Analyzing the African American Woman: The Writings of Nella Larsen - Research Paper Example

OUTLINE of Paper: Analyzing the African American Woman: The writings of Nella Larsen  Thesis: Larsen, in her life and through her characters, struggled with issues of race, gender, and social recognition – all contributing to the ultimate question of self-identity for those of colored lineage. These variables allowed her to be so effective in her narratives and the expression of the messages she wanted to convey through her novels. I. Introduction  Brief background of Nella Larsen and her two published works and their significance. A. Brief Comments leading to Thesis Statement  B. Thesis Statement  II. Main Idea (1st control of Thesis)  Larsen used Helga Crane to express her insights about issues of race, gender and social recognition. A. Brief Background B. Supporting idea or research The protagonist in Quicksand reflected Larsen’s early life and struggles. C. Supporting idea or research  Helga Crane expressed Larsen’s insights on self-identity, particularly the difficulties in growing up as a mulatto. D. Supporting Idea or research The gender theme was explained by how Larsen viewed motherhood as one that constrained or enslaved women. III. Main Idea (2nd Control of Thesis)  The numerous ways of “passing”in Passing symbolized Larsen’s own struggles for self-identity and her insights on each of them. A. Brief Background B. Supporting idea or research How the strategies of passing as a white woman – passing completely or just for convenience - demonstrated the differing approaches toward self-identity.  C. Supporting idea or research  There were the failures of Larsen’s protagonists in their struggles and how these reflected her own and her thoughts in this regard. D. Supporting idea or research  The quest for self-identity as expressed in Larsen’s two novels was characterized by an interplay of race, gender and social recognition. The self-identity handle was effective because it was a theme Larsen was familiar with. E. Opposition Point Larsen’s background may not correctly reflect those experiences she narrated in her works. V. Conclusion  Quicksand and Passing are the evidences to demonstrate Larsen’s view, insights and experiences with regards the theme of self-identity entailed in the issues of race, gender, and social recognition. A. Summary of Arguments Raised B. Thesis Re-worded  C. Concluding Statement: Larsen was not satisfied with being a member of the black elite as well as with the existing alternatives available to her in her quest for self-identity, she wanted more, and for this she suffered some tragedy. First, she seemed trapped by its narrowness, and because black experiences longed to live in a world. Secondly, the solutions she was able to come up with were all still found wanting as demonstrated by the failures of her characters. She was torn and all her life, she continued to struggle. The author expressed these feelings and perceptions through her writings and her female protagonists. Analyzing the African American Woman: The writings of Nella Larsen Nella Larsen was a famous novelist and short story writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance era, which one writer has aptly called as "an era of extraordinary progress in American black art and literature" (Thadious, 133-145). Although her literary work was limited, it was of extraordinary quality, and earned her recognition from both contemporaries and critics today. In 1928 and 1929, Larsen published two novels, “Quicksand” and “Passing”, respectively. Both of which focused on the lives of African American women and their place in society.  She created brilliant female characters in her novels who fought for equal rights and social recognition. Particularly, the extensive study devoted to her characters and the complexity and realism they depicted are widely recognized. Through the roles she explored in them, she was able to explain the intersections of race and gender, and in doing so, she demonstrated how the discussion of black identity, which often restricts the range of female identity, is possible in order to maintain a certain standard of authenticity (Hutchinson, 133-145).  Larsen, in her life and through her characters, struggled with issues of race, gender, and social recognition – all contributing to the ultimate question of self-identity for those of colored lineage. These variables allowed her to be so effective in her narratives and the expression of the messages she wanted to convey through her novels. Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, was all about a female heroine in the person of Helga Crane. The protagonist is obviously based on Larsen’s own life, being a mulatto, herself, with both white and colored parentage. The parallelisms made Crane’s characterization and own experiences glaringly real and sincere. For those who have known Larsen’s life, it was easy to identify her own struggles in the difficulties that Crane encountered in her own narrative. The dilemma that she was depicted to address was the tension that existed between her own goals and longing as a person and what the society expected of her, as a woman and as a Negro – the very issues that Larsen had to face growing up in America and in Europe. This theme has been explored in detail through Crane’s journey around the world in her quest to find the one community that would allow her the freedom to do what she wants and be tolerant with it. What eventually transpired was that Crane was able to come across various kinds of experiences related to race and gender, in the context of the different social norms in each community she visited. More importantly, through Crane, Larsen was able to identify repressions that are specific to each of the community Crane has visited. Furthermore, the figure of the "tragic mulatto" employed by Larsen in Quicksand illustrates a point of mediation, or a move between two worlds, one that