Journal on the story Quicksand by Nella Larsen

Helga Crane Name: Institution: The novel, Quicksand is one of the main pieces that Nella Larsen wrote and was a master piece, winning her Guggenheim fellowship award due to her creative writing skills. The novel relates to the story of one, Helga Crane, a twenty two year old girl who was a mixed race, born of a white Danish mother and a black African father. The father later abandons them and the mother remarries to a white step father. From this point, Helga is caught between the racial divide of the whites and blacks. For most of the mixed race person in the United States during the late 19th century, it was tough to fit in the society. As a start, the society was discriminatory of the blacks as most of them were viewed as having descended from the slaves of the earlier centuries. For the mixed race people, they were always caught up between which race they should identify with given that neither of their respective races fully accepted them. For them, it was a race of acceptance till the very end. The tragic mulatto was one of the fictitious characters emblems, for the women that were born mixed race (Gilbert & Gubar, 2007). Most of the books that were written during this time had a bi-racial character that was female and in most of the cases, their life story ended tragically regardless of how they had been doing earlier. For these ladies, they could start life having been accepted as whites in the society and probably have a comfortable life, until their true identity was blown and they were reduced to slaves. While the stories in the novels such as Quicksand used the fictitious female characters that had a rough ending, the idea was to convey the message to the world about the underlying struggle of the ...