Nella Larsen was a popular novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, a political and artistic movement during the post-war 1920s, in which black artists struggled to establish a distinct racial identity, while whites took an unprecedented (and often patronizing) interest in black culture. As a woman of biracial heritage, Larsen was uniquely suited to exploring the intersection between the worlds of black and white in terms of not only race, but also gender and sexuality. She accomplished this exploration and introspection quite handily in her novels Quicksand and Passing. Just as Larsen's career appeared poised to launch her into literary stardom, she was accused of plagiarizing a short story and disappeared from the public eye. Larsen's novels were forgotten as her books quickly went out of print. It was not until the early 1970s, with the confluence of the civil rights and feminist movements, that Larsen's works were "discovered" and reprinted, going on to become a staple of American literature.
Biography
Nellie Walker was born on April 13, 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother, Mary Hanson Walker, was a Danish immigrant, and her father, Peter Walker, was a black man from the West Indies. Just months after Nellie's birth, her father disappeared. Her mother quickly remarried, this time to a white man, Peter Larsen, who changed his stepdaughter's name to Nella Larsen. A few years later, Nella's white half-sister was born. Beyond these scanty facts, very little is known about Nella Larsen's childhood. As an adult, she was extremely reluctant to discuss her background in any detail. Many students of Larsen's work attribute her reticence to her painful, awkward memories of growing up as the lone black child in an otherwise white family. Still others have theorized that the light-skinned Peter Walker crossed the racial line to become the white Peter Larsen, and Nella Larsen remained silent to protect her father's secret.
Whatever the reason for Nella Larsen's silence regarding her upbringing, it is obvious that her childhood was less than happy. According to family friends, Peter Larsen viewed his visibly African American stepdaughter as an embarrassment and was all too eager to get rid of her as soon as she reached an appropriate age. In 1907, Peter Larsen sent 16-year-old Nella to Fisk University's normal school in Nashville, Tennessee, in preparation for a career in education. From this point onward, she had virtually no contact with her immediate family, because, in her own words, her race "might make it awkward for them, particularly my half-sister."
Rather than become a teacher, in 1909, Nella Larsen dropped out of the normal school and re-enrolled at Fisk to study biology. A year later, she moved to Denmark, presumably to live with members of her mother's extended family. She continued her education with part-time coursework at the University of Copenhagen until 1912, when she moved back to America, this time to New York City. For the next three years, Nella Larsen studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, which, at the time, was the only nursing school in New York that accepted black women as students. In 1915, upon graduating from Lincoln, Larsen moved to Alabama to serve as the assistant superintendent of nurses at the prestigious Tuskegee Institute. Her stay in the Deep South was short, however, as the next year she moved back to New York and joined the nursing staff at Lincoln Hospital.
On May 3, 1919, Nella Larsen married physicist Elmer Imes, an influential member of the rapidly expanding black bourgeoisie in Harlem. Larsen became something of a socialite wife, expected to entertain and be entertained by her husband's friends, many of whom were driving forces in the budding Harlem Renaissance. Her new circle of acquaintances included such legends as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Carl Van Vechten. When Larsen married, she resigned her nursing position. However, she quickly discovered that her new social life, though rich and varied, was not entirely satisfying. In 1921, to keep herself busy, she started working as a librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Her new job provided the ideal setting for Larsen to assuage her thirst for literature; the only thing Nella Larsen enjoyed more than writing was reading. During this time period, she also honed her writing skills through a series of unpublished poems and short stories.
In 1926, encouraged by friends, particularly Du Bois, Larsen started to view her writing as more than just a private hobby. That year, she published several articles on Danish children's games in the Brownies' Book, a magazine geared towards African American children (and not so coincidentally created and funded by Du Bois). She subsequently published several short stories in adult periodicals, often using the pseudonym "Allen Semi" (her married name, Nella Imes, spelled backwards). In September 1926, when her short story "Correspondence" appeared in Opportunity, the literary magazine of the National Urban League, Larsen resigned from her job at the library in order to devote more time to her nascent writing career.
