[see further below for exemplary integration of contextual materials -- MW]

Searching For "The New Negro": the Harlem Renaissance and Nella Larsen's Quicksand

        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. 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 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, black 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-Americans') 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 whites' benevolence in order to be uplifted. The way to achieve this was to begin an artistic movement that would highlight black Americans' 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 artist'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.

        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 Fauset's sentimental novels about Northern middle-class blacks (as well as Larsen's novels) were criticized as too bourgeois by some, and Zora Neale Hurston's stories in dialect of poor, rural Southerners were considered unacceptably stereotypical by others. Throughout the Renaissance, artists struggled to define which aspects of African-American life were figments of white America'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.

        Nella Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, was published in 1928, when the Renaissance movement was beginning its decline. The plight of her 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 Larsen'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 man's magnaminity, refutation of the black man'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 weren'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 Washington'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 students' 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. Helga'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 Larsen'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. Helga's entrapment and mental destruction as the wife of a country preacher may have been Larsen'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 Helga's move to the rural South was. Helga's Northern bourgeois society is as much to blame for her degradation as the Southerners; they don'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.

        Larsen's novel critiques on one level the color and race issues confronting a young woman of biracial ancestry. In a broader context, Helga Crane'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 woman's search for identity in America, but the search for identity of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
 
 
 

Bibliography

 
 
 

DuBois, W. E. B. "Returning Soldiers." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 3-6.

Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1995.

Larsen, Nella. " Quicksand." Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. 1-135.

Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice University Press, 1988.