Helga Crane's Copenhagen: Denmark, Colonialism, and Transnational Identity in Nella

Larsen's "Quicksand"
Author(s): Arne Lunde and Anna Westerstahl Stenport
Source: Comparative Literature , Summer, 2008, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Summer, 2008), pp. 228-
243
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon

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ARNE LUNDE & ANNA WESTERSTAHL STENPORT

Helga Crane's Copenhagen

Denmark, Colonialism,
and Transnational Identity
in Nella Larsen's Quicksan
HIS 1993 BOOK The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness,
Gilroy posits an as yet open and unanswered question: "What of Nella La
relationship to Denmark?" (18). Although she fell into obscurity relatively
after the publication of her last novel in 1929, today Larsen ranks with Langst
Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as one of the major writers of the Harlem Ren
sance. Indeed, Larsen's two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and Passing in 1929, a
only complex expressions of African-American racial and gender identity
twenties but also important modernist experiments. However, although r
scholarship has explored how black Atlantic culture transcends conventiona
nic and national boundaries by studying, among other topics, twentieth-ce
African Americans (Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and
Baldwin, for example) who moved to Europe - and especially to Franc
escape American racism, Gilroy's question has mostly remained under the
ical radar. The fact that the entire middle section of Larsen's Quicksand
in Copenhagen has only made this canonical Harlem Renaissance work m
enigmatic and problematic for many critics. In a novel whose first and last th
explore its protagonist's Odyssey through very different parts of black Ameri
the 1920s, what is the significance of Helga Crane's two-year detour (in th
center of the novel) to a small Scandinavian capital city? In this article, we
the implications of this critical oversight in order to indicate that there m
much more to Helga Crane's relationship to Denmark than previously not
Quicksand, Larsen critiques a lingering silence with respect to Denmark's
flicted relationship to its own colonial past. At the same time, Larsen iden
as an artist with several of the major figures of the Scandinavian Modernist Br
through movement of the late nineteenth century - most notably Jens Peter
sen and Henrik Ibsen.

Most Larsen scholarship of the past three decades has defined her as, first and
foremost, an African-American writer who played an essential role in the aesthetic
and literary rethinking of race and class that characterized the Harlem Renais-
sance. Larsen's Danish origins (Danish-European, Danish-Afro-Caribbean, and

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY & NELLA LARSEN / 229

Danish-American) and her self-identification with her Danish ethnic background

are elements that Larsen scholarship has tended either to dismiss or gloss over.
Indeed, several key Larsen scholars (Thadious Davis, Cheryl Wall, and Charles
Larson) have either doubted or denied that Larsen ever traveled to Denmark at
all, let alone lived there for several years. As a result, her journeys to Denmark
have sometimes been read as fantasy projections. Given the challenges of recov-
ering surviving records and Larsen's own tendency towards self-mythologizing,
this approach has not been entirely unjustified. But the impulse to suppress Lar-
sen's Danish family ties and her direct experiences in Scandinavia may also have
resulted from a desire (whether conscious or not) to secure her status within a
feminist, African-American literary canon, a status that Larsen's own identifica-
tion with her "Nordic" side and Danish roots threatens to destabilize.
Efforts to expand Larsen's canonical Harlem Renaissance identity in trans-
national directions are now changing the field of Larsen scholarship. George
Hutchinson's extensive scholarship on Larsen's Danish connections (most recently
in his 2006 work In Search of Nella Larsen) have been especially transformative. In
the 1990s, Hutchinson discovered ship's records that prove that Larsen's mother
Marie took Nella and her white half-sister Anna on an extended trip to Denmark
to visit relatives in 1898, when Nella was seven years old ("Nella Larsen and the
Veil of Race"). And it is now virtually certain that Larsen did live in Denmark
between 1909 and 1912 (see also Hutchinson, "Racial Labyrinth" and "Subject").
Such evidence helps support a transnational, pan-ethnic way of looking at Larsen's
authorship, one that acknowledges her Scandinavian heritage as much as the art-
ist did herself. Within Denmark, Nella Larsen has remained almost completely
unknown until quite recently, and Quicksand has not yet been translated into Dan-
ish. But as Martyn Bone has shown, Danish students studying Quicksand in today's
multiethnic, multicultural Denmark find extensive connections between Larsen's
representations of race in Copenhagen and their own experiences. Moreover,
the international conference "Denmark and the Black Atlantic" at the University
of Copenhagen in May 2006 has already proved pivotal to further investigations of
Larsen's relationship to Denmark - from its keynote address by George Hutchin-
son, to a walking tour of Larsen's Copenhagen and several panels dealing with
Denmark and race (in one of which the authors presented an earlier version of
this article).
The present study makes two interrelated arguments. In the article's first sec-
tion, we argue that the novel's Denmark scenes contain within them a structuring
absence. Denmark's own vexed attitudes (pride, glorification, shame, and amne-
sia) toward its colonial heritage in the Danish West Indies (which was sold to the
United States in 1917) and the nation's role in the black Atlantic slave trade haunt
the text in ways that have not been sufficiently interrogated. Although the novel's
main character, Helga Crane, rarely speaks her mind to the white Danes in the
novel, the text employs sophisticated narrative focalization strategies to convey
suppressed and denied tensions of racism and xenophobia, particularly in the
novel's middle chapters set in Copenhagen. The novel's silence (its present
"absence" if you will) about the Danish colonial legacy thus parallels the Danish
public silence regarding its own colonial heritage in the early twentieth century.
Second, we argue that Quicksand functions as an early modernist prose text within

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 230

not only an African-American context but also a Scandinavian-American one.

