She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their lives, at all costs to be hidden. Nilssen’s point of view, as always she had been able to understand her mother’s, her stepfather’s, and his children’s points of view. Worst of all was the fact that under the stinging hurt she understood and sympathized with Mrs. She’s particularly quick to judge others and prone to internalised racism, but Larsen does a great job of showing how this is a result of the conflicting social messages she’s been exposed to through her life. Helga is a very interesting protagonist: she’s not without her flaws, but even so I never stopped empathizing with her. The challenges Helga faces as a woman of colour are of course completely different from my own experiences, but nevertheless Larsen evoked a feeling that is familiar to me in a very powerful way. The opening chapters in particularly really resonated with me: they show Helga drifting, trying to figure out what to do after quitting her teaching job, and slowly realising how many opportunities are in fact closed to her. I fell in love with Nella Larsen’s amazing writing from the very first page and I could not put Quicksand down. Over the course of the novel, Helga tries to find a place where she belongs, and also to make sense of her identity in a world that keeps trying to impose stifling definitions of what it means to be a mixed-race woman on her.

He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know when and where to stopAs a result of her rejection of this ideology, Helga quits her job at Naxos Quicksand then follows her as she moves to Chicago, to Harlem during its famous Renaissance, and then to Denmark to stay with her mother’s family.

They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste. They had good sense and they had good taste. Helga becomes increasingly frustrated with the school’s segregationist race politics, which are summarised in the following passage:Īnd he had said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. When the novel opens, she is a teacher at Naxos, a wealthy boarding school in the South that educates black pupils.

Helga is a young woman trying to find her place in early 20th century American society. Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand tells the story of Helga Crane, the daughter of a Scandinavian mother and a black father.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen