intellectual friendships until 1964, when she was
found dead in her New York apartment.
Larsen’s best known novels, Quicksand and
Passing, focus on the complex lives of her biracial
heroines. In Quicksand, she relates the story of
Helga Crane, who, like the author, is the child of
mixed parentage. Helga’s mother is also Danish,
while her biracial father is of West Indian heritage.
Helga, by profession a teacher at a HISTORICALLY
BLACK COLLEGE in Naxos, Mississippi, wearies of
the hypocrisy of her colleagues. She rejects their
notion of racial “uplift.” Feeling stifled by their
conservative attitudes and behavior, she isolates
herself in the oasis of her apartment. To escape and
ultimately embark on a quest for personal identity,
freedom, and self-actualization, Helga travels to
Chicago, Harlem, and Copenhagen before ending
up trapped in rural Alabama in an oppressive mar-
riage to a Christian minister. The novel ends with
Helga in a prone position, preparing to deliver her
sixth child.
Passing, perhaps the more popular of the two
novels, is the story of two biracial women and for-
mer friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who
encounter each other while engaged in racial pass-
ing in a tea room at a fashionable Chicago hotel.
Although black-identified Irene, who is married to
a black Harlem physician, periodically engages in
this practice, Clare, who is married to a white rac-
ist, Jack Bellew, has totally assumed a white identity
and lifestyle. Despite her initial reluctance, Irene
agrees to meet Clare again. Envious of Irene’s com-
fortable lifestyle, the fact that she does not have to
live in fear of being outed, and her social status,
Clare begins to visit Harlem, where she is once
again able to experience the life she left behind.
The story ends tragically as the separate lifestyles
created by each of them eventually collide. At the
end of the novel, Bellew follows his wife to Harlem,
where he discovers her true identity. In the ensuing
confusion, Clare either accidentally falls (or Irene
pushes her) from a window on the sixth floor of a
Harlem residence.
Despite her relatively small literary productiv-
ity, Larsen’s work has received much critical atten-
tion. Critics have primarily focused on details of
her near-tragic life and the demise of her promis-
ing career as a writer. But critics have also focused
on Larsen’s vision, recorded primarily through her
heroines, which extends beyond the autobiograph-
ical to a theme more ancient and universal: the
human compulsion to strive for self-actualization
in an unfriendly and impersonal environment.
This vision, critics argue, links Larsen to Ameri-
can realism. In the end, Larsen’s heroines pursue
illusory and unrealistic goals of personal freedom
and security because they strive for absolutes in a
realm of moral relativity. They pursue self-actu-
alization on their own terms, but their efforts are
thwarted by the imposition of factors over which
they have no control. When Larsen wrote Quick-
sand and Passing, she was most probably grappling
with difficulties in her own life, but her plots also
suggest that she was concerned about the higher
moral questions that have, since the beginning of
time, engaged the human mind. In returning to
nursing, she possibly found some sense of inner
peace through service, after grappling, both per-
sonally and artistically, with the irreconcilable
moral issues posed by a life of striving.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Nella Larsen (1891–
1964).” In Black Women and America: An His-
torical Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 695–697. Brooklyn:
Carlson Publishing, 1993.
Carby, Hazel. “The Quicksands of Representation.” In
Reconstructing Womanhood, 163–175. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
Clemmen, Yves W. A. “Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: A
Narrative of Difference,” College Language Asso-
ciation Journal 40, no. 4 (June 1997): 458–467.
Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Har-
lem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
Hostetler, Ann E. “The Aesthetics of Race and gen-
der in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” PMLA 105, no. 1
(January 1990): 35–46.
McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the
Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlot-
tesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
Wall, Cheryl. “Passing for What? Aspects of Identity
in Nella Larsen’s Novels.” Black American Litera-
ture Forum 20 (Spring/Summer 1986): 114–120.310 Larsen, Nella