Quicksand makes many explicit and implicit references to Scandinavian literary
modernism, including the legacy of Jens Peter Jacobsen, Henrik Ibsen, and what
Georg Brandes has called the Modern Breakthrough movement. Larsen read
widely in Scandinavian literature, and Quicksand's Helga Crane has more than a
passing resemblance to Jacobsen's and Ibsen's most self-conflicted protagonists:
Niels Lyhne and Hedda Gabler respectively. These elements reveal not only Lar-
sen's familiarity with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scandinavian
culture, but also her active engagement with Scandinavian modernism, in order
to shape a new kind of transnational, trans-racial modernism. Therefore, Lar-
sen's absence thus far from even a loose definition of a "Scandinavian-American

canon" - one that includes works by Ole R0lvaag, Vilhelm Moberg, and even
Willa Cather - seems especially glaring.
Nella Larsen's family history indicates the triangulating and transnational rela-
tionships we are exploring. Born to a Danish mother, with a father of color from
the Danish West Indies, Larsen grew up as the stepdaughter of a white Danish
immigrant on the south side of Chicago in neighborhoods that included large
Scandinavian and German ethnic populations. After attending high school at
the all-black Fisk Normal School in Nashville, she spent the period 1909-1912
in Copenhagen, after which she returned to New York City to study nursing. It is
unclear how much subsequent contact she had with her Danish relatives. By the
early 1920s, Larsen had begun to move in the upper classes of New York's black
society, was married to a prominent African-American physicist, Dr. Elmer S. Imes,
and had befriended influential people within the Harlem Renaissance movement.
Unlike many of her Harlem Renaissance compatriots, however, Nella Larsen
enjoyed only a brief period of literary productiveness and fame. Her second and
final novel, Passing, appeared in 1929, the year after Quicksand was published, and
Larsen traveled in southern Europe as the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in
1930-31 (she did not visit Denmark) . But she returned to the United States with-
out a completed manuscript, and, after a public divorce and gradual withdrawal
from friends, she eventually returned to nursing as a profession. As Hutchinson
shows, Larsen lived in almost complete anonymity in lower Manhattan from 1938
until her death in 1964 (In Search 452-82). Almost no personal papers remain.
Like its author, Quicksand's protagonist Helga Crane has a mixed racial heri-
tage, and the novel, which takes place in six different locations - Naxos College
in Georgia, Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, Harlem again, and rural Alabama -
shares many plot details with Larsen's life. The Copenhagen section (chap-
ters 12-17) occupies the novel's compositional center. The descriptions of Copen-
hagen (including the Tivoli Gardens, the Christiansborg and Amalienborg palaces,
Kongens Nytorv, the Folkemuseum, Gammelstrand, and the Circus vaudeville
house) are filled with period details and realistic observations, and the many accu-
rate depictions of street scenes, place names, language use, customs, and institu-
tions clearly corroborate Hutchinson's research on Larsen's first-hand familiarity
with Danish culture. Copenhagen is consistently contrasted with Harlem and its
noisy crowds: European "toylike streets" (97) and their "amazing orderliness" (109)
are juxtaposed to the "feverish rush" (124) of the New York that Helga has just
left behind. Helga also remarks on the widespread practice of bicycling in

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY 8c NELLA LARSEN / 231

Copenhagen. The young Fr0kken Crane quickly learns to dodge the velocipeds
like a "true Copenhagener" (105).
In the novel's early chapters, Helga's memories of growing up a miserable and
often-despised mulatta on the south side of Chicago, as well as her impressions of
the stifling racial conventions at the all-black college where she is teaching in
Naxos, are countered by impressions of the fairy-tale-like tranquility and charm -
seemingly inspired by one of Hans Christian Andersen's stories - of her time in
Copenhagen as a child. Indeed, after socializing with a black coterie of intellectu-
als and artists in Harlem - and before arriving in Copenhagen - Helga indulges
in "daydreams of a happy future in Copenhagen, where there were no Negroes, no
problems, no prejudice" (87). Curiously, Helga's phantasmagoria of an all-white,
ethnically homogeneous stability far from a conflicted heterogeneous America
contradicts not only Denmark's history as a colonial power and involvement in the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, but also the documented presence of Afro-Caribbeans
in early twentieth-century Copenhagen.
The Danish West Indies was colonized in 1666 and ruled by Denmark for three
and a half centuries until it was sold to the United States in 1917 and renamed the
Virgin Islands. Although these three islands (especially Saint Thomas) played a
vital role in the black Atlantic's Middle Passage and the transfer of slaves, goods,
and capital in the eighteenth century and beyond, Denmark's legacy as a slave
trader and colonizer continues to be overlooked. Denmark imported 1,000 slaves
annually from Africa to the West Indies until the trade was abolished in 1803. At
that time, however, 35,000 African slaves remained on the islands, where slavery
continued until 1848 under unusually harsh rule. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the Danish West Indies had become a significant problem for Denmark's
agrarian-based economy. The islands did not produce enough sugar cane and
other cash crops to provide their own subsistence, and workers' uprisings and calls
for civic justice and freedom of the press indicated a growing unrest. By 1902,
their toll on the Danish mainland economy prompted the Danish government to
establish a commission to make the islands profitable again.
Very few Danes who were not in military or governmental positions related to
the colony would have visited the West Indies or would have had familiarity with
the region. In fact, while Danish may have been an official language, it was rarely
spoken in the commercial and public life of the West Indies, which mostly used
a Creole drawing on English, Dutch, and, to a limited extent, Danish. The colony's
presence in Danish newspapers, illustrated journals, and public discourse was also
quite limited by the year 1900, perhaps because the Danish West Indies did not
figure into Grundtvigisim, a construction of Danishness based on a "farmer's class
ideology" (0stergard 23) that emphasized small-scale capitalist entrepreneurship,
self-reliance, and community and was widely promoted in Danish public discourse
at the time. Nevertheless, a parliamentary referendum in 1903 to sell the colony
failed because of "strong nationalistic sentiments" ("A Brief History"). The Danish
West Indies thus seems to have functioned in the Danish public's awareness as an
abstractly remote but symbolically important satellite of Danish national ideology,
a status reflected by the coexistence of a general disinterest in the rapidly deterio-
rating conditions on the islands with efforts to preserve the national value of the
enterprise.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 232

