readyhwa.blogg.se

As a light-skinned product of a mixed race relationship, she must find this blackness and “put it on” before she can begin her flight. Helga’s symbolic flight is an attempt to discover her “blackness” and finally feel completely at home within it. Cranes have historically been a bird endowed with symbolism related to its ability to fly vast distances without growing too tired to rest. And all this flight imagery begins with something as simple as her name. And Helga’s entire narrative is a symbolic flight around the world to both get away from herself and find herself. Helga CraneĪt one point Helga thinks to herself, “She was about to fly.” Imagery of things flying-from cabs to ribbons to hair-permeate the narrative. Eventually, any struggle to pull herself out is futile. It is an metaphorical title which symbolizes the theme of Helga’s life as an ill-fated struggle to avoid being caught in the grip of conventional gender and racial expectations which relentlessly pursue the objective of dragging her down so deeply into exactly the life she wants to avoid. Literal-minded readers might be surprised to find there is quicksand in Quicksand. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Others see her as the “marginal black woman of the middle class” and as the embodiment of Du Bois's “double consciousness” that even the “New Negroes” could not reconcile.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Some see Crane's quest to be a search for happiness, peace of mind, social status, sexual fulfillment, and racial identity. Du Bois, for example, wrote that Helga was “typical” of the New Negro woman “on whom the shadow of ‘race’ sits negligibly and Life is always first.”Ĭontemporary critics recognize Helga Crane as an innovative case study especially open to psychoanalytic interpretations.

And both Nella Larsen and Helga Crane have been noted as daring representatives of modern African American middle-class women. Though biographers have found no supporting evidence, Nella Larsen claimed to have lived in Copenhagen, where Helga spends two years during her search for self-knowledge. Helga teaches at Naxos, a school modeled after Tuskegee-where Larsen briefly taught. Both are mixed-race women reared by their white mothers from whom they became estranged and who moved (with ambivalence) into black communities.

Many have noted the autobiographical similarities between Crane and Larsen. An intelligent, sensual, beautiful, searching, and ambitious woman, Helga's quest for security and satisfaction takes her between black society and white society, between the folk and elite cultures of the rural South, the urban North, and even Copenhagen, Denmark. Is the protagonist of Nella Larsen's 1928 novel Quicksand.