Helga and the Illusion of Healing and Integration

Quicksand by Nella Larsen ties various symbols of femininity and masculinity to race by creating ties between Helga’s black side to masculinity and tying her white side to femininity. She builds upon Helga’s relationship to symbols of femininity and masculinity throughout the novel as the story follows her journey to finding her place in the world as a mixed woman. While in Naxos and Harlem, Helga attempts to connect with the black side of herself, which is often tied to her masculinity as her dad is black, but ultimately separates herself from this world, finding herself feeling disgusted by the black people in America and feeling disconnected from them as someone who is also white. While in Copenhagen with her mother’s side of the family, Helga attempts to fit into a white community, often tied to her femininity. However, again she dislikes the environment there, wanting to return to America because she can’t express herself as a black woman in Copenhagen. While Helga’s journey between two separate worlds of race and masculinity/femininity is interesting by itself, I want to delve deeper the healing with the feminine/masculine and integration steps of the heroine’s journey and how they fit into Helga’s final experiences in the novel, ultimately leading to tragedy rather than true integration of the two sides.

By the end of the novel, Helga finds herself putting her faith into Christianity and the Lord Himself. She ends up marrying a preacher, and throughout these scenes, we see Helga fall into very traditional roles of femininity that she previously had not shown. Helga starts a family and begins to enjoy traditionally feminine roles in the house. She states, “She [Helga] meant to subdue the cleanly scrubbed ugliness of her own surroundings to soft inoffensive beauty, and to help the other women to do likewise. Too, she would help them with their clothes, tactfully point out that sunbonnets, no matter how gay, and aprons, no matter how frilly, were not quite the proper things for Sunday church wear. There would be a sewing circle. She visualized herself instructing the children, who seemed most of the time to run wild, in ways of gentler deportment” (Larsen 110). Before marrying the preacher, Helga seemed to hate the idea of marriage and motherhood, as shown by her opposition to marrying Olsen and lack of interest in having children. Overall, she is generally detached from traditional feminine symbols. However, when Helga begins to live with the preacher, this initial depiction of her shifts very suddenly, as if Helga pushed herself into this role in an attempt to fit herself into traditional femininity. She acts as if she truly enjoys her life this way, but it is such a drastic change from her previous actions that it feels forced and unnatural.

But why is this so? Helga willingly and quite enthusiastically decides to marry the preacher and has five children with him, all under the impression that she has finally found her place and happiness. It is like she is under an illusion of a perfect world. Helga describes her newfound joy in her more traditional feminine role and states, “There was a recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she had found a place for herself, that she was really living. And she had her religion, which in her new status as a preacher’s wife had of necessity become real to her” (Larsen 109). Helga feels at peace with finding her place in the world as a mixed race woman—or so it seems. This feeling and experience for Helga really isn’t new. Throughout the novel, Helga is often in a cycle of feeling at home and then suddenly hating her new found home, wanting to move somewhere else instead. This cycle happens to her in Naxos, then in Harlem, and in Copenhagen too. Now, she has found a new place back in America with a preacher, and it’s only a matter of time before she starts to hate her place here too. She begins to hate her husband and this new life she jumped into. She had adored her children and found her husband to be kind, but eventually, she became disgusted at the disorder around her. She is in a cycle of hasty decisions that lead her nowhere that feels like home. She constantly lives in an illusion, never truly healing with the feminine or the masculine. At one point, she had identified more with masculinity in not wanting marriage, not wanting children, being more bold and independent. Then, she had abruptly identified with more feminine roles and motherhood. But in the end, she is not truly at peace with either side, nor does she find a way to find peace in both. Helga seems disconnected from both masculinity and femininity no matter how hard she tries, the same way she is disconnected from the black and white sides of her family.

Helga’s “healing” through her marriage becomes an illusion of integrating with the feminine and masculine, which Larsen tactfully ties to the failure of integration between white and black communities (or, really, the integration of the black community in America into the white one). When Helga begins to hate her marriage, she also begins to dislike her faith in her religion. She reflects on her sudden, intense devotion to the Lord, realizing that she had used it to shield herself from the tragedy that is the place of black people in America (Larsen 123). The text states, “And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole [black] race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this child-like trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in ‘kingdom come’” (Larsen 123). Through this ending of the novel, Larsen depicts a failure of healing with the feminine and masculine and a failure of integration. It all ends in tragedy, and the cycle only continues. Helga’s marriage becomes a tragic attempt at integration of the masculine and feminine—an “illusion” and another hasty decision she made in vain. But Larsen also turns it into a larger commentary on the dynamics between white and black communities in America.

The ending of Quicksand is certainly a tragedy because of how Helga can’t heal with the masculine or feminine or heal with the white or black parts of herself because of her place in the world as a mixed race woman. Because she is mixed, it is much harder for her to relate to either race, and the only option for her is to keep the two worlds separate. That is her reality. Her relationship with masculinity and femininity seems to be similar, given her experience with her marriage. It’s always either one or the other for Helga rather than integration. Any attempt at integration only results in illusion and tragedy, and this cycle of illusions makes sense for the heroine’s journey (and any hero’s journey). The journey is never one straight line; it is always a series of cycles, whether that be upward cycles that ultimately lead to progress or cycles of illusions.