Organized at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, the Colonial Exhibition of 1905

was promoted as an explicit attempt to raise the public awareness and support of
the colonies. The author Emma Gad, a women's rights activist and close friend
of the Brandes family, was instrumental in organizing the exhibition. Former
Afro-Caribbean slaves from the West Indies and their descendants were brought
to Copenhagen, along with artifacts and items from the islands and from other
Danish colonies, mostly in West Africa (Kildegaard 152-64). After the exhibi-
tion, it became increasingly common for Copenhagen families to employ Afri-
can servants and nannies, some from the West Indies, which presumably led to a
fairly substantial presence, clearly coded in terms of class, of Danes of color in
the city - a situation much like that in Copenhagen during the 1760 monarchy,
when "the number of Afro-Caribbeans in service to the Danish aristocracy and
the moneyed bourgeoisie numbered in the many hundreds, largely as a conse-
quence of the scale of Danish involvement in Saint Thomas and Saint Croix
(Hansen, cited in Pred 63).
At the time of Nella Larsen's second stay in Denmark (from 1909 until 1912),
the presence of the Danish West Indies in the public imagination had increased,
as had deliberations about the status of the colony and the conditions of its Afri-
can population. The illustrated journal Verden ogvi, for example, ran a series of
articles on the Danish West Indies in 1912. Quicksand's depiction of Helga as not
only an anomaly, but also a prize trophy of her wealthy Aunt Katrina and Uncle
Poul indicates an intriguing perspective on Larsen's part. As a surrogate daughter,
the twenty-three-year-old Helga becomes the toast of the town's social elite. Lar-
sen reveals, however, an unspoken racialized tension around Helga's presence in
Denmark. While Katrina and Poul Dahl love their niece, they also exploit her as a
tool to "advance their social fortunes" (98). The novel stresses Helga's exoticism,
and her costuming, make-up, and jewelry are all strategically selected by her aunt
to show Helga off to the best possible effect in high society. As Katrina tells her:
"you're young. And a foreigner, and different" (98).
Helga is in such passages presented as a cosmopolitan, delocalized foreigner
of dark complexion; she is not explicitly coded as European-American, African-
American, or Afro-Caribbean, but, rather, as a generally exoticized and eroticized
Other. This strategy is critical to the multi-layered complexity of Quicksand's
Copenhagen sections for a number of reasons. As Hutchinson argues, "Larsen's
uses of Copenhagen pointedly revise the uses of Europe as an interracial haven
in earlier American novels" (In Search 235). Taking Hutchinson's observation one
step further into a triangulated black Atlantic context, one can also detect an
attempt to confront a transnational, transracial Denmark with its colonial bonds
to the Danish West Indies. Compared to the Jazz Age Harlem of the novel, Lar-
sen's Copenhagen exists as a kind of pre-First World War utopia (see Hutchin-
son, In Search 69) rather than within the mid-1920's cultural setting of the rest of
the novel. Quicksand's Copenhagen is thus temporally dislocated and projected
back in time. It clearly hides the presence of the Danish West Indies in Danish cul-
tural discourse during a period of domestic debate that led to its sale to the United
States in 1917.

