Intimate Geography: The Body, Race, and Space in Larsen's <i>Quicksand</i>

Abstract

Intimate Geography:The Body, Race, and Space in Larsen's Quicksand Laura E. Tanner The field of cultural geography offers one critical lens for considering the interplay of race and space in representational as well as historical terms. Contemporary cultural geography's expanded focus on the way the body is constructed by and in space has allowed cultural geographers to consider identity in the context of race, gender, and disability as well as location. In recent years, however, some cultural geographers, echoing the critiques of scholars in literary critical, philosophical, and cultural studies disciplines, have noted that the field's emphasis on locating the body as a discursive construct—even as it serves the important function of denaturalizing racial and gender hierarchies—marginalizes the body's status as a material, sensory, and emotional entity. In response, cultural geographers have begun to call for analysis not only of the body's function as a discursive site but of the way in which, in David Theo Goldberg's terms, "Race is embodied, is sourced and sensed through the interactive play and performance of space(s) and bodies" (220). Bringing the insights of cultural geography to bear on the case of Nella Larsen's life and art, however, highlights the difficulty of any attempt to supplement theoretical analysis of the constructedness of racialized subjectivity with attention to what Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles describe in Making Race Matter as "the complex and often contradictory ways in which identities are actually lived out at the level of embodied experience" (10). In Larsen's case, the glaring absence of firsthand accounts of the author's life exaggerates the universal representational challenge of rendering the textured immediacy of lived experience through language. The title of George Hutchinson's recent biography, In Search of Nella Larsen, emphasizes the difficulty of accessing and recreating the experiences of an "invisible" (1) and "mysterious" (11) biographical subject, a woman whom Hutchinson defines early in his study in terms of both corporeal and spatial lack. "Larsen herself," Hutchinson observes, "felt like a shadow through much of her life. She did not long inhabit the sort of place in which she could [End Page 179] feel at home" (1). Born in one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, the child of a white Danish immigrant mother and a black Danish West Indian father who quickly disappeared from her life, Larsen spent most of her childhood as a black girl in an otherwise white family. Her presence in that family was marked both in corporeal terms—Nella's dark skin clearly announced her racial difference from her white mother, stepfather, and half sister—and in concrete spatial terms, as Nella's blackness dictated not only her "place" in the urban geography of turn-of-the-century Chicago but her family's place of residence as well. Tensions of space and embodiment not only shaped Larsen's most intimate experiences of subjectivity, family, and home, but emerge in her fictional texts as urgent representational concerns. By approaching Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, through an experiential paradigm which locates questions of space and race in the framework of the lived body, I will trace the way that the novel explores the human consequences of its protagonist's "theoretical" approach to her own racialized subjectivity. Insofar as existing criticism of Quicksand situates Helga's body primarily in the realm of cultural constructedness, I will argue, critics of the novel often fail to acknowledge the text's exposure of tensions between the textualized body and its experiential counterpart. Readers of Quicksand have thus puzzled over an apparently inexplicable conclusion in which Helga, its beautiful and sophisticated protagonist, marries a preacher, moves to the deep South, and collapses into an apparently endless cycle of difficult pregnancies and exhausting, even life-threatening childbirths. Why, they have asked, does a cosmopolitan novel that seems to emphasize the constructedness of race, gender, and identity end by retreating to the rural South and eschewing performativity to situate its protagonist in what Jeffrey Gray describes as "the trap of the body" (266)? Introducing experiential as well as biological and constructivist definitions of the body to criticism of the novel suggests that Helga is locked...