From Tragic Mulatta to Grotesque Racial Horror: Epic/Exceptionalism and Larsen’s Quicksand

Abstract

This article re-examines Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), a major Harlem Renaissance and African-American literary canon novel, against the tendency to focus on it as a tragic mulatta story. Instead, I argue that Larsen—like African-American authors dating back to Charles W. Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins of the turn-of-the-century—challenged the trans-Atlantic racial exceptionalism by using a far more expansive critical lens that recognized a different mode of being. This being, defined by the literary category of the grotesque (popular in the 1920s and 1930s), recognizes ancient (African) times and a biomorphic mode in which humans, animals, and nature overlapped ontologically. The unique aspect of this article is that it reveals how Larsen also taps Danish literature as part of her critique of normative modern modes of thought, esthetics, politics, and spirituality. Ultimately, Larsen uses Quicksand to expose Western myths, including the stork myth, as deleterious to the more ancient myths that she excavates.