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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Quicksand, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Segregation, and Society
Mixed-Race Identity
Racial Shame and Emotional Repression
Race, Beauty, and Exoticism
Religion, Poverty, and Oppression
Summary
Analysis
Helga Crane sits alone in her room in the evening, wearing a colorful negligee. A lamp casts dim light over the ornate and eclectic furnishings. Helga enjoys these quiet, tranquil evenings after a busy day’s teaching, and never opens her door to the hubbub of gossiping faculty that mill around all day. She is 23 years old, with shapely limbs, satiny “yellow” skin, and delicate features. Her dark hair falls loosely around her shoulders. She tries not to think about work, but she struggles to shut it out tonight. Today was particularly irritating.
Larsen opens the novel with a description of Helga’s physical beauty and the sophistication of her dress and living quarters. These descriptions are intended to subvert racist stereotypes of people of color as either ugly and poor, or exotic and sensualized. Larsen’s description of Helga as “yellow” leverages the use of different colors to resist binary black and white racial categorizations when she describes people.
Themes
Helga didn’t get a lunch break today because the staff and teachers had to attend a sermon in the stuffy chapel by a famous white preacher who was passing through. The preacher had said that if anyone thought the South treated black people poorly, they should look at the exemplary community at Naxos. The black people here have good enough sense to make progress, but “know when to stop.” Thinking back on the sermon now, Helga still feels a surge of anger and resentment, and she is amazed that the preacher got a strong applause.
The preacher aims to say positive things about the Naxos community, but his comments clearly betray a sense of white superiority. When the preacher says “progress,” he means that black people get better by mimicking white culture, rather than forming their own cultural identity. The preacher’s advice about knowing “when to stop” shows that he doesn’t really want black people to have true equality, since he wants them to stay below white people.
Themes
Helga suddenly feels like she hates the South, the school, and the whole system of “Negro education” at Naxos. She wishes she could leave forever. She sits and thinks about this for hours as the room darkens about her. Seized with a desire for action, Helga flips on the light switch and throws her teaching books into the trash. She’s tried to infuse innovative ideas into her diverse students with “ebony, bronze, and gold faces,” but she thinks they are too indoctrinated by the broken system at Naxos—the school is too fixated on doing things the way white people would.
Helga’s frustration with Naxos stems from the fact that she thinks the institution is supposed to empower black people, but all it really does is perpetuate and imitate white culture. This system suppresses innovation, which Helga thinks is necessary for true empowerment. Once again, Larsen describes people of color using an array of colors rather than boxing them into a single category. Her use of “ebony, bronze, and gold” connotes the beauty and diversity of these skin tones.
Themes
Helga decides she’s through with all this. She’s been teaching at Naxos for two years, and her initial enthusiasm has been slowly replaced with bitterness at the hypocrisy of the place. She feels like her personality is blotted out at Naxos, and decides she really shouldn’t wait any longer to leave. Of course, Helga needs to tell her fiancé, James Vayle, and figure out how to get some money. It’s too late to do all that tonight, so she decides to wait until morning.
The “hypocrisy of the place” makes Helga bitter because she thought she would be helping people of color by teaching at Naxos, but really, all people do at Naxos is encourage black people to act like white people, which Helga finds oppressive. The fact that Helga only thinks of her fiancé as an afterthought implies that Helga doesn’t really love him.
Themes
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Helga is annoyed by her money struggles. She’s spent most of her earnings on expensive clothes and books. She can’t get another teaching job in the middle of the year, but she’ll have enough salary to get on a train to Chicago. Helga decides to see if her kind Uncle Peter can help her. He’s the only member of Helga’s family who doesn’t despise her, because he was very fond of his sister, Helga’s mother. Helga figures he’ll help her out with some money because he doesn’t think people with “Negro blood” can amount to much on their own.
Uncle Peter’s opinion of people with “Negro blood” implies that he and Helga’s mother are white, and that Helga’s family looks down on her for being mixed-race. Larsen begins to introduce Helga’s feelings of self-loathing and shame about her mixed-race identity when she describes how Helga feels like an outsider—even in her own family. Even though Helga is half-white, she has “Negro blood” which makes Helga’s white family think of her as fundamentally different from them.
Themes
Now Helga thinks about how to tackle James Vayle. They got together when they were new and lonely at Naxos, and Helga was attracted by James’s well-established family. James adjusted to Naxos and fits in now, but Helga still can’t bend her will enough to reshape herself the way others at Naxos do. She’s certain that James Vayle holds this against her. The fact that he still likes her makes her feel powerful, but she shrinks away from this feeling. Helga decides that it’s much more convenient for her to just leave than have an annoying quarrel with James. She feels impatient and rushes into bed, leaving her books, papers, and stockings strewn around the room.
Helga’s avoidance of James shows that she doesn’t have a good handle on her feelings. James Vayle clearly accepts Helga and this makes her feel powerful, but she represses the feeling—even though it’s a positive feeling of empowerment. Helga’s decision to leave without having a proper discussion with James shows that she is uncomfortable with emotional confrontations and prefers to flee rather than being vulnerable and facing romantic matters head on.
Themes
