Helga Crane, the central character in Quicksand, is a mixed-race woman who was abandoned at a young age by her black American father. She is raised in the U.S. by her white Danish mother and white step-family, always feeling like an awkward racial outsider. After her mother dies when Helga is 15, she is sent away to a boarding school for black women. In adulthood, Helga struggles to find her emotional footing. She feels a great deal of racial shame throughout her life, but she persistently buries this feeling and makes bad decisions (like constantly moving to some new place) to avoid dealing with it head on. In the end, Helga’s self-destructive tendencies steer her into a hard life of poverty in rural Alabama with a husband she does not love, and children that she cannot cope with caring for. Through Helga’s emotional repression, author Nella Larson argues that although being a mixed-race person in a segregated society comes with unavoidable pain, repressing that pain only causes more damage and heartache.
Helga feels deep personal shame as a mixed-race person, stemming from her painful childhood. She is frequently overcome with feelings of anger when she experiences racism, but she also feels racial shame because she thinks her existence is somehow responsible for triggering the racism. Early in the story, Helga travels to Chicago to seek out her white Uncle Peter for financial support. She is turned away by Peter’s new wife, Mrs. Nilssen, who doesn’t want black women coming around. Helga is deeply angered but also sympathizes with Mrs. Nilssen’s racism because Helga sees herself as “an obscene sore in all [her family’s] lives, at all costs to be hidden.” When she moves to Harlem, Helga is offended by her roommate, Anne’s, disgust at mixed-race romance, but only tepidly confronts her about it, opting to suppress her anger instead. Throughout the story, Helga reflects her own racial shame when she feels strongly that she shouldn’t have children, because bearing “tortured Negro children” would be “sinful.” In fact, the only time in Helga’s life when she doesn’t feel ashamed or angry is at the end of the story, because she is too tired and broken to feel anything. Instead of facing her racial pain, Helga frequently pushes her feelings down or flees to another city to avoid confronting her complicated feelings about her race. Helga leaves her teaching job at Naxos (a boarding school for young black girls in the South) because she feels angry at having to endure constant commentary on how white culture is superior. Dr. Anderson, the new principal, sympathizes with Helga’s frustrations and implores her to stay, but Helga loses her temper with hm and impulsively leaves for Chicago in the middle of the semester without a plan, job, or reference letter. Every time Helga starts to feel at home somewhere, she feels deep shame at ignoring one side of her mixed-race identity. When Helga starts to fit in with the black community in Harlem, where she moves after leaving Chicago, she feels ashamed at overlooking the white side of her identity, so she flees to Denmark where she has white relatives. Similarly, in Denmark, Helga feels ashamed at ignoring her black roots, so she returns to Harlem.
What’s more, Helga represses positive emotions as well as negative ones, showing how running from pain can actually intensify it in the long run. This tendency has particularly devastating consequences in Helga’s romantic life. Helga enjoys how much her first suitor, James Vayle (another teacher at Naxos), needs her, but this enjoyment makes her feel “a sensation amounting almost to shame,” which makes her pull away from him. Helga leaves James Vayle with a brief and curt brush off, indicating she’d rather run away than face up to matters of the heart with maturity. Helga spends the majority of her time in Denmark enamored with a wealthy artist named Axel Olsen, but is unable to face her feelings for him when he proposes. Helga craves a sign of interest from Herr Olsen, but decides his advances are “insulting” when he hints at a future together. When Herr Olsen eventually proposes, Helga feels “a little frightened and embarrassed.” Unable to make sense of her feelings, she impulsively hides behind a newfound distaste for his whiteness, and angrily rejects him. Helga invents reasons to push her suitors away whenever they show interest her, because she is uncomfortable embracing intense romantic feelings, even if the attention is what she wants.
Helga is similarly unnerved by her attraction to Robert Anderson, so she falsely convinces herself that he is ill-mannered instead of embracing her feelings. At Naxos, she impetuously storms out of Dr. Anderson’s office when he implores her to stay on, convincing herself that he is “controlling” and “rude.” Helga suppresses her attraction to Dr. Anderson and lies to herself because she doesn’t know how to handle feelings of attraction. When Dr. Anderson calls on Helga in Harlem, she pretends to be out, despite her longing to be courted by him. Helga convinces herself that standing up Dr. Anderson is a good strategy, but in actuality, she becomes panicky and flustered when he arrives at her door, and runs away to avoid embracing her growing feelings for him. Some years later, when Helga realizes the now-married Dr. Anderson has come over to apologize rather than to propose an affair, she despairs so violently that she rushes into the street and marries the first man she sees—a Reverend from Alabama whom she describes as a “rattish yellow man”—to spite Dr. Anderson. Helga moves to Alabama with a man she does not know, to live in poverty, despite having craved wealth and nice “things” her whole life. Many years too late, Helga realizes she ruined her life, because she is repulsed by her husband and was hopelessly in love with Dr. Anderson the whole time. Helga’s impulsive behavior shows that she consistently makes rash decisions that stem from her insecurity about her racial identity. This ultimately makes things worse for her, especially when she faces romantic situations. Her tendency to shut down intense feelings and act coldly to her suitors causes her a great deal more pain in the long run.
Helga is overcome with intermingled feelings of anger and shame throughout her life, but is never able to confront them directly. She ultimately undermines her ability to handle intense feelings at all, whether they are positive or negative ones. Through Helga’s emotional repression, Larsen alludes to the mental burden of racial shame in segregated societies, emphasizing the damaging and long-lasting effects of running from difficult emotions instead of confronting them head on.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Racial Shame and Emotional Repression ThemeTracker
Racial Shame and Emotional Repression Quotes in Quicksand
“And please remember my husband is not your uncle. No indeed! Why, that would make me your aunt!”
She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their live, at all costs to be hidden.
Of that white world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference. No, not at all did she crave, from those pale and powerful people, awareness. Sinister folk, she considered them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past contribution to her life, which had been but shame and grief, she had hidden from away from brown folk in a locked closet, “never,” she told herself, “to be reopened.”
Until the very moment of his entrance she had had no intention of running away, but something, some imp of contumacy, drove her from his presence, though she longed to stay. Again abruptly had come the uncontrollable wish to wound. Later, with a sense of helplessness and inevitability, she realized that the weapon which she had chosen had been a boomerang, for she herself had felt the keep disappointment of the denial.
Characteristically she writhed at the idea of telling Anne of her impending departure and shirked the problem of evolving a plausible and inoffensive excuse for its suddenness. “That,” she decided lazily, “will have to look out for itself; I can’t be bothered just now. It’s too hot.”
Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?
