Project 2 Glossary Annotation

• Laceration  (noun) – a torn and ragged wound

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laceration

From: “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen, Chapter 15 Page 118

“Helga let that pass because she couldn’t, she felt, explain. It would be too difficult, too mortifying. She had no words which could adequately, and without laceration to her pride, convey to him the pitfalls into which very easily they might step. “I might,” she said, “have considered it once—when I first came. But you, hoping for a more informal arrangement, waited too long. You missed the moment. I had time to think. Now I couldn’t. Nothing is worth the risk. We might come to hate each other. I’ve been through it, or something like it. I know. I couldn’t do it. And I’m glad.”

Here, the word laceration is used to show that Helga does not want to hurt her pride to argue with Axel Olsen about marriage. Axel Olsen proposed Helga for marriage, but Helga refused it by using the excuse of racial difference. In her argument, Helga doesn’t want to marry a white man because she has suffered from the interracial marriage of her parents.