In penning a personal blurb for the submission of Quicksand to Knopf in 1926,

Larsen acknowledges her family connection to the colony straightforwardly,

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY 8c NELLA LARSEN / 233

describing herself as "a mulatto, the daughter of a Danish lady and a Negro from
the Virgin Islands, formerly the Danish West Indies" (Hutchinson, In Search 222).
Quicksand obliquely gestures to Denmark's abstract pride in its colonies: "If you've
got any brains at all they came from your father" (78), her aunt Katrina Dahl tells
Helga. While this statement is "a pointed contradiction to American racial views
of so-called mulattos" (Hutchinson, In Search 233), it also addresses the colony's
function as a source of Danish pride in the early twentieth century, whereas Amer-
ican popular culture, on the other hand, is openly degraded. For example, Fru
Dahl's society friend Fru Fischer perceives American jazz as an alien threat to
Danish national culture. She prefers instead "the good old-fashioned Danish mel-
odies of Gade and Heise. Which reminds me, Herr Olsen says that Nielsen's Helios
is being performed with great success just now in England" (110). In Quicksand
Europe "does not offer freedom from racism; it merely displays a different kind of
racism" (Hutchinson, In Search 235). This racism, however, is tied not merely to
Denmark proper but also to its colonial and slave trade legacy.
The Dahls themselves are obtuse about and indifferent to the social, political,
and historical ramifications of Denmark's own historical involvement in the slave
trade and its still fresh imperial memories of the Danish West Indies. Nor do they
ever acknowledge their own ambivalent relationship to racial and ethnic differ-
ences. Aunt Katrina, for example, does not want to talk about mixed-race identity
and miscegenation as possible problems in Denmark. When her niece asks her if
she "didn't think, really, that miscegenation was wrong, in fact as well as principle,"
her aunt replies, "Don't be a fool, Helga [ . . . ] We don't think of those things here.
Not in connection with individuals, at least" (108). Helga is meanwhile consistently
placed on display like an exotic and sexualized trophy. Decked out in one outfit
after another, each more extravagant and revealing than the last, Helga appreci-
ates the attention, but the narrative also calls attention to the bondage in which it
puts her. At one point Helga says to herself that, although she accepted a gift of
earrings, "she escaped the bracelets" (99), as if thereby escaping shackles. These
metaphors of slavery and bondage do not refer only to the history of slavery and
African-American culture in the United States, which previous Larsen scholarship
has largely understood as a predominant context for Quicksand. Instead, the novel
opens up some tantalizing possibilities for alternate readings, not for construing a
fantasy of racial equality in Denmark, but perhaps for construing a fantasy of class
travel, of imagining Denmark as the stable nation of deep pride in Grundtvigian,
or middle-class entrepreneurial, values.
Hutchinson's research has shown that Nella Larsen was born in Chicago's
impoverished south side, where many destitute immigrants, Scandinavian and
otherwise, ended up. This area was also the "Western hemisphere's most infamous
red-light district" {In Search 15), a mixed-race area with several well-known "bawdy
houses where white women were kept for the pleasure of Negro men" (Herbert
Ashbury, as cited in Hutchinson, In Search 16). Housing and census records are
contradictory regarding Larsen's parents, but the bleak circumstances in which
Larsen was born are foregrounded by Hutchinson. Larsen's mother emigrated
from the rural borderlands of Denmark and Prussia {In Search 17); she probably
came to the United States strictly for economic reasons, since rural poverty and
the exploitation of Danish landless peasants in this region was rampant at the

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 234

end of the nineteenth century (0stergard 23). Traveling alone as a teenager, she
was not welcomed to the United States by wealthy Danish relatives or contacts. She
took the train, like many Scandinavian immigrants, to Chicago, where she most
likely was working as a servant or dress-maker when she met Nella's father, who
probably had some familiarity with spoken Danish from the Danish West Indies,
and, as a cook and laborer, presumably had at least periods of stable income
(Hutchinson, In Search 18-19). It is also possible that Larsen's mother, like other
young immigrant women, was one of many "'women adrift' [who] formed liaisons
with men out of sheer necessity" (19).
Hutchinson does not speculate about the relationship between Larsen's parents,
but the geographical area in which they lived makes it possible that Larsen's mother
had some familiarity with the plight of young immigrant Scandinavian-American
women who had to work as prostitutes in combination with other jobs. Even legiti-
mate employers at the time "admitted that they did not pay women enough to live
on" (Hutchinson, In Search 18). Combining prostitution with another form of "legit-
imate" employment (dress-making, for example) was also common for working-
class women in Scandinavia at this time (see Melby, Sandström, and Schi0tz) . Such
bleak and harsh conditions are conspicuously absent in Quicksand's Chicago and
Copenhagen sections. In Chicago, for example, Helga visits her well-to-do uncle
(Larsen herself had no such wealthy, established Danish relatives) and leisurely
shops in the exclusive up-town areas around Michigan Avenue.
The jewels, clothes, entertainment, delicacies, and other luxuries associated
with Helga's relatives in Copenhagen are important markers of their class and
social capital. Yet, despite their apparent wealth, the Dahls reside in an apartment
at "Maria Kirkplads" (which is actually spelled "Kirkeplads" in Copenhagen), a
middle- but not upper-class area at the time. Between visits to literary salons and
social gatherings, Helga also frequents distinctly working-class areas of Copenha-
gen, such as the fish market at Gammelstrand, and she comments on the poverty
she sees, although in Copenhagen it is "white," "neat," and "washed" (105). Helga's
sophistication is in addition repeatedly juxtaposed to the crude remarks of ser-
vants and working-class Copenhageners who gawk at Den Sorte ("the Black One")
(103), a Danish expression retained in Larsen's English text.
Aunt Katrina seeks to capitalize on Helga's sophistication and quietly pushes
for a marriage between her and the well-known painter Axel Olsen, since such
a marriage would further elevate the family's social status. At a society party in
Copenhagen, Axel Olsen flamboyantly enters and immediately takes stock of the
silent Helga on display, appraising her as though she were for sale. His utter-
ances of approval ("Superb eyes . . . color . . . neck column . . . yellow . . . hair . . .
alive . . . wonderful") not only anatomize Helga as an artist's model but also echo
the words of a buyer pricing the value of a slave being sold at the auction block
(101). Finding her quite suitable to his tastes, he agrees to paint her portrait -
which is a great social coup for the Dahls. Although Olsen's painting of Helga
stirs significant interest at the annual exhibition, Helga herself describes the
work as "some disgusting sensual creature with all her features" (119). For Helga,
the painting reveals Olsen's vision of her as a primitive, sexual, jungle princess, a
vision which violates her own self-image as a prim, urban sophisticate. Quicksand's
many intriguing layers of class, gender, and racial tension all come together in

