete resolution to the conflict surrounding Helga and the Renaissance would have been one that allowed for the expression of both facets of American life, but in each situation the political atmosphere made that reconciliation impossible. Quicksand is a carefully crafted allegory that not only documents a young womanÂ’s search for identity in America, but the search for identity of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

Zora Neale Hurston, one of the young writers that so incensed the elder leaders, trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas. She spent a great deal of time in rural Florida collecting songs and folktales and incorporated parts of her observations in her stories and novels. She wrote her fiction in an imitation of the Southern dialect she heard there and remembered from her childhood and was harshly criticized for it by several other prominent writers, especially Richard Wright. She was also criticized for what other artists considered playing to the fad-following whites who were all over Harlem, speaking in her Floridian dialect and basically being, much to the delight of her lookers-on, "a living representative of the Southern folk idiom" (Hemenway, 194). Because she was committed to studying what Mrs. Mason considered the "primitive" aspects of black life, their relationship remained close.

The characters in Hurston’s stories fight, drink, gamble, and do all kinds of things that DuBois probably blushed to read about – all without judgment from the author. Tea Cake’s death in Their Eyes Were Watching God does not seem like a divine punishment for his gambling and reckless spending, but Jody’s death is because he tries to prevent his wife’s natural instincts and restrain her to "standin’ still and tryin’ tuh laugh" (Hurston, 158). Jody is trying to go against the natural order of things, always attempting to make "improvements" to Janie and the town. Like the movement, his rejection of the natural necessitates his death. Near the end, he tries to get into the "primitive" himself by acquiring the services of a "root-doctor" (Hurston, 78) to cure him, but by then it is too late.

Hurston felt that it was imperative to study Southern rural black life in order for urban blacks to understand and enjoy being themselves. She saw her work as "getting to the core of Afro-American culture, seeing it as an illustration of man’s most basic impulses." The people she grew up surrounded by were, to her, closer to the natural world that Janie and Tea Cake live in so happily than the Harlem sophisticates. Hemenway writes that her most lasting role in the movement was to "remind the Renaissance – especially its more bourgeois members – of the richness in the racial heritage" (Hemenway, 195) and to celebrate the culture of the common folk over its detractors. "I am not tragically colored," Hurston declared in "How it Feels to be Colored Me", (Hemenway, 201) and attempted through her folkore collections, fictional stories, and nonfiction magazine articles to remove the tragedy from those with black skin.

The Harlem Renaissance aimed to unify and uplift African-Americans through representation in art. What it actually did was reveal the deep layers of complexity among them. The vast differences in opinion and experience of the artists caused them to disagree on the best and most truthful way to represent American blacks. Regrettably, the movementÂ’s participants did not recognize that this complexity could have been just the thing to prove to white America that they were as capable of creating great art and as worthy of study as any other people. Instead, they allowed the differences in artistic vision to divide them and destroy the movement. Many of the more prolific and talented figures of the period, including Larsen and Hurston, were allowed to fade into obscurity, only to surface again after death in the wake of the "Black Power" movement some forty years later.
 
 
 

Bibliography
 
 

Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd,

Mead, and Company, 1972.