“Things, Things, Things”: Fetishizing the Hybrid Body in Quicksand

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in Helga Crane’s body in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand functions as the aesthetic ground of experiment and resistance, signifying the (im)possible site of racial, sexual and cultural liminality. It explains the process through which the hybrid body becomes a fetishized object, eroticized and aestheticized not only by society but also by the hybrid subject herself. This particular survival tactic conceived by Helga alludes to the ways in which one processes and counters the outside force of ideological interpellation in a form of self-fetishization. The essay concludes that this strategy ends in failure because of the inherently ambivalent nature of fetish which simultaneously reinforces and undermines the viability of the in-between space. Ultimately, through applying the idea of hybridity to the aesthetics of the body, this essay attempts to highlight the existential dilemma of maintaining a viable site of cultural difference through Larsen’s critique of the impossibility of the hybrid third space in a given society.