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY & NELLA LARSEN / 235

these Copenhagen sections. Within the universe of the novel, Helga is at once a
unique and prized possession, and a foreigner whose alluring dark skin symbol-
izes a curiously delocalized and exotic "Africa" (117), which relates specifically
neither to the United States nor to the Danish West Indies (see also Barnett, Hos-
tetler, Silverman, and Sherrard-Johnson) .
These tensions become even more explicit when Olsen, whose attempts to
secure Helga as his mistress have been discretely ignored by Helga over a period
of months, unexpectedly proposes marriage. As Helga considers accepting, how-
ever, Olsen reveals his true colors, telling her that "'You have the warm impulsive
nature of the women of Africa, but my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a prosti-
tute. You sell yourself to the highest buyer. I should of course be happy that it is I.
And I am'" (117). Helga rejects Olsen's marriage proposal with a retort that
objects to the racialized and sexualized stereotypes on which Olsen's comments
are based. She indicates that she is not for sale - either as a prostitute or as a vic-
tim of slavery (117).
Despite the implications of Helga's reply, however, Quicksand engages more spe-
cifically with racial tensions than with sexualized ones. Uncle Poul cannot under-
stand Helga's reasons for refusing to marry Olsen and wanting to leave for Amer-
ica. He says: "It isn't as if there are hundreds of mulattoes here. [ . . . ] You're
unique here, don't you see? [ . . . ] Helga, it isn't this foolishness about race. Not
here in Denmark. You've never spoken about it before. It can't be just that?" (120) .
Helga doesn't answer and breaks into tears. Her inability to engage in the lan-
guage of the sophisticated Dane is also coded as an inability to express the trans-
national, multi-racial particularities of her situation, one that her uncle cannot
understand and one that the Danish language would have no immediate way
of expressing. Quicksand, it seems, searches for ways not only to engage with an
African-American experience of race, as most scholars have pointed out, but also
to invoke very explicitly the predicament of one Scandinavian-American's return
to the homeland, a Scandinavian-American who speaks the home-country's lan-
guage reasonably fluently in adulthood but who looks, in the case of the fictional
Helga, distinctly different. In a fleeting use of a focalized perspective, the nar-
rative makes manifest what Uncle Poul is thinking, but not uttering: "She was
weeping. Charming, yes. But insufficiently civilized. Impulsive. Imprudent. Self-
ish" (121). Helga's silences contribute to this impasse in mutual comprehension.
Although in other instances the novel presents her as quite adept at spoken Dan-
ish, here her "slow, faltering Danish" (103) suggests a reluctance to speak a tongue
that is both imperial and, perhaps, uncomfortably associated not only with racial-
ized power hierarchies embedded in a socio-historical context of the black Atlan-
tic, but also with those involved in a sexualized economics of prostitution.
The silences of Quicksand are also the silences of class, gender, displacement,
and migration, in which a returning African-American woman, who is also
Scandinavian-American, silently indulges in a phantasmagoric reconstruction of
the homeland as a return to a life of leisure, refinement, admiration, and unique-
ness. Yet Helga's ambivalent reactions toward those who seem to represent that
paradigm (the Dahls and Olsen) clearly suggest its instability. Helga's construed
uniqueness is also clearly marked by class: in this Copenhagen upper-class set-
ting she is aestheticized as racially abstract and exotic, rather than identified as

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 236

belonging to a small, but nevertheless present, group of servant blacks of Afri-

can or Afro-Caribbean descent.

Because Helga's ostensible role as a sophisticated cosmopolitan who enter

an exclusive upper-class paradigm contrasts starkly with the experiences of
most Scandinavian-Americans returning to the homeland, it may represent a
re-imagining of Larsen's memories of being taken for a servant in Copenhagen
Alternately, Larsen might have had to serve much more mundane functions in
her relatives' household, if their place of domicile, like the Dahl's in Quicksand
was indeed located in the middle-class area around Maria Kirkeplads, and if,
perhaps, they also associated the young Larsen with the infamous red-light dis
trict of Chicago, where her mother gave birth to her. As Hutchinson suggests
Helga's relatives are "almost credible" {In Search 69). In short, although the city
locations are largely accurate, their inhabitants seem fictionalized to a signifi-
cant extent.

When Larsen composed Quicksand in 1926, at the height of the Ha

sance, she was part of a bohemian coterie. She was a good friend
Vechten, the white author of the 1926 Harlem Renaissance novel Ni
and she also associated with W. E. B. Du Bois and his circle. This cote
an aesthetic avant-garde and was explicitly interested in challenging ste
representations of race. Larsen's first published writings appeared in th
American children's magazine The Brownies' Book, an offshoot of
flagship journal, The Crisis, edited by Du Bois. Significantly, Larse
tions to the magazine were two essays on Danish children's games -
Three Scandinavian Games" and "Danish Fun" - which she herself had learned
first-hand in Denmark as a child. This context is important. Because Quicksand was
composed within and for this group of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, it is not
surprising that Larsen reconstructed parts of her experiences in Copenhagen to
reflect its political and aesthetic inclinations and address its interest in recon-
ceptualizing racial politics. It also helps to explain the novel's explicit challenges
to the export of facile, stereotypical images of African-American performers to
Europe.
Thus, although Helga is portrayed as an exoticized Other to be exhibited for
social and monetary profit (i.e., the wedding game played by her relatives), her
sexual innocence, especially in her relations with Olsen, also offers a very explicit
counter-example to the export of African-American sensuality that has striking
parallels to the expatriate performer Josephine Baker, who had moved to Paris
during the same period (see Wall 103-11). In a Harlem scene early in Quicksand
there is mention of "the advantages of living in Europe, especially in France"
and of "a favorite Negro dancer who had just secured a foothold on the stage of
a current white musical comedy" (83). These serve as oblique references to the
cult status of Josephine Baker in Paris at the time of Larsen's writing. Baker was
of course most famous, if not infamous, for her notorious Banana Dance and its
evocation of a wildly uninhibited jungle creature (see DeFalco).
What critics who mention the Josephine Baker parallels in Quicksand tend to
overlook, however, is that Baker's erotic cabaret performances were not only a
sensation in Paris, but played to rapt audiences in Copenhagen and Stockholm
as well. Scandinavians were clearly fascinated by Baker; a nude, bracelet-clad

