Religion, Poverty, and Oppression Theme Analysis

Towards the end of Quicksand, Helga Crane, the story’s protagonist, runs out of her Harlem apartment in a fit of despair because Dr. Anderson, the man she loves, is not going to leave his wife for her. Battered by a rainstorm, Helga seeks refuge in a nearby church. As she leans into the railing to steady herself, Helga is overpowered by the congregation, who crowd around her and say she has been “saved.” Helga, who has spent her life traveling around to different places and trying to find a place to fit in, experiences a brief moment of belonging, which is intermingled with the congregation’s attention and joy. On a whim, she marries a man from the congregation, moves to a poor town in rural Alabama, and throws herself into a religious life. Helga’s spiritual awakening begins in Alabama, and she finds a sense of acceptance and belonging (for the first time in her life) in the idea of being accepted by a loving God. However, Helga’s newfound spirituality is short-lived. As time and age wear her down, Helga becomes increasingly skeptical about the force of religion in her life. Helga notices that other poor, black women in her town think it’s okay to suffer in this world because they’ll be rewarded in the next one. She becomes disillusioned with religion, and depressed about her poverty. Through Helga’s disillusionment, Nella Larsen argues that many poor black Americans in her time simply accept their fate rather than pushing for better lives because they believe their rewards will come after death. Larsen thus communicates that religion is oppressive because it encourages poor black people to tolerate their poverty and hardship rather than fighting for better living conditions.

Helga decides to marry Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green (even though she describes him as “rattish yellow man”) because she hopes that she will find a sense of belonging in a poor, religious community. For a time, she does. After Helga’s experience in the church, she clutches “to the hope, the desire to believe that now at last she had found some One, some Power, who was interested in her, who would help her.” When Helga moves to a tiny town in Alabama with the Reverend, she begins to feel some sense of peace and belonging for the first time in her life. Larsen writes, “Here she had found, she was sure, the intangible thing for which, indefinitely, always she had craved.” Helga reflects that when she tends to her “ugly brown house,” she feels that her life is “utterly filled with the glory and marvel of God.” The other houses and people in the community similarly “shared in this illumination.”  Larsen shows that Helga, like other people in the “tiny” town’s community, really believes that her hardships are alleviated because her faith makes everything tolerable.

As time wears on, however, Helga grows older and weaker, and is run down by the labor of living in poverty and having child after child, as many women in the town do. She starts to realize that the people in the town believe that their burdens are “God’s will,” and they should simply endure their hardships until they die, which she cannot accept. When Helga complains about being perpetually ill and exhausted from having so many children, her husband (who was one of nine siblings) keeps telling her to “trust the Lord more fully,” and to “accept what God sends.”  Similarly, another woman in the town named Sary Jones—who has six children in six years—advises Helga to bear her exhaustion because she will get time to rest in the next world. Helga realizes that faith often serves as a “shield” that disguises “the cruel light of an unbearable reality.” After bearing her fourth child and falling gravely ill, Helga decides that faith is an illusion, and is really more of an oppressive tool. It has its “uses” because it holds back “the poor and the blacks” from seeking better lives. Helga thinks that religion is “what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this childlike trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in ‘Kingdom Come.’“ Helga vows to escape her life of poverty, exhaustion, and illness in Alabama, but she is trapped by motherhood, and the story ends with Helga giving birth to yet another child.

Larsen thus communicates her criticism of religion through Helga’s voice. For Larsen, religion is a dangerous tool that is used to impede the social progress of poor, black people in her time, because it instructs them (just as the Reverend instructs Helga) to “accept” God’s will, and tolerate their poverty.