Helga Crane Reconsidered: An Intellectual Experience with Essentialism in Quicksand
Helga Crane Reconsidered: An Intellectual Experience with Essentialism in Quicksand

Summary/Abstract: The themes of quest for racial identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and the protagonist’s struggle with dual identity are the most commonly discussed topics in countless critical articles over the past twenty years. However, Larsen’s portrayal of Helga Crane’s struggle to find an identity as a woman of mixed race serves to demonstrate that her issue is mainly with how society is essentialist. The primary goal of Quicksand is to demonstrate the fluidity of identity. With the challenges that the protagonist faces in the story, Larsen vividly demonstrated that identity is relentlessly changing. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that the reductionist nature of different forms of essentialism causes many people continuous suffering. In other words, Larsen deploys the mulatto figure as a useful critical tool to explore how society is immersed in essentializing categories of race, class, gender and sexuality.

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