Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Quicksand, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Segregation, and Society
Mixed-Race Identity
Racial Shame and Emotional Repression
Race, Beauty, and Exoticism
Religion, Poverty, and Oppression
Summary
Analysis
A happy year has passed since Helga first walked into Anne’s house. Helga has fallen into a fun life in Harlem’s bourgeoning culture, with a job, friends, and perhaps even a sense of contentment. Helga has been working at an insurance company and has made a lot of sophisticated friends through Anne. Helga is happy that her new friends look down on the sense of inferiority that the black community at Naxos has. Helga feels as if she has “found herself.”
Helga feels at home in her new environment. Her new friends also denigrate the way white superiority is prevalent in the Southern education system. Larsen exposes a pattern that is emerging with Helga. At the beginning of her experiences in a new place (as with school, and with Naxos) she is optimistic that she has found her place to fit in. Soon after, however, the veneer of each new life begins to wear off as soon as she realizes she can’t escape the reality of life as a mixed-race woman.
Themes
Helga and Anne have fallen into a fast friendship, and Helga is living with Anne in her tastefully-furnished home, which suits Helga just fine. She is absorbed in Harlem’s cultural life and no longer feels the need to be acknowledged by white people. She has resolved to lock that part of her heritage away forever, marry a wealthy “brown or yellow” man, have “laughing, appealing dark-eyed children,” and stay in Harlem forever. Helga never thinks of James Vayle, but—much to her distaste—she thinks often of Dr. Anderson. Happy to be far from Naxos, and released from the feeling of smallness that she has felt her whole life, Helga feels free, content, and happy.
Larsen foreshadows the reason why Helga eventually struggles in Harlem: she is burying the white side of her identity in this new life. She also represses her feelings for Dr. Anderson, whom she often thinks about. Repressing parts of herself like this, instead of accepting herself and her feelings, is what causes Helga’s emotions to bubble to the surface when she feels provoked and loses control, as will happen shortly. Larsen, once again, weaves in descriptions of people of color that emphasize a racial spectrum and the beauty in blackness.
Themes
