The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Abstract

Published to critical acclaim in 1928 and praised by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,” Larsen's Quicksand has since been criticized for its focus on the narrow world of the black bourgeoisie. But her treatment of race, gender, and culture is far more complex than these pronouncements suggest. This essay shows how Larsen's emphasis on the aesthetic—objets d'art, clothing, fabrics, decor—highlights problems of cultural constructs and self-representation. Often compared with her prolific contemporary Jessie Fauset, Larsen goes beyond Fauset in both stylistic experimentation and psychological insight, daring to explore the failure of her protagonist to transcend cultural concepts of race and gender at a time when one-dimensional success stories were the rule in black women's novels of racial uplift.