The New Negro Flaneuse in Nella Larsen's "Quicksand"
2008; Saint Louis University; Volume: 42; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoThe story began long ago ... it is old. Older than my body, my mother's, my grandmother's.... For years we been passing it on, so that our daughters and granddaughters may continue to pass it on. The story never stops beginning or ending.... The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals.--Trinh T. Minh-ha (Woman, Native, Other 1-2) No. She couldn't stay. Nor, she saw now, could she remain away. Leaving, she would to come back.--Nella Larsen (Quicksand 96) Quicksand (1928) represents the many ways that black women's movements are policed: by the law, by educational institutions, by racism, by Jim Crow segregation, by the race and gender ideologies of Empire, by the social strictures of white, black, and European society, and by the institutions of marriage and family. Novelist Nella Larsen (1891-1964) represents and critiques the raw reduction of identity the subject experiences when circumscribed by the negative limits by specific communities, racial ideologies, and class localities. These negative limits represent the containment and fixing of identity that Larsen contrasts with the expansion of identity promised both by geographic mobility and the facts of social relations. However, Larsen does not simply set up a predictable narrative of modern cosmopolitanism that contrasts the limiting small-town experience to the expansive tumult of the metropolis. Rather, she opposes the containment of any given place and any given social location against the expansiveness of acts of movement and relocation. Larsen's positioning of her protagonist Helga Crane as leaving, only to have to come back signals neither failure nor resignation to the inevitable return home, but a strategy of resistance that many modernist women adopted mobility. Modernism is defined in part by practices of expatriation, especially as it is associated with modernist women writers such as Gertrude Stein, Jessie Fauset, Djuna Barnes, and other women artists and publishers who moved (some permanently) to Paris's Left Bank. It is also associated with black cultural producers and figures such as performer Josephine Baker, who took the opportunity to perform in Europe in part as an escape from memories of the violent 1917 East St. Louis race riots. (1) Similarly, when Helga Crane leaves the U. S. for Europe, she does so in part hoping to escape the ubiquitous effects of American racism. For Larsen, the promises of modernist mobility remain haunted by histories of racial violence, but not in ways that frame the black female subject, and especially the biracial subject, as fixed within a one-dimensional tragic narrative. Her characters rather wrestle with how they will inhabit the promises, failures, and histories represented in the very idea of modernist mobility. I argue that Larsen defines the female subject of modernity by examining the relationship of subjectivity to relocation and mobility. In doing so, Larsen delineates the material complexities of that quintessential figure of modernism, the flaneur, or public stroller and mobile observer of modern effects. (2) As a woman on the move, Helga Crane represents something at times imagined to be impossible, a modern flaneuse or female flaneur. By writing of the experience of black female flanerie, Larsen's work holds out the promise and possibilities of moving away from, into, and between communities and locations. Larsen is a key literary figure, as Hazel Carby contends, because her novels represent, along with the work of Jessie Fauset, the first novels by African American women to locate black female subjectivity in the urban space embedded within capitalist social relations (in contrast, for instance, to Zora Neale Hurston's novels, which are anchored in the idealized black rural folk culture of the South) (Reconstructing Womanhood 170). …
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