Dear Nella Larsen,

I have just read “Quicksand” and “Passing” and, as a historian of black female sexuality and as a woman, I find myself left with many questions. The character of Helga Crane in particular has stayed with me. Sexuality is in many ways an open and oft-discussed theme of her story, yet her own attitude toward sexuality perplexes me.

Helga was the daughter of a white woman and a black man who, as she says, “may not have even been married.” The implications of this illicit sexuality seem to shame Helga; she is faced with the tenuous identity of being the black daughter of a white woman. All of the relatives that she knows are white, but in the South and in Harlem she is firmly entrenched in the African American world. In Denmark, she is a novelty, and by the end of her time in Europe it becomes clear that she is also a sexual novelty, as Axel Olsen is so overcome by desire for her that he first tries to illicitly proposition her, and then proposes marriage.

Helga is trapped in a tragic life cycle – she is happy with her life while it is new in any new place, but quickly becomes discontent with where she is and starts to hate all of the people around her (importantly, both black people at Naxos and in Harlem, and white people in Denmark). How does her vicious cycle of unhappiness and anxiety related to her sexuality? Does she sense that, as a mixed-race woman, she can never fit into a sexual life as a black woman? I also wonder how her class was involved in her devastating life cycles – she is well-bred but poor at the beginning, and later wealthy through relatives, but always runs in highly educated, upper/middle class circles of African Americans. In the end, she marries a preacher, thereby sentencing herself to a life of poverty. But did she see this as really leading to happiness, or did she see it more as a sexuality in which she could finally feel comfortable after living for so long with the uptight, uncomfortable sexual norms she witnessed in the upper classes?

The endings to both of your stories leave me, to put it lightly, dissatisfied. I feel devastated and confused by Helga's choices in “Quicksand” and wonder what was possibly the point of ending her life in such a miserable place, and I am disturbed by Clare's death and wonder too what the violent end of her life was meant to explain. If Irene has killed Clare, what does that tell us about the social relationships of black women and the way they restrict and punish each other's sexuality? If Clare has killed herself, are we meant to infer that it was caused by her attempt to pass and live in a mixed-race relationship, and her final deep horror that she has done so?

Though I know it is impossible, I sincerely wish for an explanation for these characters and their upsetting endings. The mixed messages you leave on the pressures and desires that black women feel on their sexuality have led me only to more questions.

In scholarship and curiosity,
Hazel V. Carby.


Interracial sexual relations are a prominent theme in Larsen's novels – she herself was the daughter of a white mother and a black father. In Quicksand, James Vayle says that white men only come to mixed-race parties to look for black women, and Helga refuses to marry Olsen partially because she feels she cannot marry a white man; meanwhile, in Passing, Clare passes for a white woman and marries a white man. What attitudes did Larsen's various comments from characters on interracial relationships reflect on this topic, and how are we to reconcile the sometimes conflicting opinions we read with Larsen's own background?

How would Jane Edna Hunter (the founder and president of the Phyllis Wheatley Foundation who so worked to limit young black migrant women's sexual lives and fight “organized vice”) have reacted to Larsen's female characters (Helga, and Clare and Irene) and their sexualities? Was Helga a girl of “good character”?