Nella Larsen: Madame X of the Harlem Renaissance

Nella Larsen (1893-1964). Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Nella Larsen didn't begin her professional life as a writer: instead, she attended the Nurse Training School at Tuskegee, and then headed north to work for the New York Health Department. In 1921, Larsen left the nursing profession to work at the New York Library. By this time, she had already become a fixture in the Harlem literary scene, appearing at events, and publishing short fiction pieces, essays, and magazine reviews (Gates, et al., 1079). Referred to as "Madame X" for the scarcity of details about her personal life, Larsen's fiction tells volumes about life as a woman navigating the boundaries of race in the modern world.

However varied her professional life may have been, it was her parentage, one surmises, that had the greatest influence on her writing. While many writers shrink at the notion that their work might have some autobiographical nuance, it seems clear that Larsen's background launched her into a quandary over the subject of race. Her first novella, Quicksand, examines the unique social placement of individuals of mixed parentage--and the morality of passing. Her protagonist in Quicksand, Helga Crane, bears a striking resemblance to a modern tragic heroine in the sense that her European ancestry places her in the privileged circles of Europe, while her African American ancestry is somewhat of an anathema. 

Quicksand explores, perhaps more trenchantly, the experience of race from this vantage point in a way that had been previously ignored and Passing extends the examination of the performance of race and social class. In what ways does the experience of writers like Larsen continue to evolve? That is, how has the social acceptance of mixed-race individuals changed, altered, matured, or otherwise continued in this day in age?