A Discussion On The Reactions To Sexual Politics In Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Nella Larsen's representative work Quicksand which depicts the struggling journey of a middle-class African-American woman's self-definition triggers diverse discussions about U.S. black women's sexuality. The main critics of the book focus on the heroine's repressed sexuality and attribute it to the public voice about black women's permissiveness, however, seldom of them probe into the origin of the definition of black women's sexuality to discover the functioning of the system of sexual politics. It is precisely this elusive factor that the paper seeks here to discuss the mechanism of sexual politics on the black women and the typical reactions in Quicksand.The term"sexual politics"employed in this paper is the one proposed by Foucault, which relates to how sexuality and power become linked in constructing people's sexualities. Through the depiction of African-American women's life in the both antebellum and postbellum America (1800-1930), the paper exposes the different manifestations of sexual politics on them in different times. Combining with the actual situations in Quicksand, the paper later has listed out three typical reactions to the sexual politics on U.S. black women, which represent the middle-class black females'situation in general. In the process of comparing these three typical reactions and paying special attention to Helga's reactions, the paper concludes that the tragic ending potentially contains Larsen's suggests for the U.S. black woman, that they should either follow the crowd to live an ordinary life and maintain the image according to the social rules, or become a racial and sexual rebel like Audrey to pursue the self-definitions of self-reliance and independence by totally ignoring the public opinions, and there's no middle place to gain both. No matter which way is chosen, the point is never to lose yourself, since the sexual politics has already forced the black women to give up many things and rights owned by them, as soon as they give themselves up, they will be engulfed in the quicksand instantly.