{"id":45372,"date":"2016-02-26T21:10:35","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T21:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45372"},"modified":"2021-12-03T17:53:09","modified_gmt":"2021-12-03T17:53:09","slug":"nella-larsen-reconsidered-the-trouble-with-desire-in-quicksand-and-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45372","title":{"rendered":"Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in “Quicksand” and “Passing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in <\/a><\/strong><\/em>Quicksand<\/a><\/strong> and <\/a><\/strong><\/em>Passing<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States<\/a>
\nVolume 41, Number 1, Negotiating Trauma and Affect (Spring 2016)<\/a>
\nPublished 2016-01-25
\npages 165-192
\nDOI: 10.1093\/melus\/mlv083<\/a><\/p>\n

Rafael Walker<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of English
\nBaruch College, City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Winner of MLA’s 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in LGBTQ Studies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This paper challenges the pervasive tendency to treat Larsen\u2019s<\/a> work as explorations of black women\u2019s lives and examines the distinctly biracial perspective that her fiction attempts to elaborate. I argue that her novels employ narratives of frustrated desire in order to show the impossibility of the racially liminal subject in a society that thinks in black and white. In developing this argument, the essay explains the aesthetic and theoretical implications that ensue from taking this biracial perspective seriously. For instance, it shows how each novel mobilizes a distinct ontology of biracial identity\u2014biraciality as synthesis in one case (<\/em>Quicksand<\/a> [1928]) and biraciality as oscillation in the other<\/em> (Passing<\/a> [1929]). In its discussion of the aesthetics of Larsen\u2019s fiction, the essay demonstrates how this shift in racial perspective enables us to reassess her endings, which vexed critics in her day and continue to vex readers in ours (including the scholar arguably most responsible for Larsen\u2019s current prominence, Deborah E. McDowell<\/a>). Aware that aversion to the essentialist \u201ctragic mulatta<\/a>\u201d trope has been one of the primary impediments to concentrating on biraciality in Larsen\u2019s work, I offer ways of understanding Larsen\u2019s focus on biraciality as more\u2014rather than less\u2014subversive of American racial ideology than previous studies suggest.<\/em><\/p>\n

The fictions of Nella Larsen have long been understood as daring explorations of black women\u2019s sexuality and subjectivity. Deborah E. McDowell<\/a> is one of the earliest and most in\ufb02uential exponents of this idea, suggesting that Larsen portrays \u201cblack female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic\u201d (xvi). According to Hazel V. Carby<\/a>, Helga Crane in Quicksand<\/em><\/a> (1928) is \u201cthe \ufb01rst explicitly sexual black heroine in black women\u2019s \ufb01ction\u201d (\u201cIt\u201d 471). Similarly, Cheryl A. Wall<\/a> claims: \u201cBoth Quicksand<\/em> and Passing<\/em><\/a> contemplate the inextricability of the racism and sexism that confront the black woman in her quest for selfhood\u201d (89). The association between Larsen\u2019s work and black women\u2019s subjectivity was so entrenched by the time that Judith Butler<\/a> wrote on Passing<\/em> (1929) that she hesitates before applying psychoanalysis to the novel: \u201cThere are clearly risks in trying to think in psychoanalytic terms about Larsen\u2019s story, which, after all, published in 1929, belongs to the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>, and ought properly to be read in the context of that cultural and social world\u201d (173). (It becomes clear from Butler\u2019s subsequent remarks that the \u201ccontext\u201d she has in mind is primarily racial, particularly in her claim that \u201cboth stories revolve on the impossibility of sexual freedom for black women\u201d [178].) More recent studies have maintained this view of Larsen\u2019s \ufb01ction, bearing such titles as \u201cQueering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen\u2019s Quicksand<\/em>\u201d (2011) and \u201cThe New Negro Fl\u00e2neuse in Nella Larsen\u2019s Quicksand<\/em>\u201d (2008).1<\/sup><\/p>\n

I mention but a few of the many examples of the critical tendency to take for granted that Larsen was chie\ufb02y concerned with black women, but they suf\ufb01ce to reveal what strikes me as an \u201celephant in the room\u201d in Larsen studies: that all of her heroines are racially ambiguous, if not explicitly biracial. In numerous ways, Larsen takes pains to show that something about her major women characters signi\ufb01cantly sets them apart from the less ambiguously black women around them, whether it be that they can pass for white<\/a> or that they have a white parent.2<\/sup> If Larsen had intended to explore the experiences, psychology, or sexuality of black women speci\ufb01cally, it seems odd that she should have chosen to do so, in both novels she wrote, through such ambiguously raced women. Why did she not concentrate instead on a woman like Felise Freeland, a spirited…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Volume 41, Number 1, Negotiating Trauma and Affect (Spring 2016) Published 2016-01-25 pages 165-192 DOI: 10.1093\/melus\/mlv083 Rafael Walker, Assistant Professor of English Baruch College, City University of New York Winner of MLA’s 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for Best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,666,1196,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[32574,4259,14211,87,22792],"class_list":["post-45372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-gaylesbian","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-crompton-noll-award","tag-melus","tag-melus-multi-ethnic-literature-of-the-united-states","tag-nella-larsen","tag-rafael-walker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62478,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45372\/revisions\/62478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}