{"id":46871,"date":"2016-05-09T00:15:25","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T00:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46871"},"modified":"2016-05-09T00:32:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T00:32:15","slug":"the-highly-important-matter-of-clothes-apparel-and-identity-in-nella-larsens-quicksand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46871","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cHighly Important Matter of Clothes\u201d: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen\u2019s Quicksand"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cHighly Important Matter of Clothes\u201d: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen\u2019s Quicksand<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Fringe: The Noun That Verbs Your World<\/a>
\nIssue 19, Summer 2009<\/a> (2009-07-19)<\/p>\n

Kaley Joyes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> novel Quicksand<\/em><\/a> (1928) is saturated with clothing. This essay examines the ways in which Larsen uses fashionable apparel to map connections between racial identity and aesthetic style. The narrator tells us that protagonist Helga Crane has \u201cloved and longed for nice things\u201d all her life (6), and this desire for \u201cthings\u201d is a constant throughout the<\/a> novel. Larsen tracks Helga\u2019s quest for self-discovery not only across multiple geographic settings \u2013 from the American South to New York<\/a>, Denmark<\/a>, and back again \u2013 but also through multiple changes in costume. As the novel opens, Helga is a teacher at an elite African-American boarding school called Naxos. After becoming frustrated with the school\u2019s repressive and assimilative hierarchies, Helga quits her job and returns to her hometown, Chicago<\/a>, where she experiences a period of deprivation. The job she eventually finds takes her to Harlem<\/a>, where Helga immerses herself in bourgeois black culture but soon tires of closeting her white ancestry. Helga next travels to Denmark to reconnect with her mother\u2019s family. Far from being accepted as Danish, however, Helga is seen as an exotic outsider. She returns to America, hastily marries, moves to rural Alabama<\/a>, and has five children in rapid succession. At the novel\u2019s conclusion, Helga longs for the affluence and beauty of her premarital life, but there are no indications that she will renew her pattern of abrupt departures and new beginnings. Throughout Helga\u2019s journey, fashion provides a useful symbolic register for racial identity. Like many mixed-race Americans, Helga is consistently identified \u2013 that is to say, defined \u2013 by her appearance.[1] Through Helga\u2019s clothing, Larsen links modern culture\u2019s deep investment in appearances to what W.E.B. DuBois<\/a> famously identified as slavery\u2019s twentieth-century heritage: \u201cthe problem of the color-line\u201d (1), of how \u201cto be both a Negro and an American\u201d (5). The color line is particularly problematic for mixed-race Americans who may be displaced, and thus obscured, by the color line\u2019s divisions.[2] This is not to say that Helga\u2019s character can be entirely explained by her biracial heritage; rather, I read the connection between Helga\u2019s clothing and her search for integrative mixed-race identity as one aspect of Larsen\u2019s complex novel. By unpacking the ways in which Helga\u2019s fashion choices signify the effects of being located between the color line\u2019s demarcations, I hope to explicate<\/a> Larsen\u2019s keen understanding of commodified aesthetics\u2019 relationship to modern identity formation…<\/p>\n

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

The \u201cHighly Important Matter of Clothes\u201d: Apparel and Identity in Nella Larsen\u2019s Quicksand Fringe: The Noun That Verbs Your World Issue 19, Summer 2009 (2009-07-19) Kaley Joyes Nella Larsen\u2019s novel Quicksand (1928) is saturated with clothing. This essay examines the ways in which Larsen uses fashionable apparel to map connections between racial identity and aesthetic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[23732,23731,23733,87],"class_list":["post-46871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-fringe","tag-fringe-the-noun-that-verbs-your-world","tag-kaley-joyes","tag-nella-larsen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46871","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=46871"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46876,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46871\/revisions\/46876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}