Nella Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, was published in 1928. Quicksand is a largely autobiographical story of a woman of mixed parentage who finds herself oppressed by both racial and gender-related expectations. While the novel was hardly an instant classic, it was met with modest critical acclaim and taken as evidence of Larsen's very promising career as an author. The following year, she published the novel Passing, a controversial examination of the fluidity of racial divisions in American society. With the publication of Passing, Larsen cemented her place as a premiere writer of her time. The novel was so well received that in 1930, Nella Larsen became the first black female to receive the Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing.
Just prior to entering the ranks of Guggenheim fellows, Larsen published the short story "Sanctuary" in Forum magazine. While her previous work concentrates on the African American elite, "Sanctuary" tells the tale of Jim Hammer, a destitute black thief in the rural South who inadvertently shoots a man when interrupted during a robbery. Hammer, believing that he has killed a white man, seeks shelter with his friend Obadiah's mother, who agrees to hide him from the sheriff. When the sheriff and his deputies inevitably arrive, it turns out that the man Hammer shot in the dark was in fact Obadiah. As her son's murderer hides in her back room, Obadiah's mother calmly informs the white men that she has not seen Hammer all night. After the sheriff departs, she sends Hammer on his way, angrily cautioning him to "don' nevah stop thankin' yo' Jesus he done gib you dat black face."
Though "Sanctuary" was originally hailed as a probing examination of racial loyalty, the short story eventually became Larsen's undoing. A few weeks after the story appeared in Forum, a disgruntled reader sent a letter to the magazine's editor, pointing out the significant similarities between Larsen's story and a little-known short story "Mrs. Adis," written by Sheila Kaye-Smith and published in Century magazine eight years earlier. Larsen published a response in Forum in which she explained her inspiration for the story and included drafts meant to show how she independently came up with the idea. Her protestations of innocence were met with widespread skepticism. Emotionally devastated by the accusations of plagiarism, Nella Larsen used her Guggenheim money to flee to Europe, ostensibly to research material for her next novel. She remained abroad for two years, returning to America in 1932 when her husband accepted a position on the faculty of her alma mater, Fisk University.
In 1933, Nella Larsen and Elmer Imes engaged in a spectacularly messy divorce. Apparently Imes had been carrying on a covert affair with a white woman, a situation that was made all the more painful for Larsen due to her past literary explorations of similar themes. News of the bitter dissolution of her marriage made ripples as far away as her former social circle in New York. Her old friends wrote her to extend their sympathies and urge her to move back to Harlem. Deeply embarrassed by failures in both her professional and personal life, Nella Larsen instead severed all contact with everyone who knew her and effectively disappeared.
On March 30, 1964, the body of 72-year-old Nella Larsen was discovered in her small apartment in Brooklyn. For the past thirty years, she had quietly worked as a nurse first at Gouverneur Hospital in Manhattan and then at Bethel Hospital in Brooklyn. Though the manuscripts for two unfinished novels were discovered in her apartment after her death, Larsen never published a word after "Sanctuary."
Quicksand
The protagonist of Quicksand is Helga Crane, the daughter of an absentee black father and a Danish mother who remarries a white man. The financially privileged but emotionally restless young woman unsuccessfully casts about to find her place in the world, as "she could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity." Though Helga Crane is biologically a member of two races, she finds herself unable to socially fit in with either racial community for various (often conflicting) reasons. She quits her job as a teacher at the fictional institution of Naxos (a thinly veiled description of Tuskegee), disillusioned with the administration's kowtowing to white benefactors. She moves to Harlem, only to tire of the constant discussion of the "race problem." She then spends several years living in Denmark, but becomes unhappy with the homogeneous Danes' apparent ignorance of racial issues. Eventually, Helga moves back to New York, where she finds Jesus and spontaneously decides to marry a fundamentalist preacher from Alabama. True to form, Helga quickly tires of her new situation, but this time, she finds herself trapped by her female reproductive capabilities, as her plans to escape her unhappy marriage are thwarted by her constant succession of pregnancies and children.
Quicksand is well written, engaging, and thought provoking. In addition to examining Helga Crane (and indirectly, herself) as a racial paradox, Larsen delivers scathing blows to the elite social circles that appeared in Harlem during the Roaring Twenties, as well as probing into the societal expectations of women during that time period. Although W.E.B. Du Bois praised it as "the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt," the novel never really achieved any degree of literary popularity. Nowadays, Quicksand is most often studied as a sort of unofficial autobiography of Nella Larsen, ignoring the noteworthy thematic explorations of the novel.
