Creation vs. Procreation

Motherhood and Artistry in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

The struggle between motherhood and artistry can be traced throughout much of literature. The image of motherhood as a smothering and suffocating force can be seen in Chopin's Awakening, in Ibsen's A Doll's House, in Edith Summers Kelley's Weeds, and in most of the poetry of both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; this is, of course only a small sampling of evidence of the prevalence of this theme. It is often seen in women's literature, because the identification of oneself as an artist requires a certain level of freedom to be selfish that motherhood does not proffer. The struggle between self-identification and motherhood is particularly prevalent throughout the course of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. At the end of the novel, the audience is witness to the culmination and consequence of that struggle.

Throughout Quicksand, it seems that Larsen's protagonist, Helga Crane, is perpetually pregnant. This condition is never viewed in an optimistic light throughout the course of the work. Rather the audience sees that her children have quite literally depleted Helga of a life and vitality that she once possessed:

She, who had never thought of her body save as something on which to hang lovely fabrics, had now constantly to think of it.... Always she felt extraordinarily and annoyingly ill, having forever to be sinking into chairs ... waiting for the horrible nausea and hateful faintness to pass.... T

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"It seemed hundreds of years since she had been strong. And she would need strength. For in some way she was determined to get herself out of this bog into which she had strayed," (Larsen, 134). With a loss of her youthful freedom, and thus, the ability sand social freedom to be selfish, Helga has also lost her strength. The birth of her most recent child has been particularly complicated and it does in fact, die, shortly after she gives birth to it. In this the audience sees that not only has Helga put all of her energy, all of her love, and truly all of herself, into the creation of this child, but even then, her creation was not strong enough to exist in the world. Furthermore, Helga now wants to leave her husband and children, in the tradition of such literature as The Awakening and A Doll's House. she had to admit it wasn't new, this feeling of dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced before... This differed only in degree... The thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred. At his every approach she had forcibly to subdue a furious inclination to scream out in protest... She meant to leave him. And it was, she had to concede, all of her own doing, this marriage. N

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