Nella Larsen and the Intertextual Geography of Quicksand

Bibliographic Data

ID4546159
AuthorsAnna Brickhouse (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume35
Issue4
Pages533
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican American Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1062-4783 • E-ISSN: 1945-6182
PublisherPenn State Press (Project Muse) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2903281
OpenAlexW292023412
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Toward middle of her 1928 novel Quicksand, Nella Larsen thematizes her authorial relation to past in scene that uncannily adumbrates future demise of her career. Larsen's protagonist, Helga Crane, pores over writing of her new employer, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, prominent lecturer on the race problem who has hired Helga to edit her speeches. But lectures, as Helga interprets them, proved to be of others' speeches and opinions. As she puts her own hand to Mrs. Hayes-Rore's writing, in fact, Helga mentally accuses her employer of that most serious of authorial crimes: Helga had heard other lecturers say same things in Devon and again in Naxos. Ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences and were lifted bodily from and works of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and other of race's ills. For variety Mrs. Hayes-Rore had seasoned hers with peppery dash of Du and few of her own. Aside from these it was, Helga reflected, same old (70) Helga's unspoken charge, of course, is plagiarism. Mrs. Hayes-Rore has taken ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences and paragraphs not only from previous orations but also from published works, material copyrighted as intellectual property of individual authors, whom Larsen names directly here to heighten full effect of Helga's assessment. Indeed, Helga is able not only to recognize specific sources of familiar ideas and language but even to distinguish Mrs. Hayes-Rore's original pronouncements from those she has appropriated. Yet Helga proves to be mistaken in dismissing resulting texts as merely patchworks of the same old thing. As implied comparison between sensual pleasures of writing and cooking suggests, a peppery dash of Du Bois and few new vinegary statements season final speeches, in Larsen's culinary metaphor, to their own perfection. While Larsen may well have shared her protagonist's condescension toward doctors of race's ills, she seems nevertheless careful to suggest that Helga has underestimated shrewd authorial figure who sits before her like a cat watching its prey, eyes bright and investigating, lit with humorous gleam. Busy correcting and condensing, Helga overlooks aggressive revisionist strategy behind assimilation of familiar words, sentences, and that characterizes her employer's writing (70). Helga misses point of patchwork: recirculation of ideas in different contexts, recombination of authorial voices to new ends. And her fa ilure here to read for range of possibilities made available by patchwork is precisely what marks Larsen's allusion to her novel's own revisionary relation to prior texts-a relation that would, in Larsen's last work, be misunderstood by her contemporaries as much as it was by her protagonist in Quicksand. In April, 1930, she was publicly accused of plagiarizing from British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith to create story Sanctuary, an event that irreversibly devastated her authorial career.(1) As librarian, self-fashioner through examples, and ultimately an alleged plagiarist, Larsen was indeed committed revisionist- and perhaps consummate revisionist not only of Harlem Renaissance, with which she is most commonly associated, but also of cultural moment in which American writers urgently sought to recover national past. Quicksand was written and during period of intense American cultural nationalism that, as George Hutchinson has recently argued, represents crucial but often overlooked context for interpretations of African American modernism (Harlem). Writing during what Ann Douglas has called American literary reclamation project of 1920s (194), Larsen made her authorial debut when task of documenting American history was taken up with new urgency by leading intellectuals on American scene, from British expatriate D

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