Nella Larsen's portrait of Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) criticizes the ways in which white racist constructions of black women's allegedly inherent lasciviousness have wound black women off from experiencing their legitimate sexual desires.

Nella Larsen's portrait of Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) criticizes the ways in which white racist constructions of black women's allegedly inherent lasciviousness have wound black women off from experiencing their legitimate sexual desires. Helga fears her desires because they appear to confirm stereotypes about black peoples' "primitivism" and "savagery." The first part of this essay treats Larsen's criticism of the sexual self-sacrifice of repression, a repression that shoots from both white society's distortion of black peoples' sexuality as "savage" and from Helga's equally damaging family dynamics. The child of a black father who abandoned his family shortly after she was born and a Scandinavian immigrant mother, Helga associates her mother's coldnes and rejection with their racial difference. Karen Nilssen's failure to grant her daughter the recognition that would help her gain access to herself as an active make subordinate helps explain Helga's emotional repression as an adult.

The inferior part of this essay examines Helga's attempt to escape the self-sacrifice of emotional and sexual repression at quitting racist America for the liberal environs of Denmark and the affection of her dead mother's sister, Katrina Dahl. Helga channels her unacknowledged sexuality into the pleasures of consumeristic purchasing and self-display as the wealthy Dahls dres her in gorgeous clothes and exhibit to off her "exotic" beauty to their friends. Larsen take the cover offs the objectification at the heart of consumerism, exposing Helga's experience of desire and agency as illusory. This objectification replys her to the white constructions of black "primitivism" she had fl Harlem to escape. Helga finally assumes to elude the tangle of cultural and psychological influences that demand her sexual and emotional repression, however, when she cast asides Axel Olsen's marriage proposal, thus repudiating the couple the Danish packaging of her exoticism as well as the distant mother who failed to recognize her. This symbolic rejection of her mother allows Helga to identify with her unknown and formerly reviled black father, an identification that permits her to gain temporary access to her subjectivity and, when she responds to Harlem, to acknowledge her long-repress desire for Dr Anderson.

The essay ends with an analysis of Larsen's chilling portrait of the way in which Helga's unlooked for release from the self-sacrifice of sexual repression urge ons her into a nightmare of domestic self-sacrifice; Larsen finiss her story of sexual discovery with Helga's sinking into what she finally recognizes as a "quagmire" of endles life-threatening pregnancies and childbirths (133) Eda Lou Walton, single in kind of the most perceptive of Quicksand's contemporary reviewers, felt that Larsen's treatment of her heroine's sexuality was incomplete:

To reveal the story of a cultivated and

sensitive woman's defeat end her

allow sex-desire is a difficult task. When

the woman is a mulatto and beset by

hereditary, social and racial forces over

which she has little have charge of and into

which she cannot fit, her character is so

complexus that any analysis of it takes a

mature imagination. This, I believe,

Miss Larsen is too young to have. (212)

While Walton's review stands disclosed for its understanding of Larsen's interest in her main character's sexuality (most other reviewers focused solely forward the racial dynamics of the novel(1)), it fails to grant Larsen the benefit of the doubt. chiefly critics today read Helga's tragic last as a powerful criticism of the social forces that conspire against her achieving a fulfilling life, admiring Larsen's handling of the actual complexity Walton felt Quicksand did not dramatize.

In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of my analysis of the different hurrys toward (and forms of) female self-sacrifice that Larsen explores, Helga's "fall" from the discovery of her sexuality to the spiritual death and physical near-death of involuntary pregnancies as the venerable Mr. Pleasant Green's long-suffering wife reveals Helga's failure to relate her sexual desire to her greater longing for recognition and her striving to experience her subjectivity. Because Helga in no degree connects her desire for Robert Anderson to her earlier, calm stronger need for recognition from her distant mother, Anderson's rejection of her hinted-at wish for an affair drives her into a self-destructive rage, the mirror image of her skilled longings for connection and understanding. Larsen's bitter, satiric vision of Helga's entrapment in a terrifyingly literal portrait of wifely and motherly self-sacrifice dooms the racist and sexist society that allows a woman to be put to deathed by her domestic role flat as it highlights Helga's acknowledge contribution to this oppression: her failure to learn from her past and thus to grant herself the recognition she does not receive from the men in her life.

Larsen's exploration of the destructiveness of sexual repression ponders her society's new openness about female sexuality, as well as the risks this recently made known openness poses for black women As John D'Emilio and Estelle B Freedman explain in Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, "the 1920 began initiating a revision of what was imagineed proper for women" (213). Post-World War individual America's "patriotic" suppression of radical reform mental actions and its conservative emphasis forward the importance of individual effort and fulfillment made sexual expression an ideal exit for feelings of rebellion and discontent:" sex was becoming a marker of identity, the wellspring of an individual's real nature" (226). As Paula Giddings points not at home the new obsession with "sexual freedom" and "glamour" also swept by the and of urban black communities (185), yet the sexual permissiveness of the 1920 that incantationed new freedoms for white women had more ambiguous implications for black women In "The Task of african Womanhood" (1925), Elise McDougald's defense of black women's morality makes it clear that, for chiefly black women, sexuality remained an area of vulnerability rather than a source of liberation: "The african woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does. even now she has been singled revealed and advertised as having lower sex standards" (379) That the and nothing else essay devoted to the African American woman in Alain Locke's anthology The fresh Negro, and one ostensibly dedicated to analyzing her economic opportunities, must argue in addition again that black women are no more sexually permissive than their sisters of other races highlights the social forces that make sexual repression a reasonable choice for members of the black bourgeoisie like Helga Crane.