Larsen, Nella

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Nella Larsen

Born April 13, 1891

Chicago, Illinois

Died March 30, 1964

American novelist

Nella Larsen struggled all her life with the question of where she belonged—in the black world or the white.

In the course of only a few years Nella Larsen produced two of the most accomplished novels of the Harlem Renaissance, and she was considered one of the period's most promising authors. Her work reflects her own experiences as a biracial person (she was the daughter of a white mother and a black father), focusing on the issues of identity and belonging that she and others of mixed racial heritage faced. Larsen is credited with moving away from casting the biracial individual as a "tragic mulatto," a common practice in nineteenth-century novels, and achieving more complex portrayals. Critics also praise her sensitive explorations of the problems of women (especially black women) in search of fulfillment.

Caught between the black and white worlds

Not much is known about Larsen's early life. She was born in 1891 in Chicago, Illinois, to a Danish-American mother and a black father born in the Caribbean islands or West Indies. Her father died when she was two years old, and her mother soon married a white man of Danish ethnicity, like herself. Larsen grew up entirely surrounded by white people, including a half-sister whom she would later claim was embarrassed to have a biracial sibling.

It seems likely that as Larsen grew older she felt a need to associate with African Americans, for after finishing high school in Chicago she enrolled at Fisk University, one of the country's leading black schools. She attended Fisk from 1909 to 1910 but apparently felt uncomfortable in that all-black world and transferred to the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, where she studied science. Living in a society that was mostly segregated, Larsen was struggling with the question of where she belonged—in the black world or the white.

A nurse and librarian

Larsen returned to the United States in 1912 and entered a nursing course at Lincoln Hospital in New York City. After spending one year as a supervising nurse at Tuskegee Institute (the black trade and agricultural school founded by African American leader Booker T. Washington [1856–1915] in Alabama), Larsen worked for several years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital and for the New York City Department of Health. In 1921 she became a New York Public Library assistant, and two years later she completed the library's training course to become a librarian. She worked as a children's librarian at the 135th Street branch in Harlem from 1924 to 1926.

Meanwhile, back in May of 1919, Larsen had married a physicist named Elmer Imes and had become active in the Harlem social scene, even though she had a reserved personality and cultivated manners that made her seem standoffish. Her library work gave her easy access not only to the excellent black cultural material housed in the Schomburg Collection at the 135th Street branch but to the literary activities—such as book readings and discussions—that took place there. Always an avid reader and book collector, Larsen decided that she too would like to try her hand at writing.

A highly praised first novel

In January 1926 Larsen resigned her library position and devoted herself to the development of her writing skills; she started with short stories and then began working on a novel. Larsen's efforts were encouraged by two Harlem Renaissance leaders known for their support of promising black writers, Walter White (1893–1955; a black novelist himself and a top official of the NAACP) and Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964; a white critic, novelist, photographer and booster of African American culture). When Larsen finished her novel, Van Vechten sent the manuscript to his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. It was accepted and published as Quicksand in 1928.

Written in only six weeks (though Larsen claimed she had been thinking about it for five months), Quicksand concerns a restless, complex protagonist named Helga Crane who is, like her creator, the daughter of a Danish-American mother and a black father. The book chronicles Helga's search for happiness and satisfaction, beginning with her education in Chicago by a white uncle and her time spent teaching at Naxos, a small all-black school in the South. Impatient with the hypocrisy she witnesses there (and unconsciously in love with the school's principal), Helga returns to Chicago, where she meets a rich black woman who helps her find a job and a place to stay in Harlem. There, Helga experiences the comfortable, insulated life of the African American middle class, a life that she soon finds too limited and unsatisfying.

Next, Helga travels to Denmark to stay with her aunt and uncle. She meets a handsome, rather arrogant Danish painter who wants to marry her, but after two years she grows tired of being treated like an exotic curiosity. Helga returns to Harlem, where she feels desperate and lost until she has a religious experience in a storefront church. She marries the church's pastor, the overweight, uneducated Reverend Pleasant Green, and moves with him to Alabama, where she begins a seemingly endless cycle of childbearing. At the end of Quicksand, Helga is pregnant with her fifth child and seems unlikely to escape from the isolated, physically exhausting situation she has chosen.

