Tropes of Apologetic Sexuality and the Lineage of African American Women in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article locates Helga’s apologetic sexuality in Quicksand within the early twentieth-century context of the Great Migration―one of the major demographic transformations in the US race history―including consumerism, and Black Nativism. Helga’s search for her own subjectivity discloses how the homogeneous black patriarchy marginalized female African Americans, appropriating a black female body for political struggle and racial uplift, and her mobility and consumerist fetishism militate against social and cultural oppressions inscribed upon a black female body in the male-centered black community. Such representations of psychological conundrums and sexual cul-de-sac of African American women place Quicksand in the womanist tradition, echoing the social surveillance on a black female body in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which sexuality without apology is not allowed. Through the inner psychological turbulence of Helga, whose sexual desire is always deferred, Larsen criticizes a world where female sexuality can be sanctioned only within heterosexual black patriarchy.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 Barnett, Pamela E., "‘My Picture of You is, After All, the True Helga Crane’: Portraiture and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand" 20 (20): 575-600, 1995

2 Barbeito, Patricia Felisa, "‘Making Generations’ in Jacobs, Larsen, and Hurston: A Genealogy of Black Women’s Writing" 70 (70): 365-395, 1998

3 McLendon, Jacquelyn Y, "The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen" Virginia UP 1995

4 Scheper, Jeanne, "The New Negro Flaneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand" 42 (42): 679-695, 2008

5 Tolnay, Stewart E, "The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond" 29 : 209-232, 2003

6 Hostetler, Ann E, "The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand" 105 : 35-46, 1990

7 Du Bois, W. E. B., "Review of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and Melville Herskovits’ The American Negro" 35 : 202-, 1928

8 Carby, Hazel, "Reconstructing Womanhood : The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist" Oxford UP 1987

9 Larsen, Nella, "Quicksand and Passing" Rutgers UP 2002

10 Macharia, Keguro, "Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand" 57 (57): 254-275, 2011

11 Carby, Hazel, "Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context" 18 (18): 738-755, 1992

12 Karl, Allissa G, "Modernism and the Marketplace : Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen" Routeledge 2009

13 Goldsmith, Meredith, "Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s" Northeastern UP 263-290, 2003

14 Larson, Charles R, "Invisible Darkness : Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen" U of Iowa P 1993

15 Tate, Claudia, "Domestic Allegories of Political Desire : The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century" Oxford UP 1992