I Really Enjoyed By Nella Larsen - 1319 Words

I really enjoyed â€Å"Quicksand† by Nella Larsen, it is a story about biracial woman, Helga Crane, whose mother is Danish and father is black man. Both of them are gone or dead, so she kind of have been passed around her whole life. As an adult she is looking for fulfillment and a place where she feels like she fits in. The title â€Å"Quicksand† gave me an idea about how the story works, Helga repeatedly decides to go somewhere to move on with her life and hopefully be happy, but she would eventually get pull back down into this feeling of discontentment, isolation, and invisibility. I think that one of the most important thing about the book is it covers the lack of space and invisibility for biracial individuals. For someone like Helga,†¦show more content†¦Another thing in the book that I really appreciated was a feminist perspective, Helga feels that if she were to ever get into a relationship and marriage, it would eventually ends with her having childre n; she has the fear of childbearing ending her life throughout most of the book. She keeps putting herself in situation where she can be in control, where she does not have to worry about letting a man or physical constraint to control her. Overall, I thought this was a beautiful story. 1) What might be the meaning of Nella Larsen’s book title â€Å"Quicksand†? 2) What is Helga’s take on maternity and motherhood during her era? I believe Larsen should be considered a major American writer because her work overlap between the Harlem Renaissance and the American Modernism. The primary idea of â€Å"Quicksand† is that Helga is pursuing her racial identity. She desires to create something fresh, something that is contrast from the stereotypes. Helga s quest for racial identity signifies the notions of race assumption in the Harlem Renaissance. It is a necessity for Helga to explore to improve her understanding of her identity through the perspectives of cultures. She acknowledges there is a racial factor, which exists in her consciousness and she does not attempt to conceal or refute it. Her presence demonstrates the interpretation of racial accepting as a fundamental part of her identity, expressing one of the core concepts of the