Abstract
Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) opens with an epigraph from Langston Hughes’s poem “Cross”:
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
In this poem, the reader knows the race of the “old man” and “ma” based on where the “old man” and “ma” live, in a “fine big house” and a “shack” respectively. There is an emphasis not only on gender as a defining characteristic that inscribes the fate of the “old man” and “ma” but, by clarifying where they live, Hughes demonstrates who these people are without having to literally express their race. Magazine culture of the 1920s and 1930s shows a similar emphasis on place: though removed from the horrors of slavery, these publications operated with the principle that where one lives defines one’s socio-economic position. It is through these publications that we can read Larsen’s main character, Helga Crane. Considering Quicksand in the context of these publications, specifically fashion magazines and publications produced by and for black readers in this period, affords us a unique opportunity to explore connections between mass visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance novel in the late 1920s.
This title comes from Quicksand when Helga Crane begins to settle into her new life in Denmark: “Always had she wanted, not money, but the things which only could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things” (97).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Works cited
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Things. Ed. Bill Brown. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. 1–16.
Carroll, Anne Elizabeth. Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern.” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 1022–41.
Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004.
Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996.
“An Exquisite Town House.” Harper’s Bazaar Jan. 1928: 93.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
“Frank R. Smith Furniture of the Better Kind.” The Messenger Jul. 1918.
Goldsmith, Meredith. “Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Consumer Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen.” Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Eds. Joan Shelley Rubin, Lisa Botshon, and Meredith Goldsmith. Ann Arbor: Northeastern UP, 2003. 263–90.
Johnson, Barbara. “The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut.” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 252–65.
Larsen, Nella. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. New York: Anchor, 2001.
Nadell, Martha Jane. Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
“Properties and Real Estate.” The Messenger May 1924.
“Society.” Harper’s Bazar Jan. 1920: 90.
Wall, Cheryl A. “Passing for What?: Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels.” Black American Literature Forum 20.1/2 (1986): 97–111.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Lauren M. Rosenblum
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rosenblum, L.M. (2013). “Things. Things. Things”: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and the Beauty of Magazine Culture. In: Hinnov, E.M., Harris, L., Rosenblum, L.M. (eds) Communal Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274915_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274915_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44592-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27491-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)