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY 8c NELLA LARSEN / 237

Baker, for example, was featured on the cover of the Swedish magazine Vara
nöjen (issue Number 20 from 1927). The cover caption reads: "Josephine Baker,
Charlestondrottningen - parisarnas gunstling" or "Queen of the Charleston -
the Parisians' Favorite." In fact, Scandinavian fascination with Baker remained
strong from her first tours there in the summer of 1928 through subsequent
tours well into the 1950s, and, indeed, as Baker biographers have noted, it is dif-
ficult to separate fact from fiction in the performer's recollections of her Jazz
Age high life. For example, Baker told several versions of a story in which she and
the Swedish Crown Prince carried on a passionate love affair during the 1928
tour. In the version related by Baker's adopted son Jean-Claude Baker, she was
reportedly taken to the Royal Palace and "led through a secret door into a room
with a four-poster bed covered in precious furs. She lay down, naked, and the prince
summoned a servant who came in with a silver tray heaped with jewels, and one
by one, the prince covered Josephine's body with diamonds, emeralds, rubies.
Every time I go to Stockholm, someone tells me this story; it is now part of the
country's folklore" (159).
In Quicksand Larsen anticipates the kind of cultish sensation and upper-class
fascination Baker would attract in Copenhagen, yet Larsen formulates Helga's
reactions to such sensationalism very differently. Needless to say, Helga Crane is
quite the opposite of Baker. Helga's relatives and suitors, not her own desires, push
her to be ever more sensual and primitive. Likewise, because of Helga's bi-racial,
transnational identity, Olsen wrongly assumes her to be a sexualized Josephine
Baker-figure beneath the surface (see Gilman for a discussion of the threaten-
ing aspects of black female sexuality at this time). Between the lines of his pro-
posal, Olsen reveals his sublimated fantasy - playing the role of the slave-owning
colonizer - and Helga rebels against her assumed role in this sexualized colo-
nial economic exchange.
Later Helga recognizes another white fantasy of blackness. Along with her fam-
ily and Olsen, she goes to the great Circus, a vaudeville house in Copenhagen
(112). There a blackface minstrel act delights the crowd, much to Helga's discom-
fort: "Out upon the stage pranced two black men, American Negroes undoubt-
edly, for as they danced and cavorted, they sang in the English of America an old
ragtime song that Helga remembered hearing as a child" (112). That "these pink
and white people among whom she had lived had suddenly been invited to look
upon something she had hidden away and wanted to forget" (112) makes Helga
feel ashamed and betrayed. She returns alone to watch the two African-Americans,
who have "blacked up" with burnt cork, perform plantation blackness for a white
audience, and their performance unexpectedly changes her view of both the Danes
and her black biological father: "For the first time, Helga felt sympathy rather
than contempt and hatred for that father [...]. She understood, now, his rejec-
tion, his repudiation, of the formal calm her mother had represented. She under-
stood his yearning, his intolerable need for the inexhaustible humor and the inces-
sant hope of his own kind" (122). Inwardly and silently, Helga charts a new
transnational identity that draws on her subjective reactions to performances of
blackness for Scandinavian consumption: female exhibitions of blackness that
seem modeled on Josephine Baker and imperialist fantasies, and male perfor-
mances of blackface that can never be black enough.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 238

The many paradoxes attending Larsen's own life, as well as the experiences
of Helga in Quicksand, are further illustrated by the contrast between Larsen's
activities in Copenhagen and those of her characters. Larsen herself attended
lectures at Copenhagen University, kept up with the cultural news of the liberal
and intellectually engaged daily paper Politiken, and gained a broad acquain-
tance with the writing of Georg Brandes, J. P. Jacobsen, Henrik Ibsen, and per-
haps August Strindberg (Hutchinson, In Search 67, 73, and 225-26) . These intel-
lectual encounters are excluded from the plot in Quicksand, however. As an author,
Larsen adopts the position of the social outsider, much like her compatriots
of the Modern Breakthrough movement some decades earlier, and she writes
like "a Scandinavian modernist [who] foregrounds the snobbishness of the
Scandinavian bourgeoisie, their obsession with class status, and the role of the
exchange of women through marriage in cementing class ties" (Hutchinson,
In Search 235). There are several key connections between Quicksand and mod-
ern Scandinavian literature in the novel's themes, its tight formal construction,
and its reliance on a highly sophisticated aesthetic conceptualization, in order
to put "problems under debate," as Brandes so famously pronounced in his lec-
ture series at Copenhagen University. Indeed, Brandes's argument in the inau-
gural lecture of 1871 that the study of literature must be "comparative" along
national and linguistic boundaries, and that, in fact, a "national literature is com-
plete and well-rounded only if it presents the whole history of the thoughts and
feeling of its people" (383-84) seems to foreshadow the intervention of this
Scandinavian-American writer of Danish descent into the world of Scandina-
vian modernism.

