Slain in the Spirit: Sexuality and Afro-Caribbean Religious Expression in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Abstract

This chapter uses Zora Neale Hurston’s depiction of Afro-Caribbean Vodou in Tell My Horse: Voodoo Life in Haiti and Jamaica to examine the struggle between spirituality and sexuality within Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928).¹ Hurston’s emphasis on Vodou’s intertwining of the physical and spiritual is shared by Larsen, in whose text a mixed-race protagonist refuses to tether herself to absolutes regarding God, the body, sexuality, and maternity. Neither perpetuating the myth of hypersexualized black female bodies, nor resigning themselves to necessarily oppressive versions of spirituality, both Larsen and Hurston tell an unconventional story about black female autonomy, sexuality, and maternity. In contradistinction to this unconventionality, much of the existing criticism on Quicksand insists on confining the novel to a Western context that sees maternity and spirituality as necessary evils opposing the endeavor of cultivating an autonomous identity. Keeping their foci on protagonist Helga Crane’s sexuality only in terms of her race, Larsen’s critics unintentionally fall into the essentialist trap that they attempt to dismantle. Specifically, critical analyses of the novel have confined Helga’s sexual tragedy to the framework of feminine ideals in the Christian South. When read in the light of Hurston’s analysis of Vodou, however, the novel makes clear that maternity and spirituality are not essentially oppressive forces. Larsen’s critics do the text a disservice by avoiding an analysis of the significantly corporeal religious expression in the novel, a kind of spiritual physicality prevalent in systems of faith within the African diaspora.