Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Print.
In the book “The Feminist Differences,” Barbara Johnson wrote a chapter called The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut. She explains how the novel won second prize in literature from the Harmond Foundation, and W.E.B Du Bois called it the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt. Nella Larsen herself suggests that her novel should be read through the grid of the mulatto figure b choosing as her epigraph a stanza from a Langston Hughes poem entitled “Cross”:
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
Spillers and Hughes suggest a neither/nor. Quicksand is a neither/nor self from within being told. In Quicksand, Larsen has her mother as a Danish immigrant and her father a black American. This complicates the whole race issue.
The question that this chapter is asking is how come Nella achieves teaching Southern black college and working at an insurance company in New York, but she is still depressed. It also explains moments in the novel that are left as unanswered questions that the readers may not see. The author pushes your thinking on what is really being said and makes you understand parts of the story that you might not think was very important. In the back there are notes to pages that explain things that may not be understood. There are numbers during the chapter that leads you to the back. That helps a lot.
Bloom, Harold. Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Chelsae House Publishers, New York. Print.
Black American Prose Writers Of The Harlem Renaissance by Harold Bloom has a chapter specifically on Nella Larsen. It tells us a biography of her in the introduction. She was the daughter of an African-West Indian father and a Danish mother. She was born April 13, 1891. Her father died at the age of two and her mother married a Danish man two years later. She attended school in the suburbs of Chicago, living in an all white home. She studied to be a nurse in New York and worked her profession in Alabama and New York. She married a man names Dr. Elmer S. Imes, but they divorced in 1922. She became a librarian in New York and published two novels while there. She got awards for Quicksand. She was accused for plagiarism in her short story Sanctuary which never got published. She then continued as a nurse and died march 30, 1964, buried in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery.
The rest of the chapter is about critics who are critiquing Nella’s novels. The critics compare her two novels in relation to her own malatto life. It shows how unlike the women in the novels who died from their marginality, she did not. It tells us how like her, the women in her novels are driven to emotional and psychological extremes in their attempts to handle ambivalence, marginality, racism, and sexism. With their opinions, we see the similarities and differences with Nella and her characters she made in her novels.
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of Harlem Renaissance. University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 1995. ebook
In the book, Women of Harlem Renaissance, there is a chapter on Nella Larsen called “Three: Nella Larsen passing for what?” Nella was first born under the name of Nellie Walker. Her father, Peter Walker was “colored” and her second father was white Danish. His name was Peter Larsen. The first marriage had no existence, so there is a theory that maybe both Peters are the same person. Maybe Nella was living in a colored family passing for white? She was not much accepted in her family, so Nella went off to enroll in Fish University where it was an institute for Negros. She did not feel at home in this institute of colored people, along with at home in a white community either.
She only stayed at Fisk for a year before moving to New York. She went and got her nursing license, along with working at a library acceptance. While at the library, she wrote two novels, Passing and Quicksand, and also wrote children’s games in Scandinavia that were published in the brownies books up Nella Larsen Imes, her married name. It then begins to talk about what her two novels are about. I think this is an excellent book to come by because it tells us information much farther in the beginning of her life, rather than just the major details we need to know. It gives us ideas that maybe her two fathers were the same, but maybe they were not. Who knows and will we ever know?