is constantly engaged in criminal intimacies. Crane has been caught between two worlds. First, she was a victim of the "one drop rule" that is always marked as eventually belonging to the black race. In American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, black characters who passed for white represented a paradox. Under the "one drop" rule that governs the relations across the race in the nation, they are legally black (Pinckney, 67-71). At the same time she is also of mixed race, Blacks find her somewhat alien as well. Her character shows that the bi-racial character can not exist, that they should always be defined ultimately belonging to a race, and when this persons social relations include black, it is always labeled as such. This marks the limits of movement of the tragic mulatto, but still speaks of a movement that is a constant topic of queer politics (Hutchinson, 133-145).  Larsen explained how Crane and perhaps herself dealt with the challenge of her kind, by making a misidentification with what she sees in order to get away from her, she "layers" itself in "a mess weak" (Larsen, 59). This foreshadows the scene in Denmark, where more than a spectator is involved in the action: Who is she looking at? Who is watching? What is the relationship of staging the race to her understanding of her own subjectivity (which recognizes songs from her childhood), and their understanding of their own performance of racial exoticism. In Denmark, there has been "herself entirely to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, and desired" (Larsen, 74). Crane was a woman "without people", and for almost any woman, that must mean a disaster. Calle, in her examination of Quicksand, effectively summed up the themes of the story by saying that the repressions that Larsen has identified included those that concern representation and identity, rejection of difference, silence about racial divisions, the consideration of others as an exotic object, and the oppressive social constructions of race and gender (515). This last variable was particularly highlighted with the “maternity” theme as depicted in Quicksand. The portrayal of Crane’s perpetual pregnancy demonstrated her enslavement as a woman, with her body being used up by the role imposed by society – the part of child-rearing, which eventually killed her own desires and ambitions. Crane had four children and they eventually took their toll on her, with the first three “born within the short space of twenty months” (123). Here, mothering, wrote Berg, in Crane’s experience represented the abuse of women in our society (103). With childbirth, several layers of roles were imposed on the mother that abused her very person – physically, psychologically, and emotionally. She had to pass up opportunities and sacrifice herself for her offspring and her family, effectively ending her life because it would be spent not for herself anymore but for the services of others, the children and the husband. Meanwhile, Larsen’s novel Passing offered the opportunity to reconsider the relationship between race and space. The novel provides an account of space that is highly radicalized. It describes 1920s Chicago as having heavily restricted white and black spaces. However, race itself is far more uncertain. Like Quicksand, this novel was, most importantly, all about “passing” or the attempt to pass a person in a racist and sexist society. Like Larsen and her first character, Crane, the novel’s two main characters, Irene and Clare, though black by blood in US American racial systems, were both able to pass as white. Their skin color rendered their race ultimately unknowable, they can easily cross the borders between the white and the black world. By using Frantz Fanon’s notions of corporeal systems and epidermal systems, and by focusing on skin itself, it is possible to open up another way of seeing race and space in the novel. It is argued that these racial systems ultimately clash, and come to grief, in the novel. Even so, the clash of bodily systems enables a possible resolution to the problem of seeing the person either through black/white grids of signification and power, or through their aggregation into phenotypes or races. In this view, bodily systems may come to define race and space, but not exclusively in one way or another (Thadious, 133-145). The child of both black and white parents encounters various forms of incomprehension in a society for which blackness” and “whiteness” seems to constitute two mutually exclusive and antagonistic forms of identity (Pinckney, 67-71).  According to Ginsberg, while Crane attempted to pass in order to find a unitary sense of identity, one that is structured around one role, Clare Kendry used the strategy in order to avoid enclosures of a unitary identity: Like Helga, Clare passes for many things; yet unlike Helga, Clare chooses not to be confined by any one signification, be it race, class or sexuality. She founds her identity not on some sense of “essential self” but rather on a self that is composed of and created by a series of guises and masks, performances and roles (75). The above argument brought us back to Larsen’s experience as a mulatto and the search for self-identity. However, this time, she approached the issue from a different perspective. When she has discussed how Crane’s strategy of “passing” failed, she posited another model through Clare, certainly basing from her own experiences and ideas. Clare crossed the colored line, abandoning all traces of her heritage. This kind of passing answered the question of identity in a perverse kind of way. It entailed the rejection of a part of a person in order to assume an ideal identity that could have emerged as a result of equally perverse factors. Needless to say, this particular strategy “to pass” also failed as demonstrated by the outcome the Clare Kendry narrative. Through one of the characters, Irene, Larsen expressed her own reservations. To quote: 