Quicksand is both a canonical work of the Harlem Renaissance and a mod-

ernist novel of distinctly European vintage (see Doyle). For example, Larsen's
sophisticated but understated use of free indirect discourse calls to mindj. P.
Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne (1880), a Danish modernist novel that features, like Quick
sand, an aloof protagonist who is obsessively concerned with visually pleasing
objects and ideas about (though not necessarily productivity in) aesthetic repre
sentation, and who never seems quite able to make up his or her mind, take action,
and accomplish something that would grant him or her the cultural and monetary
capital he or she craves. In fact, there are several notable connections between
Larsen and Jacobsen. Larsen had recommended a translation of Jacobsen's real-
ist novel about rural poverty, Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), to Zora Neale Hurston,
who, as Jon Woodson argues, was strongly influenced by this work when compos-
ing Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). And as Davis notes, when in 1926 Larsen
wrote a long letter to the editor of Opportunity defending Walter White's critically
maligned novel Flight, she singled out Jacobsen as a crucial influence on the kind
of modernist literature and aesthetic directions that she, White, and other 1920
Harlem writers championed (202-03), including a naturalistic focus on the con-
temporary social moment and the rejection of both religion and philosophica
idealism.

The similarities between Quicksand and Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne are particularly
striking. Helga is a dreamer caught up in fantasies of erotic, aesthetic fulfill-
ment, yet shunning their material implications; Niels is a naïve "philosopher"
who rejects "the laws of thought" (23), an aspiring but ineffective poet "sick with

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY & NELLA LARSEN / 239

yearning actually to see all that art and beauty" (51). Both characters search for
self-fulfillment in aesthetic pursuits in different cultural settings and eventually
die prosaic deaths in poverty, far from their birth-place and social milieu. The
novels share intriguing formal similarities as well, combining long descriptive
passages, sometimes by a detached narrator, sometimes focalized, while devot-
ing a limited amount of time to plot events and plot progression. Like Larsen,
Jacobsen frequently employs free indirect discourse in Niels Lyhne to indicate the
distance between the novel's narrator and its main character, toward whom the
narrator is both critical and sympathetic. He also conveys his characters' basic con-
tradictions (just as Larsen would do later) through increasingly lyrical and meta-
phorical devices (Cokal 179 ff). Likewise, Jacobsen's female characters (Fru Boye
and Fennimore, in particular) generally react against their male counterparts'
over-inscription of their aestheticized and thereby idealized characteristics, and,
like Helga in Quicksand, rebel at being understood as artwork, designed for and
by male artists and viewers.
Quicksand's thematic and narrative affinity to Niels Lyhne is especially impor-
tant considering the other transnational legacies of Jacobsen's novel. It is well
known that Niels Lyhne inspired Rainer Maria Rilke's rewriting of Danish history
and provincialism in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and that Thomas Mann
found models for Tonio Kroger in Jacobsen's prose. Indeed, the transnational and
transcultural connections opened up by the intriguing similarities between Niels
Lyhne and Quicksand merit further investigation. We will here limit ourselves to
noting that by insisting, as Jacobsen does with respect to Niels, on the main char-
acter's inability to formulate her deepest feelings in words (see also Cokal 179),
Larsen underscores by linguistic suppression her main character's predicament.
Helga rarely speaks her thoughts and feelings openly in Quicksand, variations
on the terms "silence" and "quiet" abound in connection with her character, and
other characters infer through the use of free indirect discourse thoughts and
opinions about her person that are not explicitly uttered, as when Uncle Poul
rebuffs her for not accepting Olsen's marriage proposal (Larsen 121). In Quick-
sand, however, the use of free indirect discourse also reveals unexpected paral-
lels to the social moment in which the novel was composed. By silencing Helga
with respect to her relatives, Quicksand evokes both Denmark's historical role in
the global economy of the slave trade and its hidden racism. Helga's reticence,
in short, makes her a representative of the threatening, unknowable, and thereby
also aestheticized Other.
Connections to the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough movement inform
other aspects of Quicksand. Readers familiar with Scandinavian late-nineteenth-
century literature will immediately recognize that Larsen refers to An Enemy of
the People (1882) when, in Harlem, Helga must muster "all her self-control to keep
from tossing sarcastically at Anne[,] Ibsen's remark about there being assuredly
something very wrong with the drains, but after all there were other parts of
the edifice" (80). Helga's direct reference to Ibsen in conjunction with her Har-
lem friend Anne maps the Norwegian playwright's critique of mass conformity
and hypocrisy onto Harlem's black bourgeoisie. As Davis has pointed out, Ibsen's
Nora Helmer from A Doll's House (1879) also prefigures the Helga who "under-
stands that her relatives are transforming her into both a pampered doll and a

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 240

sexual commodity" (266). Larsen may even be making a punning reference to

Ibsen's play by placing Helga Crane inside "the Dahls' house," a domestic sphere
in which even the seemingly progressive, well-meaning Dahls are trapped both
by their roles inside Danish national ideologies of colonial "innocence" and by
the social hierarchies of gender and race. Quicksand seems to evoke even more
deliberately Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890). Both the eponymous Hedda and Helga
share irrational and self-destructive impulses, as well as an aesthetic idealism
that finds no ultimate satisfaction in the worlds they inhabit. Both narratives
feature rebellious yet conformist female protagonists - torn by intense social
pressures to marry, competing male suitors, and unwanted pregnancies - who
are finally destroyed in "suicidal" endings. And with both, much remains unvoiced
and unsaid. Hedda, like Helga, remains a complex and conflicted riddle, even to
herself.

