Nella Larsen - Quicksand

Author background: Nella Larsen was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a black father, and she later lived in New York. She was accused of plagiarism, and she died friendless in New York. She was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel is and is not autobiographical - some elements match her life story, and others obviously do not.

• Central theme: belonging related to class and race
• Tragic mulatto: she doesn't know her identity, society doesn't know what to do with her, she doesn't know where she belongs; this genre typically ends in depression or suicide; page 51 she describes herself as a "despised mulatto"
• Naxos: Helga is unhappy there because she can't conform, and she can't be happy in her non-conformity; she is threatening to the faculty there because she is different as a half-white woman and she has no family or connections; she gets upset with Anderson when he says she's got good breeding or stock; the name Naxos plays off of "saxon"
• Objects: Helga is more comfortable with objects than people (page 36)
• Great Migration: blacks moved from deep south to industrial north; Helga can't get a job in the north without references because these legitimize Helga's social state
• Harlem: it's perfect, too-good-to-be-true; she is discontented because Anne rages against whites and half of Helga is white
• Audrey: she's the opposite of Helga; she mixes in both crowds, and she knows where she belongs
• Copenhagen: no oppression or racial discussions; the painting of her is primitive, stereotypical, "bad, wicked" (119), and it displaces her identity
• Quicksand: she has her fifth child at the end, and it's like she's stuck in quicksand - the more she struggles, the more she gets stuck; by latching on to Reverend Green, she has been a fool
• the South: Helga misreads important scenes in her life such as the moment when she wanders into the church; implies the theme of everyone being a fool and misreading moments in their lives; she acts in "bad faith" - she ruins her life every day, limits herself with her choices because she makes choices out of fear/denial of her free will (Jean-Paul Sartre)
• Repetition compulsion: abandonment (her father left her, she leaves everything, she can't leave her kids), repeats traumatic event as a way to master that event; America stuck in repetition compulsion in thinking about race
• Helga is constrained to the role of a tragic mulatto so she repeats stuff because she doesn't know what else to do