Nella Larsen Norton Intro.

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Norton Introduction: Nella Larsen Source: Norton Anthology *Race: Harlem Rennaisance writers were encouraged to write about their African-American heritage, but often attacked if they decided to write about any other issue not concerning race. “Nella Larsen’s writing brought this disagreement out of the realm of abstraction and showed how confusions over authenticity, were tearing apart the inner lives of African Americans. Her own mixed-race background enabled her to see that already in the 1920s the majority so-called Negroes were in fact people of mixed racial ancestry and led her to ask how there could be such a thing as racial authenticity if there was no such thing as a “pure” race.” (1527) *Life: “Her life story resembles that of Helga Crane, protagonist of “Quicksand” *Awards: “Larson won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1930 for creative writing- the first ‘black’ woman to receive such an award.” (1528) * Genres: Published two novels and one controversial short story. *Style: “Quicksand” is a psychological, episodic, perhaps even picaresque novel who’s style is controlled by modernist principles of brevity and impressionistic subjectivity. The narration follows the mental processes, and adopts the point of view, of the mixed race Helga Crane. “She [Helga] is thwarted by external and internal racial pressures-internal because she interprets her own desires in stereotypical terms of the primitive and the civilized, external because she is always perceived in racial terms and her life options are thoroughly constrained by racial prejudice. Alienated, restless, she moves between cultural worlds without ever feeling welcome, finally retreating into a marriage that Larsen presents as a kind of death.” (1527)