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” (42). Larsen was apparently, at times torn with some inner struggle as demonstrated by Irene’s side of the story. There was the fascination with the opportunity to pass, while at the same time there was the pride in her race. The reason, stressed Wall, why passing, in all versions as suggested by Larsen, failed was simple: “Larsen’s protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide” (98). The latter part of Larsen’s life was also marked by difficulties as she was reported to have suffered depression, drug-use and that she has withdrawn to herself even from her friends. Some quarters remarked that perhaps, the failures of her protagonists were also reflective of her fate until she died. Nella Larsens novel Quicksand depicted the author’s life as the daughter of a white mother and black father. She allowed seeing reality from a different perspective. Being an educated and cultured woman, she demonstrated in the novel how she became more open to the contradictions of life as an African-American woman in a society that was dominated by ideology not only for white people but also for those who blocked women from a life of self-determination and fulfilling of their dreams and goals. With Passing, she explored the issue of self-identity further, explaining how it was to effectively cross the color line and to use the passing mechanism as a tool to get away completely or just for convenience. This novel is exclusively devoted to “passing” and through this handle, explored the themes of race, gender, and, ultimately, self –identity as well. What the novel demonstrated was the increasing struggle felt by Larsen in her own quest for self-identity. It is easy to identify when and how she would perhaps ask herself, which is the better way, how best to find the elusive identity. Clare, Irene and the minor character Gertrude represented the conflicting ideas that Larsen must have faced. There are critics who stressed that Larsen may not be what she claimed herself to be because she had been very secretive about her family’s history. According to Page, “her parents may or may not have separated after her birth. Her father may or may not have married a white man named Peter Larsen” or that her father, Peter Walker and stepfather, Peter Larsen were actually the same man, with Walker passing as white in order to get a job in Chicago (350). This variable supposedly would make it difficult to determine whether she did struggle with self-identity or at least up to the degree that her protagonists experienced. However, this factor, even if true, did not deny the fact that Larsen was a mulatto – the fundamental force behind the credibility of her arguments and insights. Her narratives were heartfelt and everyone seemed to agree with her as evidenced by the widespread approval of her work. All in all, the two writings by Larsen offered an opportunity to critically examine society and make the readers aware of the urgent need to improve radically. Any woman who has sought a metaphorical place in the sun, a position she could be paid what she deserved, or treated a love or a marriage based on respect and honor for herself (Thadious, 133-145). It seems that Larsen was not satisfied with being a member of the black elite as well as with the existing alternatives available to her in her quest for self-identity, she wanted more, and for this she suffered some tragedy. First, she seemed trapped by its narrowness, and because black experiences longed to live in a world. Secondly, the solutions she was able to come up with were all still found wanting as demonstrated by the failures of her characters. She was torn and all her life, she continued to struggle. The author expressed these feelings and perceptions through her writings and her female protagonists. In the end, Larsen’s work challenged the representations of African American women by depicting women capable of autonomy while criticizing a society which deprives them of their recognition and identities. The research shows how the dual race personality of Nella Larsen and her work related with the Harlem Renaissance, thus proving the thesis statement that Nella Larsen in her life and through her characters, struggled with issues of race, self identity, and social recognition (Hutchinson, 133-145). Regardless of her own dilemma, which were reflected in her stories, her work contained an overview of a black world that once existed, made more significant by the fact that they were told from the perspective of an African American woman.  Works Cited Berg, Allison, Mothering the race: womens narratives on reproduction, 1890-1930. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Calle, Pilar. “The Journey to Nowhere: Communities as Cages of Repression in Nella Larsens Quicksand (1928).” In Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Americanos Actas del XXI congreso internacional de A.E.D.E.A.N., Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos: Sevilla 18, 19, 20 Diciembre 1997. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1999. Hutchinson, George, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, Harvard University Press, 2000. Ginsberg, Elaine. Passing and the fictions of identity. Duke University Press, 1996. McDonald, C. Ann, "Nella Larsen (1891-1964)". In Champion, Laurie, American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Page, Yolanda, Encyclopedia of African American women writers, Volume 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Pinckney, Darryl, Review of Hutchinsons In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Shadows, the Nation, 2006. Thadious, Davis. Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Watson, Steven, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. New York: Pantsheon, 1995. Wall, Cheryl. "Passing or What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsens Novels." Black American Literature Forum 20, 1986. Read More