Nella Larsen

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Nella Larsen in 1928
Nella Larsen in 1928

Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964) was an American mixed-race novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote was of extraordinary quality, earning her recognition by her contemporaries and by present day critics.

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[edit] Biography

Nella Larsen went by various names throughout her life. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891 as Nella Walker, the daughter of the Danish immigrant domestic case worker Marie Hanson and Peter Walker, a West Indian man of color from Saint Croix who soon disappeared from her life,[1][2]. Taking the surname of her Scandinavian stepfather Peter Larsen,[1] she also at times went by Nellye Larson, Nellie Larsen and, finally, Nella Larsen[3] as well as by her married name Nella Larsen Imes.[4]

Larsen lived several years as a child with her mother's relations in Denmark, and in 1907-08, she briefly attended Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically Black University, which at that time had an entirely Black student body. George Hutchinson speculates that she was expelled for some violation of Fisk's very strict dress or conduct codes; she then spent four years in Denmark, before returning to the U.S. [5]

In 1914, Larsen enrolled in the all-Black nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital. Upon graduating in 1915, she went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama where she became head nurse at a hospital and training school. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. (Washington died shortly after Larsen arrived in Tuskeegee.) Working conditions for nurses were poor—their duties included doing hospital laundry—and Larsen lasted only until 1916, at which time she returned to New York to work again as a nurse. However, after working as a nurse through the Spanish flu pandemic, she left nursing and became a librarian.[4]

In 1919, she married Elmer Samuel Imes, a prominent physicist, the second African American to receive a Ph.D in physics. They moved to Harlem, where Larsen took a job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL).[4] In the year after her marriage, she began to write, publishing her first pieces in 1920.

Certified in 1923 by the NYPL's library school, she transferred to a children's librarian's position in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening that became the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen gave up her work as a librarian and began to work as a writer active in the literary community.[4] In 1928, she published Quicksand (ISBN 0-14-118127-3), a largely autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.

In 1929, she published Passing (ISBN 0-14-243727-1), her second novel, which was also successful.

In 1930, Larsen published "Sanctuary" [1], a short story for which she was accused of plagiarism; also at this time her marriage was failing.

"Sanctuary" resembled Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story "Mrs. Adis", first published in the UK in 1919. Kaye-Smith was an English writer, mainly on rural themes, and very popular in the US. "Sanctuary"’s basic plot, and a little of the descriptions and dialogue are virtually identical. Compared to Kaye-Smith’s tale, "Sanctuary" is longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race, rather than class as in "Mrs Adis". Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Much later Sheila Kaye-Smith herself wrote in "All the Books of My Life" (Cassell, London, 1956) that she had in fact based "Mrs Adis" on an old story by St Francis de Sales. It is unknown whether she ever knew of the Larsen controversy.

Despite the accusations of plagiarism, which ultimately turned out to be false, Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, and working on a novel about a love triangle; the three protagonists were all white; the book was never published. [6]

She returned to New York in 1933 after her divorce was complete. She lived on alimony until her ex-husband's death in 1942; she was not writing (and never would again), was apparently depressed, and may have been using drugs. After her ex-husband's death she returned to nursing and disappeared from the literary circles through which she had previously travelled. She lived on the Lower East Side, and did not venture to Harlem.[6] Many of her old acquaintances speculated incorrectly that she, like some of her characters, had crossed the color line and disappeared. However, George Hutchinson's recent biography of Larsen demonstrates that she remained in New York, working as a nurse, and avoiding contact with her earlier friends and world.

[edit] Identity

As mentioned above, Nella Larsen was of biracial parentage and thus of what would have been considered at the time "low birth." She obtained a good education (though not a college degree); she married into Harlem's black professional class (but never quite felt at home in it); she knew all the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, but was about a decade older than Langston Hughes' generation; she was, according to Darryl Pinckney, more comfortable in the interracial bohemia of Greenwich Village than among the "Talented Tenth". [4]

[edit] Quicksand

Nella Larsen's first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional character loosely based Larsen's own early life. Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home.

