Much Ado about a Thing: A Materialist Reading of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

• Published in: South Central Review 2024-09, Vol.41 (3), p.42-59
• Main Author: Nemmers, Adam
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Consumption; Dialectics; Larsen, Nella; Materialism; Modernism; Novels; Self concept
• ISSN: 0743-6831; 1549-3377; 1549-3377; 0038-321X
• DOI: 10.1353/scr.2024.a945211

“Much Ado about a Thing” conducts a materialist reading of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand , tracing the devolution of Helga Crane as she travels from Naxos to Copenhagen to Alabama. While she begins the novel as a sovereign subject amid her treasured possessions, Helga becomes sexualized, exoticized, and objectified, and eventually succumbs to the fate of a worn-out, used-up thing as a wife and mother. As I argue, Helga’s materialist devolution is inextricably intertwined with her racial and gender identity as a Black woman living in the United States, yet is complicated by her own zealous desire for things, which critiques her status as an aesthete and materialist. Further, through the tragic example of Helga, Larsen critiques the facile and artificial subject/object system of classification that has engendered the oppression of marginalized people, yet overlooked the significance of work-a-day things that surround us. In transitioning between material states, Helga demonstrates the importance of both personal and narrative perspective, highlighting her own instability as she attempts to construct an identity independent of those and that which surround her.