Another window. . .
HUM 3285: British and American Literature
Spring 2011
Dr. Perdigao
February 28, 2011
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
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Born in Chicago as Nellie Walker; daughter of white Danish mother Marie Hanson
and black West Indian father Peter Walker
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Father died when Larsen was young; mother remarried Scandinavian man Peter
Larsen
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Larsen claimed to have lived in Denmark, returned to attend University of
Copenhagen but scholars have not found support
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Studied at Fisk University, studying nursing (1907-1908), then Lincoln Hospital
School of Nursing in NYC (1912-1915); worked for Tuskegee Institute’s Andrew
Memorial Hospital as head nurse, then NYC’s Board of Health
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1919—married research physicist Dr. Elmer S. Imes; went from working class to
African American middle class
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Employed at 135th Street branch of NY Public Library; met writers in Harlem;
entered Library School of the NY Public Library in 1922
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
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Carl Van Vechten (Hugh Wentworth) claimed to have discovered her, introduced
her to Knopf publishers
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Quicksand (1928): Helga Crane, daughter of white mother and black father; teacher
at Naxos; travels to Denmark; considered exotic; returns to America; questions of
race in America, abroad: South: Chicago: Harlem: Copenhagen: NYC: South;
desire for control over her body and identity—resulting in quicksand, loss of
autonomy and agency
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Passing (1929); Harmon Foundation’s bronze medal for achievement in literature;
Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing (1930); writes in Spain and France--for
novels on racial freedom and husband’s infidelity; divorce in 1933, failure to
publish third novel; loss of status in return to nursing; stops writing in the late
1930s
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Charges of plagiarism for story “Sanctuary” (1930); Sheila Kaye-Smith’s story
“Mrs. Adis” published in 1922
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Lost connections to other New York writers; former husband died in 1941; worked
as nurse in NYC hospitals until death in 1964
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
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Recovery of her work in 1970s
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Passing (1929): Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry; passing in America; racial identity;
psychological doubles; themes of racial passing, class and social mobility, and
female desire
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Ideas of safety and security versus risk
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Passing as “a device for encoding the complexities of human personality, for veiling
women’s homoerotic desires, and for subverting simplistic notions of female selfactualization” (Thadious M. Davis 253)
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Female sexuality—ideas about domestic sphere in relation to a “woman’s quest for
satisfaction and completion” (Davis 253).
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Works end with “irreparable breakdown of illusions about emancipatory strategies
or possible futures for women” (Davis 253).
Negotiating Passing
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Ideas about Africa—Irene, Brian
“Heritage” poems: Cullen, Bennett, McKay
America—uplift; NWL
Brazil
Being American—Clare, Toomer
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Mrs. Dalloway—tea, party; buying flowers; planning parties
Security, stability
Septimus: Clare; window as symbol
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Cigarette: Clare
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Repression, fainting
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Subconscious
Negotiating Passing
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Walter White, former director of NAACP, had encouraged Larsen to complete
Quicksand
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Van Vechten introduced novel to his publisher; Du Bois praised the novel
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Contemporary critics questioning endings of stories—like Fauset and Hurston—
sacrifice of independent female identities
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Marriage and death as themes
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Conflicting ideas about racial and sexual identities, a black and feminine aesthetic
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Ideology of romance—marriage and motherhood
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Repressed female sexual experience
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Ideas about black female sexuality—insisting on chastity like the purity of
Victorian bourgeoisie (McDowell xiii)
Negotiating Passing
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How does one identify him/herself and why? What happens when academics,
philosophers, and sociologists change the terms on you?
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What does it mean to be black, middle class, and a woman?
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Ideology=social constructions that can confine groups; system of beliefs established
and becomes part of “cultural norm”
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Race, class, and gender are constructs; we created race through language (real but
manmade)
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Carole Vance writes, “Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction,
repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency”
(qtd. in McDowell xiv).
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Ideas of pleasure and danger in both texts
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19th century ideas about sexuality but flirtation with “female sexual desire”
connects them to the liberation of the 1920s (McDowell xiv).
Negotiating Passing
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Doubles—offering ideas about the relationship between black women and desire
and sexuality versus the idea of the black woman as respectable in middle-class
terms (McDowell xvi)
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Sexless marriages for both characters
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fear of dark child; protecting sons from it; sex as joke; separate bedrooms
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Irene as unreliable narrator, as central consciousness, her fears
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Irene’s emerging sexuality—from rooftop to tea party to own bedroom
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Repressing feelings
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Concealment and burial
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Letter inciting desire
Negotiating Passing
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Clare—as symbol of desire, dressed in red
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Projection of Irene’s desire onto Brian—question if there is an affair
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Cheryl Wall’s description of a “Psychological suicide, if not a murder” (qtd. in
McDowell xxix)
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Cigarettes—snuffing them out
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Text as concealment as well—veiled references, what is permitted
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“Implying false, forged, and mistaken identities, the title functions on multiple
levels: thematically, in terms of the racial and sexual plots; and strategically, in
terms of the narrative's disguise. . . The novel performs a double burial: the erotic
subplot is hidden beneath its safe and orderly cover and the radical implications of
that plot are put away by the disposal of Clare” (xxx).
Negotiating Passing
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“In ending the novel with Clare’s death, Larsen repeats the narrative choice which
Quicksand makes: to punish the very values the novel implicitly affirms, to honor
the very value system the text implicitly satirizes” (McDowell xxxvi).
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Novel passes
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Dichotomies—lady/Jezebel; virgin/whore (McDowell xxxi)
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Social institutions of education, marriage, religion, all strangling and controlling
sexual expression of women