Breaking Down Creative Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Abstract

Breaking Down Creative Democracy:A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand Gregory Alan Phipps (bio) Caustic, controversial, and frequently cynical about racial politics, Nella Larsen worked simultaneously with and against prevailing tendencies in the Harlem Renaissance. She supported Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois's disparagement of primitivism and exoticism, but, unlike Fauset, she did not ally the figures of the New Negro and New Woman with bourgeois morality. Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), features a biracial female protagonist who occupies a series of disparate communities, pursuing beauty, luxury, romance, and autonomy. However, repetitious collapses into alienation and despair compromise the potentially affirmative side of her cosmopolitan mobility. Numerous scholars have noted that Larsen modeled Helga Crane's story in part on her own experiences, although the conclusion of the novel seems to diverge from her life. As George Hutchinson remarks, at the time she was writing Quicksand, Larsen was "working her way into circles where she felt valuable, understood, and at home, and these circles defied the constraints of racial, gendered, and sexual entrapment" (238–39).1 Her protagonist, on the other hand, never finds this kind [End Page 135] of community, ultimately fleeing to the rural south, where she lives in a homogenous African-American environment as a preacher's wife. Most critics consider this conclusion not just a break in the autobiographical trajectory of the novel but also a break in the continuity of the narrative. Conversely, this article argues that Helga's fate in Alabama grows directly out of the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience that frames preceding events in her life. Focusing on a neglected point of connection between Larsen's social context and Helga's migrations, the article notes that the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience invokes several foundational principles in the intellectual movement of pragmatism. Pragmatism developed in the early twentieth century into the paramount school of philosophy in America, influencing some of the most important communities Larsen occupied in the years leading up to Quicksand. The novel reflects and reworks integral pragmatist theories from the writings of John Dewey and Charles Peirce, providing a uniquely black feminist case study in pragmatism's articulation of the intimate connection between individual experience and democracy. Du Bois praised Quicksand, calling it the "best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of [Charles] Chesnutt" ("Two Novels"), but critics such as Cheryl Wall and Ross Posnock have questioned how well Du Bois understood the novel.2 Posnock maintains that in praising Helga Crane as a character Du Bois ignored the "extremity and risk of her primitivism," misconstruing her as an "antirace race woman" (85). To be sure, it is difficult to read Quicksand as a narrative about the rejection of primitivism, considering it concludes in rural Alabama with Helga suffering through multiple pregnancies. After revolving among various locales that are full of educational, artistic, and intellectual sophistication, Helga lands in the type of setting that authors in the Harlem Renaissance tended to associate with so-called "authentic" black primitivism. As a result, Quicksand transforms in the final chapters from a "cosmopolitan novel of manners" into a depiction of a "painful series of grotesque bodily disasters" (Stringer 82). Some critics have tended to [End Page 136] find this conclusion disturbing, if not inexplicable—a "baffling narrative cul-de-sac" (Karl 137). As a social commentary, the novel seems to imply that an intellectual and artistic biracial woman living in early twentieth-century America will fail to find a satisfactory niche in cosmopolitan and urban settings. At the same time, the novel also revises some of the familiar themes associated with the "tragic mulatto." After all, part of the problem for Helga is she is unable to find contentment in either predominantly black or white social environments. Several scholars have discussed how Larsen reworks the figure of the tragic mulatto, affording her protagonist more autonomy and independence in the process—although Helga does not acquire enough freedom to escape her fate.3 Analyses of Helga's inability to settle into any social environment usually intersect with topics of repetition and cyclicality. As Dorothy Stringer states...