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Chapter 22
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
After her first few months in Alabama, Helga is too busy and too sick to make good on her grand plans for supporting the townspeople with clothing advice and sewing circles and such. Her pampered body is not accustomed to the labor of poverty, and it shows. Every day Helga feels sicker, weaker, and more used up by back-to-back pregnancies and children. In just a few years, she has three children, whom she loves, but she is utterly exhausted. The Reverend advises Helga to trust her faith, that “we must accept what God sends.” The Reverend, however, often dines at other people’s houses Helga struggles to cook or clean with her constant pregnancy nausea.
Having painted a rosy picture of Helga’s life in Alabama, Larsen now switches to expose the true picture of life in poverty underneath the veneer of religion. Once again, Helga doesn’t fit in because she was raised in an affluent urban environment and is unfit to handle the physical demands of an impoverished life. Larsen uses the Reverend’s comments to show how people often cast unacceptable social struggles as acceptable because they are God’s will.
Themes
Helga wonders how the other women in the town keep up, and finally plucks up the courage to ask some of them how they manage. A woman named Sary Jones (who’s had six children in less than six years) tells Helga it’s nothing, and that she shouldn’t fret because they’ll be rewarded in heaven. This is starting to feel like slim compensation to the worn-out Helga, though she feels ashamed for being unhappy and lacking faith. In fact, she even feels a bit oppressed, but stops asking questions, yields to her faith, and submits to just getting through it all.
Larsen’s description of Sary Jones as “bronze” implies, as before, that there is a wider racial spectrum than simple black and white distinctions allow. Larsen uses Sary Jones’s comments to expose her central criticism of religious life: people think they will receive rewards for their struggles in the afterlife, so they accept unfairly impoverished and laborious lives rather than pushing for social change and equality in this life.
Themes
