Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) (April 13, 1891 — March 30, 1964) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
Nella Larsen went by various names throughout her life. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891 as Nellie Walker. She was the daughter of Danish immigrant Marie Hanson and Peter Walker, a West Indian man of color from Saint Croix who soon disappeared from her life. Her mother was a domestic case worker.. Taking the surname of her Scandinavian stepfather Peter Larsen, Walker also at times went by Nellye Larson, Nellie Larsen and, finally, Nella Larsen. When she married, she sometimes used her married name Nella Larsen Imes.
As a child, Larsen lived several years with her mother's relations in Denmark. In 1907-08, she briefly attended Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically Black University. George Hutchinson speculates that she was expelled for some violation of Fisk's very strict dress or conduct codes; she then spent four years in Denmark, before returning to the U.S.
In 1914, Larsen enrolled in the all-black nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital. Upon graduating in 1915, she went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she became head nurse at a hospital and training school. While in Tuskegee, she came in contact with Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. (Washington died shortly after Larsen arrived in Tuskegee.) Working conditions for nurses were poor; their duties included doing hospital laundry. Larsen lasted only until 1916, when she returned to New York to work again as a nurse. After working as a nurse through the Spanish flu pandemic, she left nursing and became a librarian.
In 1919, Larsen married Elmer Imes, a prominent physicist, the second African American to receive a Ph.D in physics. They moved to Harlem, where Larsen took a job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). In the year after her marriage, she began to write and published her first pieces in 1920.
Certified in 1923 by the NYPL's library school, she transferred to a children's librarian's position in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening that became the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen gave up her work as a librarian and began to work as a writer active in the literary community. In 1928, she published Quicksand (ISBN 0-14-118127-3), a largely autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.
In 1929, she published Passing (ISBN 0-14-243727-1), her second novel, which was also critically successful.
In 1930, Larsen published "Sanctuary" [1], a short story for which she was accused of plagiarism. Her marriage was in trouble during this period.
"Sanctuary" resembled Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story "Mrs. Adis", first published in the United Kingdom in 1919. Kaye-Smith was an English writer, mainly on rural themes, and very popular in the US. "Sanctuary"’s basic plot, and a little of the descriptions and dialogue are virtually identical. Compared to Kaye-Smith’s tale, "Sanctuary" is '... longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race, rather than class' as in "Mrs Adis" [Pearce 2003]. Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Pearce also mentions that much later Sheila Kaye-Smith herself wrote in All the Books of My Life (Cassell, London, 1956) that she had in fact based "Mrs Adis" on an old story by St Francis de Sales. It is unknown whether she ever knew of the Larsen controversy.
Despite the accusations of plagiarism, which turned out to be false, Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She used it to travel to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, and worked on a novel about a love triangle. The three protagonists were all white; the book was never published.
Larsen returned to New York in 1933 after her divorce was complete. She lived on alimony until her ex-husband's death in 1942. She was not writing (and never would again), was apparently depressed, and may have been using drugs. After her ex-husband's death, Larsen returned to nursing and disappeared from the literary circles with which she had previously travelled. She lived on the Lower East Side, and did not venture to Harlem. Many of her old acquaintances speculated incorrectly that she, like some of her characters, had crossed the color line and disappeared. However, George Hutchinson's recent biography of Larsen demonstrated that she remained in New York, working as a nurse, and avoiding contact with her earlier friends and world.
Larsen died in her Brooklyn apartment in 1964, at the age of 72.
Nella Larsen's first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's own early life. Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home.
Her travels bring her in contact with many of the communities which Larsen knew. The reader meets Helga, a first-year teacher in "Naxos," a Southern Negro boarding school based on Tuskegee University, where she finds herself dissatisfied with the complacent philosophy of those around her. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher who advocates that blacks ought to sensibly segregate themselves into black schools, that striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Helga abruptly quits her teaching and moves to Chicago, where her white uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Then she goes to Harlem, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem."
Taking her uncle's legacy and advice, she visits her aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic. Realizing that she deeply misses seeing Negro people, she returns to New York City. Experiencing a near mental breakdown, Helga happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After seducing and marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the poor Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's blind adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Helga Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for much more than simply how to synthesize her own mixed ancestry...she expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends see as genetic differences between races.
The novel also tells the tale of Helga's search for a marriage partner: as it opens, she has become engaged to marry for social benefits a prestigious Southern Negro man she does not really love; in Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons; by the final chapters she has seduced and married a stereotypical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic, as Helga Crane sees what she hoped would be sexual fulfillment and success of her altruistic ideas of "uplifting" the poor southern blacks she lives among, turn into an endless chain of pregnancies and suffering. Helga becomes disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, and fantasizes about leaving her husband, but she is never able to.
Clare and Irene were two childhood friends. They lost touch when Clare's father died and she moved in with two white aunts. By hiding that Clare was part-black, they allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white racist. Irene lives in Harlem, commits herself to racial uplift, and marries a black doctor. The novel centers on the meeting of the two childhood friends later in life, and the unfolding of events as each woman is fascinated and seduced by the other's daring lifestyle. The novel traces a tragic path as Irene becomes paranoid that her husband is having an affair with Clare (the reader is never told whether her fears are justified or not, and numerous cues point in both directions). Clare's race is revealed to her husband John Bellew. The novel ends with Clare's sudden death by "falling" out of a window.
The end of the novel is famous for its ambiguity, which leaves open the possibility that Irene has pushed Clare out the window, or the possibility that Clare has killed herself.
Many see this novel as an example of the plot of the tragic mulatto, a common figure in early African-American literature. Others suggest that the novel complicates that plot by introducing the dual figures of Irene and Clare, who in many ways mirror and complicate each other. The novel also suggests erotic undertones in the two women's relationship. Some read the novel as one of repression, while others argue that through its attention to the way passing unhinges ideas of race, class, and gender, the novel opens spaces for the creation of new, self-generated identities.
Recently, Passing has received renewed attention because of its close examination of racial and sexual ambiguities and liminal spaces. It has achieved canonical status in many American universities.
Passer la ligne, A French translation of Passing, ACFA Editions, Marseilles, 2009. ISBN 978-2952425926
Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled ISBN 0-8071-2070-7.
George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line
Sheila Kaye-Smith, All the Books of My Life, Cassell, London, 1956
Nella Larsen: links, secondary bibliography
Martha J. Cutter, "Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction," in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed Elaine Ginsberg, Duke UP 1996, pages 75—100.
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