Praise for Quicksand, then and now

At the time of its publication, Quicksand received positive reviews from publications both black (such as Crisis, Opportunity, and the Amsterdam News) and white (including the New York Times and the Saturday Review of Literature). Larsen's psychologically complex portrait of a woman caught between two races was praised by conservative critics like W.E.B. Du Bois—who, in a review in Crisis (quoted in David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue), called the novel "on the whole the best piece of fiction that Negro American has produced since the heyday of [nineteenth-century African American writer Charles] Chesnutt"—as well as more liberal ones like Alain Locke.

Later critics have continued to laud Larsen's depiction of Helga, especially her feelings of alienation and loneliness and her struggle to maintain her self-esteem. Still, many reviewers have found the novel's ending weak due to its ambiguity: is the reader supposed to see this conclusion as a tragedy, or is it the fate Helga has really been seeking all along?

Passing also earns acclaim

Larsen won the Harmon Foundation's (an organization founded to recognize and support black achievers in several categories) bronze medal for literature in 1928, and the next year proved even more eventful. In 1929 she became the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for creative writing, and her novel Passing was published. This novel focuses on the practice of light-skinned African Americans "passing" as white in order to attain acceptance and material security, and it explores the costs of such deception.

Passing features two contrasting main characters, both of them light-skinned black women: Irene Redfield (from whose perspective the story is told) is married to Brian, a successful—though restless and dissatisfied—black doctor, and enjoys a comfortable if somewhat dull life in Harlem; her old friend Clare Kendry, who pretends to be white, has married a jolly but racially prejudiced white man in order to avoid a life of poverty. Irene and Clare meet by chance, and Clare begins to make frequent visits into Harlem, drawn in by the warmth and familiarity of the black community but always fearing that her husband will discover her real identity. Just as Clare's husband bursts into a Harlem party, Clare falls seventeen floors from the window of the apartment where the party is being held. She may have fallen or taken her own life, but it is strongly suggested that she was pushed by Irene, who had felt threatened by the mutual attraction between Clare and Brian.

Once again, Larsen provides a modern, skillfully written perspective on an old issue, that of passing and the toll it takes on those who choose to hide their true racial identity. Larsen portrays the self-doubt, confusion, and loneliness experienced by those who pass and explores such themes as the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of the black middle class (who enjoy a comfortable existence while ignoring the suffering of less privileged blacks) and the dangers of both risk-taking and security-seeking behaviors. Critics responded to Passing much as they had to Quicksand, praising Larsen's narrative skill and grasp of character while faulting the novel's ambiguous ending, which leaves the readers very much in doubt about the author's real message.

Time in Europe leads to break with literary life

In 1930, funded by her Guggenheim fellowship, Larsen left for Spain and France, where she intended to work on several new writing projects. Just before her departure, she had to defend herself against a charge of plagiarism (claiming someone else's work as one's own) regarding her short story "Sanctuary." Although Larsen successfully cleared herself of guilt, the incident seems to have depleted her self-confidence. Her time in Europe was also marred by problems in her marriage. She started two novels while living overseas, but neither was ever completed.

After returning to the United States, Larsen attempted to salvage her marriage by moving to Nashville, Tennessee, where her husband was teaching. Apparently, she continued to write, but she did not publish anything else. In 1933 she was divorced from Elmer Imes and returned to New York. This time Larsen moved not to Harlem but to Greenwich Village, a community located closer to downtown Manhattan that was popular with artistic people. For a short time she associated with other writers, but eventually Larsen dropped out of the literary scene.

With the death of her former husband in 1941, Larsen was left without the financial support she had been receiving from him. She returned to nursing, working for the next twenty years as a night nurse and supervising nurse in various Manhattan hospitals and leading a very quiet life. She died at the age of seventy-two, just before the revival of interest in Harlem Renaissance writers that took place during the 1960s. Recognizing her as a significant talent, many critics and readers regret that Larsen produced only two novels in her short writing career.

For More Information

Books

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Doyle, Sister Mary Ellen. "The Heroines of Black Novels." In Perspectives onAfro-American Women. Edited by Willa Johnson and Thomas Green. Washington, DC: ECCA Publishers, 1975, pp. 112–25.

Fuller, Hoyt. Introduction to Passing, by Nella Larsen. New York: Collier, 1971, pp. 10–24.

Hill, Adelaide C. Introduction to Quicksand, by Nella Larsen. New York: Collier, 1971, pp. 9-17.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Sato, Hirako. "Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen." In Harlem Renaissance Remembered. Edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.