There are also oblique references in the final Alabama section of Quicksand to
Swedish feminist Ellen Key, who, drawing at least partly on Ibsen's social reform-
ism, argued in her seminal work The Century of the Child (1900) that the path to
women's equality and general social welfare started at home, through the dedi-
cated and systematic care of house and children. Sounding like a disciple of Key,
in Alabama Helga also preaches to the over-worked and downtrodden African-
American women about the need for good design - as "soft inoffensive beauty"
(146) - and she wishes to instruct them about "inexpensive ways of improving
their homes" (147) and train their children in "gentler deportment" (146).
Quicksand's implicit connection to Key and emerging tenets of Scandinavian
functionalism and design doctrines of the 1920s thus obliquely informs those
sections of the novel that seem most explicitly connected with African-American
experiences of rural poverty.
Intriguing parallels between the United States and Denmark, between trans-
national and heterogeneously racialized vectors of influence thus operate on
many levels throughout Larsen's novel. Yet even though Quicksand clearly charts
an unusual, if not unique, triangulating geography of transnational identity, Lar-
sen's narrative devices and Helga's character suggest that such a transnational
and transracial identity remains elusive. Paul Gilroy's provocative question,
"What of Nella Larsen's relationship to Denmark," is not easily answered if that
question is posed only in the singular. The relationships are multiple, and Larsen's
representation of Denmark in Quicksand is highly unusual in its implicit and
explicit references to the country's colonial heritage and racialized conceptions
of modernity. It is obvious, in this respect, that Quicksand has critical relevance
not only for twenty-first-century Scandinavian studies, but also for transnational,
postcolonial, feminist, and identity studies. Just as Quicksand emphasizes Helga's
silences, so contemporary Danish historiography is still invested in quieting ref-
erences to its colonial past. To cite only a single example, J. V. Jespersen's recent
A History of Denmark (published by Palgrave in 2004) does not mention the Dan-
ish West Indies and only refers obliquely to Denmark's role in the transatlantic
slave trade.

Quicksand's thematic insistence on silence also needs to be interpreted from

this transnational, historiographie perspective. Helga is generally described as

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 TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY & NELLA LARSEN / 241

quiet and she rarely explains her point of view on racial identity to others, black
or white. Furthermore, the narrator seldom intervenes to relate her views. Instead,
the novel creates a crucial slippage between what is stated and what is repressed.
This slippage initially evokes W. E. B. Du Bois's term double consciousness from
The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois defines double consciousness as the condition in
which the African American always feels his two-ness as both an American and
a Negro: - "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ide-
als in one dark body" (8). Quicksand compounds this duality in its depiction of
Helga. On the one hand, she is torn between her self-identifications "as neither
white nor black yet both" (as Werner Sollors's work on interracial identity has
termed it). On the other hand, her identity is further split, as Constance Borab
argues, by sexism, a situation that indicates the gender-specific limitations of
DuBois's term (86; see also Bell 136). To this multiplicity, we add the particular
transnational complexity of Quicksand's explicit evocation of Denmark as consti-
tutive of Helga's multiple identities and of Larsen as a unique Danish-American
author in the Western literary tradition of modernism. The novel and Larsen
present precisely the complex transnational identities for which scholars such as
Caren Kaplen and Inderpal Grewal argue in their seminal co-edited volume Scat-
tered Hegemonies. Larsen's work offers compelling reasons for us to find a place for
Scandinavian-European and Scandinavian-American modernity and Danish
transnational relationships within these reconfigurations.
Knowledge of Larsen and Quicksand among readers and scholars in Scandi-
navia is today largely limited to those familiar with American literature. None
of her fiction has been translated into a Scandinavian language, and writing on
her in Scandinavian publications is limited. This neglect of Larsen's place and
function in the context of Scandinavian-American studies is especially critical,
since her writing redefines the normative borders not only of the Harlem Renais-
sance but also of the Scandinavian-American literary canon. Most works within
the Scandinavian-American tradition focus on the rural immigrant experience in
the United States- for example, Ole R0lvaag's Giants in the Earth, Vilhelm Moberg's
The Emigrants saga, and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! Chronicling an urbanized, mod-
ernist, and transatlantic Scandinavian-American experience, Larsen reverses
the usual direction of influence to examine the experience of an émigré from
the United States in Europe, rather than the other way around. Larsen's insistence
on her own multi-racial, multi-ethnic heritage, most evident in Quicksand, thus
deserves further exploration as a means of redefining the boundaries of both the
African-American and Scandinavian-American literary canons (see Pred). More-
over, Larsen and Quicksand link these two seemingly disparate traditions within
a rich and overlooked transnational context. The questions raised by this article
will also, we hope, spark further interest in challenging the implicit silences of
Denmark's colonial engagement and its continued critical presence in the trian-
gulating relationships of transnational transfer today understood as the black
Atlantic.

The University of California, Los Angeles

The University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 242

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