There are several reasons why Quicksand was (and still is) overlooked in the study of American literature in general, and African American literature in particular. Larsen's intended audience undoubtedly found it somewhat difficult to sympathize, let alone empathize, with the undeniably selfish character of Helga Crane, who is handed all of life's privileges, great and small, but can never find happiness. The character's constant admissions that she knows she is materially lucky compared to most people do little to alleviate this basic problem. Additionally, some of Larsen's thoughts on the social and political climate of the Harlem Renaissance proved to be abrasive to many of her peers. In Quicksand, she vehemently attacks black hypocrisy, describing black socialites who claim to hate whites with unparalleled venom, but simultaneously seek to emulate elitist white culture. Rather than viewing the novel as an intriguing dissection of the time period by a person living in it, modern scholars often dismiss Quicksand as hopelessly dated.
Passing
Passing examines the practice of the same name, in which a non-Caucasian individual who is suitably European in physical appearance surreptitiously "passes" as white, in order to gain the social and economic privileges denied to racial minorities. The novel examines two former childhood friends who were raised as African Americans, but use their appearance to "pass." Olive-skinned Irene Redfield generally chooses to identify herself as a "New Negro," living in Harlem and marrying an influential black physician, but she sometimes engages in functional passing, permitting strangers to believe that she is Italian in order to gain admittance to segregated establishments. Clare Kendry, whose ivory skin and fine, blond hair allow her to fully cross the racial line, marries a racist (and tremendously wealthy) white man who has absolutely no idea that his wife is part African American. When the two women unexpectedly bump into each other in a white-only restaurant more than a decade after they went their separate ways, Irene finds herself both fascinated and deeply repulsed by Clare's choice to live as a white woman, blinded to the fact that she herself sometimes passes for convenience. The novel explores race as a social construct rather than a simple matter of skin color, as Clare Kendry, who has effectively "become" white, is nevertheless drawn to her childhood roots, attempting to insinuate herself in Irene's life despite the significant dangers involved.
At one point in the novel, Irene Redfield declares: "It's funny about 'passing.' We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it." This passage efficiently summarizes the main reasons why Passing became Larsen's best-known work. Although the novel is a magnificent piece of literature, it became popular when it was published as a semi-fictional exposé of a controversial and very real practice (readers were also undoubtedly titillated by the fact that interloper Clare Kendry is eventually defenestrated for her attempts to have the best of both worlds).
Since the rediscovery of Nella Larsen, Passing has excited interest more for its sexual themes than racial ones, although race is inextricably woven through the whole novel, as with all of Larsen's work. Contemporary students of Larsen have suggested that Passing is actually an encoded story of lesbianism. Both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry are involved in sexless marriages, and indeed, there are many mysterious glances, electrifying caresses, and not quite chaste kisses that pass between the two women. At one point, Irene tries to analyze her feelings for Clare but fails, dismissing them as "something for which she could find no name," an allusion to the description of homosexuality made famous at Oscar Wilde's criminal trial. When viewing the novel in purely racial terms, the ending (in which Irene erupts into a jealous rage at the completely unfounded suspicion that her husband and Clare Kendry might be having an affair) seems ill fitting and almost tangential. However, if the more recent theories regarding the sexual themes are applied, the end of the story almost makes sense. Perhaps Irene is angry at Clare's infidelity, and not her husband's. When Irene speaks of security and propriety (and the lack thereof in connection with Clare Kendry), maybe she is referring to her own sexual affair with Clare. Of course, we'll never know if Larsen intended this particular interpretation of her most influential work, but regardless, Passing is an infinitely complex and surprising piece.
Sources:
Larsen, Nella and McDowell, Deborah, ed. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/NellaLarsen.html
http://www.literarytraveler.com/nellalarsen/nellalarsen.htm
http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/sanctuary.html
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/larsenbio.html
http://www.engl.niu.edu/dderosa/AmericanSurvey/1900/Larsen/larsenhandout.html
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/nlarsen.html