Her travels bring her in contact with many of the communities Larsen herself knew. The reader meets Helga, a first year teacher in "Naxos," a Southern Negro boarding school based on Tuskegee University, where she finds herself dissatisfied with the complacent philosophy of those around her. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher who advocates that blacks ought to sensibly segregate themselves into black schools, that striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Helga abruptly quits her teaching and moves to Chicago, where her white uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her, then to Harlem, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem." Taking her uncle's legacy and advice, she visits her aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic; realizing that she deeply misses seeing Negro people, she returns to NYC. During a near mental breakdown, Helga happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After seducing and marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the poor deep South, where she is disillusioned by the people's blind adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Helga Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for much more than simply how to synthesize her own mixed ancestry--she expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends see as genetic differences between races.

The novel also tells the tale of Helga's search for a marriage partner: as it opens, she has become engaged to marry for social benefits a prestigious Southern Negro man she does not really love; in Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons; by the final chapters she has seduced and married a stereotypical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic, as Helga Crane sees what she hoped would be sexual fulfillment and success of her altruistic ideas of "uplifting" the poor southern blacks she lives among,turn into an endless chain of pregnancies and suffering. It is not her skin color after all that is the obstacle to her happiness.

Helga is a complex character, and the novelist is up to expressing much complexity. The decline of her life after she moves south, however, is less well-expressed. The book is well worth reading for a glimpse of how the Washington and DuBois conflict may have affected real people in the early part of the 20th century.

[edit] Passing

Larsen's second novel tells the story of two light skinned women: Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Both women are of mixed heritage and are light enough to pass as white. Clare fully commits herself to passing and marries John Bellew, a racist white man who knows nothing of her heritage and affectionately and jokingly calls her "Nig" because he says that, as she's gotten older, her skin has grown slightly darker. Irene lives in Harlem, commits herself to racial uplift, and marries a black doctor. The novel centers on the meeting of the two childhood friends later in life, and the unfolding of events as each woman is fascinated and seduced by the other's daring lifestyle. The novel traces a tragic path as Irene becomes paranoid that her husband is having an affair with Clare (the reader is never told whether her fears are justified or not, and numerous cues point in both directions) and Clare's race is revealed to John Bellew. The novel ends with Clare's sudden death by "falling" out of a window.


The end of the novel is famous for its ambiguity, which leaves open the possibility that Irene has pushed Clare out the window or the possibility that Clare has killed herself.

Many see this novel as an example of the plot of the tragic mulatto, a common figure in early African American literature. Others suggest that the novel complicates that plot by introducing the dual figures of Irene and Clare, who in many ways mirror and complicate each other. The novel also suggests erotic undertones in the two women's relationship, and some read the novel as one of repressed lesbian desire.

Recently, Passing has received a great deal of attention because of its close attention to racial and sexual ambiguities and to liminal spaces. It has now achieved canonical status in many American universities.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Pinckney, p. 26.
  2. ^ Sushama Austin, Nella Larsen - Discovering Parallels to Nella Larsen, Literary Traveler. Accessed online 27 October 2006. (Citation for parents' names.)
  3. ^ Sachi Nakachi, Mixed-Race Identity Politics in Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) (doctoral dissertation, Ohio University), p.14. Accessed online 27 October 2006.
  4. ^ a b c d e Pinckney, p. 28.
  5. ^ Pinckney, p. 26-28.
  6. ^ a b Pinckney, p. 30.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

  • 1928 Quicksand
  • 1929 Passing

[edit] Other Works

  • 1926 "Freedom"
  • 1926 "The Wrong Man"
  • 1930 "Sanctuary"


[edit] References

  • Darryl Pinckney, "Shadows", The Nation, July 17/24, 2006, p.26–30. A review of Hutchinson's In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line.

[edit] Further reading