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Description
In the opening scene of Nella Larsen's 1928 novel Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane contemplates ways of escaping the stifling life she has been leading as a teacher in the black southern educational institution Naxos. Her sudden decision to leave in the middle of the semester means that she will need money, so she decides to ask her maternal uncle, Peter, for a sum that would allow her to begin a new life in Chicago. Although she prefers not to approach her "contemptuous" white relative, she tells herself that a beggar "cannot expect to choose" (7). This passage marks the first in which the topos of the beggar emerges in the text, and Helga clearly identifies with the image. But Helga does not even get the chance to solicit money from her uncle. When she arrives at her relative's house, she is greeted by her uncle's new wife, who categorically refuses to acknowledge Helga as Peter's niece. Humiliated, denied recognition, Helga flees from this woman "who so plainly wished to dissociate herself from the outrage of [Helga's] very existence" (29).
In one sense, the trope of the beggar features more centrally in Anzia Yezierska's 1927 novel, as it appears in the book's very title, Arrogant Beggar, and can be said to frame the entire narrative. The protagonist, Adele Lindner, the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, is born into poverty. However, she does not accept drudgery as her lot in life, and, like Helga Crane, attempts to find fulfillment and transformation in an established institution; in Adele's case, the Hellman Home for Working Girls. Adele is ultimately disillusioned by the "soldier's routine" and hypocrisy that characterize life in the Home, just as Helga becomes completely disenchanted with Naxos. Caught between her ties to the Jewish Lower East Side and her desire to "rise in the world" (49), Adele is forced to negotiate the various constraints imposed on her as a working-class Jewish woman; similarly, Helga is forced to negotiate the different constraints imposed on her as a black woman. Despite the many parallels between the two novels, though, Adele, unlike her literary counterpart, manages to find a way to thrive. At the end of Arrogant Beggar, she is the owner of her own restaurant-cafe, has created a community, and is happily married. In sharp contrast, at the conclusion of Quicksand, Helga is living in severe poverty, has come to despise her husband, and is about to give birth to her fifth child, which, as the text suggests, will most likely kill her.
Published just a year apart, Quicksand and Arrogant Beggar are both narratives about young women who are searching for self-realization. These novels can thus be seen as part of a relatively new literary genre: women novelists' writings about female self-determination, developed during the Progressive Era and reflecting the dramatic social changes that transpired in relation to gender roles in the early 20th-century United States (Ammons passim). And yet, while these two texts share similar cultural concerns and narrative themes, the fates of Helga Crane and Adele Lindner are ultimately very different. What, then, might account for the dramatically dissimilar trajectories of Helga Crane and Adele Lindner?
Building on the insights of Hazel Carby (1987) and Deborah McDowell, much of the recent scholarly literature on Quicksand has focused on Helga's ability or, more frequently, her inability to express her sexuality and desire as a middle-class black woman. Kimberly Roberts, for instance, argues that Helga is "caught between two seemingly contradictory ... proscribed roles Larsen sets up for black womanhood--those of the angel and the whore" (112). Similarly, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson contends that Helga's struggle to express her desire is "imperiled by her reluctance to emulate the new-race ideal or its ostensible opposite, the Jezebel" (838). Whereas Quicksand has generated an impressive corpus of criticism in the last 20 years, Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar has received very little scholarly discussion. In one of the few articles that does examine this particular text, Lori Harrison-Kahan proposes that Adele, like Yezierska's other heroines, is represented as a hybrid character, caught between "white aspirations and ethnic loyalties" who is not fully assimilated at the end (432).
Drawing on this recent criticism, my comparative approach in this paper focuses on aspects of Larsen's and Yezierska's texts that have yet to be explored. More specifically, in what follows, I investigate the trope of the beggar, which surfaces at various and crucial moments in these two novels, to argue that although Quicksand and Arrogant Beggar both invoke images of begging and beggary, there is a profound difference in the ways that Larsen and Yezierska depict their protagonists' relationship to this trope. It is this difference, I propose, that can help account for the radically divergent trajectories of Adele Lindner and Helga Crane, and, perhaps more importantly, can provide a way of conceptualizing the dissimilar "racial" positions and identifications of African American and Jewish American women during the early twentieth century. (1) My discussion, therefore, will not revolve around the important question of Helga's sexuality; and while Harrison-Kahan's claim regarding Adele's hybridized identity is well taken, I use the trope of the beggar to argue that Yezierska's text actually gestures toward the way Jewishness and whiteness were being reconfigured as more and more compatible with one another. (2)
Are You a Beggar?
While living in Denmark with relatives, Helga Crane receives an invitation to the wedding of her friend Anne. Initially, she refuses to embark on the journey. Her response is forceful: "Go back to America, where they hated Negroes! To America, where Negroes were not people. To America, where Negroes were allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happiness, of security. To America, where everything had been taken from those dark ones, liberty, respect, even the labor of their hands. To America, where if one had Negro blood, one mustn't expect money, education, or, sometimes, even work whereby one might earn bread" (82; emphasis mine).
Having already identified herself as a beggar when back at Naxos, here in Denmark Helga broadens her scope to include all... |
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