Making It New: 1900–1945 483first African-American women to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for literature,
which enabled her to spend a year researching further novels in Europe. But no
more books were to appear. Larsen had been shattered by being accused of
plagiarism in one of her short stories, published in 1930, and the infidelity of her
husband. Writing projects were planned and announced but never completed or
published. The writing stopped. Larsen was forced to return to nursing to support
herself, and lived the final years of her life in greater obscurity, even, than Hurston.
Her two remarkable long fictions, which were rediscovered after her death, are,
however, very different from Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her location is, for the
most part, a more bourgeois, educated, confined world than the one Hurston
wrote about; her major characters, intelligent, sophisticated women of mixed race,
are caught up in troublesome confusions of race, gender, and class, as they try to
negotiate their way through a complex social milieu. And the recognizably
modernist, disjunctive, and episodic structure of her narratives creates a multiple
subjective space for those characters, as they search for a means of realizing identity,
marking themselves out and achieving personal fulfillment in a world that seems
intent on division and erasure – defining them in terms of a series of rigid divisions
and denying them as individuals.
Quicksand, for instance, tells the story of Helga Crane. The daughter of a Danish-
American mother and an African-American father, her mixed heritage irretrievably
complicates her search for security and self-realization. “What did she want?” she
asks herself. She does not know. She is consumed by a sense of “outsidedness,”
of being “different” wherever she goes and having “no home.” And, in quest of
something, some source of satisfaction, she moves from the South to New York to
Copenhagen, then back to America, always wondering “why couldn’t she be happy,
content somewhere?” “She hadn’t belonged there” in Harlem, she reflects. Among
the Danes, “she wasn’t one of them either.” Continually, she is seized by a restlessness
that leads to vacillation of feeling, emotional fissure: wherever she goes, she may be
convinced for a moment that she has found “a place for herself, that she was really
living.” But the conviction soon wears off. All she is left with then is what she calls
“this knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts.” And those
divisions are never resolved. All that happens at the end of the novel is that Helga
falls victim for a while to the “desire to believe,” a “seductive repentance” that leads
her to a conversion experience and marriage to a preacher. Journeying back with
him to the South, she sinks into “asphyxiation,” the “quagmire” of marriage to a man
she now hates, constant childbearing and domestic routine – and the sense that the
faith to which she had once surrendered is a destructive illusion. Recovering from
the miscarriage of her fourth child, Helga persuades herself that she will escape from
the quicksands of her life “later. When she got up. By and By.” The final words of the
novel put paid to that illusion, however, at least for the reader. “Hardly had she left
her bed and become able to walk again without pain,” we are told, “... when she
began to have her fifth child.”
Passing uses a very different narrative line to explore similar mired complexities
of gender, race, and class. In this case, there are two protagonists. Both areGGray_c04.indd 483ray_c 04 .indd 483 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM