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Chapter 21
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
Before she knows it, Helga finds herself married to the Reverend and living in a tiny Alabama town. She feels as if she’s finally found a place to fit in, and is really living. She feels that for once she hasn’t “clutched at a shadow and missed the actuality.” She’s convinced that his time her happiness will last, and she accepts her new life whole heartedly, even the poverty. Helga is enthused to fully embrace her role as the town pastor’s wife, and has grand plans to set up a sewing circle, help the congregation smarten up their attire, and be a guiding force for the children of the town.
So far, Helga has lived among white people in in Denmark. She’s also lived among people of color in an educational context at Naxos and in the affluent, urban environment of Harlem. Now, she has completely shifted gears to a poor, rural environment. Helga’s constant moving thus illustrates a wide scope of living environments available to people of color in early post-slavery American society. As before, Larsen will leverage this part of the plot to offer social criticism, this time of religion and poverty.
Themes
Helga makes a bit of progress with her goals, and is happy when the women in the town politely thank her for sharing her thoughts on improving their church clothes. She has no idea, however, that behind her back they call her “uppity” and pity her husband for having to put up with her. Even if she did know, she wouldn’t mind, because she feels truly endowed with newfound humility. Helga isn’t even put out by the adoring women of the congregation who hang on the Reverend’s every word, especially Clementine Richards, a “strapping black beauty” with “bold shining eyes” who makes no secret of her desire for the Reverend.
Once again, Larsen describes a person of color (this time, Clementine Richards) in a way that emphasizes their beauty without objectifying them, which contributes to her wider goal of developing a new aesthetic for the beauty in blackness. Larsen emphasizes the way Helga doesn’t fit in to this community by showing Helga’s concern with how people dress, which seems “uppity” to the rural community. This clues the reader in that Helga’s enjoyment of her new life may be short-lived.
Themes
Helga’s days are completely full with tending the house and garden, and the joy of being “right with God.” She is convinced she’s finally found the happiness that she’s been looking for all her life. Sometimes she’s disturbed by anxiety at night, but her fears are always gone by morning. Even the simple shacks that the townspeople live in feel illuminated by the “radiance” of God as the rhythms of life—births, deaths, and marriages—unfold around the impoverished but happy people in this tiny little corner of Alabama.
Larsen leverages Helga’s joy and happiness to offer a convincing account of how belief in being “right with God” can make life in poverty seem much brighter and more radiant than it actually is. Helga’s anxiety at night, however, informs the reader that her present happiness is still covering up her pain, and that there may be more to the full story of life in Alabama than this rosy description portrays.
Themes
Helga even feels grateful for the Reverend, and won’t disrupt her feeling of peace with nagging thoughts about his dirty fingernails, infrequent bathing, and stinky clothes. She pushes such thoughts away, deciding they are shallow and meaningless. She’s even able to ignore the smug self-satisfaction that “pours from him like gas from a leaking pipe.” At night she embraces his “amorous” advances, feeling so in love with life that it blocks out all reason.
Larsen’s vivid descriptions of the physically repulsive Reverend show the reader that Helga is covering up her true feelings about him, and her false reading of her situation will likely soon unravel. Although Helga has found a life that feels happy, she still repeats the same patterns of pushing her true feelings away. Here, she pretends she loves her husband when she is clearly turned off by him.
Themes
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