In Quicksand by Nella Larsen, Helga Crane is the protagonist who seems dissatisfied with her surroundings. Helga’s character development throughout the story happens within her thoughts and actions. For example, in the beginning, Helga begins her work teaching at Naxos. At first she is optimistic about the young minds filled with aspirations, but then thinks that the school institution itself beats this out of them, to quote specifically: “Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with keen joy and zest of those immature people who have dreamed dreams of doing good to their fellow men. But gradually this zest was blotted out, giving place to a deep hatred for the trivial hypocrisies and careless cruelties which were, unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos policy of uplift” (11). In understand Helga, I get the sense that she is someone who battles with the desires of her heart and the realities of real life. She questions the differences her friendship would make to the students and compares it to the size of an atom. She also struggles with the notion that money holds her back, and although she struggles to be free and express the actions her mind seems to scream for, everything isn’t as simple to make happen for herself. Helga seems to struggle with the desires she has in her mind and the oppression that seems to surround her regarding race. Helga fumes over the sermon of the preacher who urges that black people of Naxos were superior because they knew to stay in their place, and to go further than that would lead them only to corruption. Although the preacher seems to at times praise the students, Helga understands the message behind the preachers sermon, This infuriates her and she imagines the creativeness and individuality that would be able to be expressed but aren’t, comparing the school to a “machine”.Here Helga again is faced with the fact that her true wishes and desires fall dead on the reality of the situation, and when it finally hits her, she can no longer stand it and devises a plan to free herself from Naxos.

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In the story Quicksand by Nella Larsen, The protagonist Helga is facing a bunch of issues she never thought she’d have to deal with. She is a twenty-two year old woman that is half black and white. She teaches at Naxos, one of the finest schools for Negroes anywhere in the country. She went in with the intentions of all confidence and joyous thinking Naxos was a community of innovation and individualism but soon came to find out that it was the exact opposite. I believe this is where her character starts to develop. As written in the passage “Helga’s essentially likable and charming personality was smudged out. She had felt this for a long time. Now she faced with determination that other truth which she had refused to formulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was utterly unfitted for teaching, even for mere existence, in Naxos.” (365) She begins to feel like a failure since all of her ideas and teaching methods were constantly being rejected. Helga felt like Naxos was turned into a machine that had students and teachers abiding by the “White” way of how they thought things should be. She began to lose all interest and even hope in teaching anymore. She was slowly loosing it inside by feeling so defeated and disappointed and thought it was time to leave. Helga was so overwhelmed with everything going on she even thought that picking teaching as a career was the wrong choice. Her dreams of going into an all Negro top charted school to help teach and motivate other young beings soon came crashing down. She went into Naxos not accomplishing anything she had set out to do which killed her. I believe Helga did make the right choice by leaving because she was dealing with a lot of interracial and self-acceptance issues that had no good outcome. I’m also anxious to see how the rest of her character develops.

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In the reading Quicksand by Nella Larsen, the main character, Helga Crane, comes to different revelations. Based on her experiences, she develops news ideas about herself. This can be seen early in the story when she decides to no longer teach at the Negro College Naxos. The narrator places her in a setting where she is in her room relaxing from a stressful day of work. As she fails to not think of work and school, she reflects on how she feels working at the college compared to how she felt when she first started. The narrator gives a brief background of when Helga started working. Helga had high regards for the establishment. She wanted to be a part of the Negro education. The author expresses on page 365 “Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the keen joy and zest of those immature people…this zest was blotted out…”. Helga use to be have a passion and joy for teaching at a Negro College until she learned the truth about the establishment. She wasn’t effective of really teaching her students because of the methods of teaching that was used in the school. There was no practice of individualism or expressing thoughts and ideas. Helga thought that this institution was a place to teach black students to conform to the “white” way of thinking. This discovery frustrated her. What made her more unhappy was her inability to assimilate the way the rest of the staff and students did. She was disappointed by how the college ran, insulted by the white preacher’s words to at the assembly, and most of all, angered by the way everything was accepted. It seemed as if no one but her felt that their methods of teaching was wrong, and felt like she was frowned upon because she was the only one who felt this way. All of this drove her to quit teaching there and end the relationships she formed while at the college.

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Reading the beginning of Quicksand by Nella Larsen left me really interested In the book. I feel that as the main character,  Helga’s character was developing all throughout the story. From the beginning its seems like there is a fighting force that Helga Crane is battling with. Naxo’s ,where she  lives and teaches at that time just seemed to be a place that she felt she didn’t belong. I feel that because of the constant  rebelliousness and differentiating herself from the other characters in the story that Helga’s character was constantly developing. The mere fact that in narration she was unique assisted in the evolution of Helga’s character.

“Helga’s essentially likeable and charming personality was smudged out. She had felt this for a long time. Now she faced with determination that other truth, which she had refused to formulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was utterly unfitted for teaching, even for mere existence in Naxos. She was a failure here. She had, she conceded now, been silly, obstinate , to persist for so long. A failure. Therefore, no need, no use to stay longer. Suddenly she longed for immediate departure.”(12)

This passage  from chapter one of Quicksand is already helping me to understand how Helga’s character is being shaped. It is apparent that at one point Helga was a sweeter person than she is growing to be in Naxos. Somehow Naxos was tainting her opinion of her belonging and acceptance there. I feel that at this early point In the story Helga was already developing a sense of self, different from the person who had originally came. I began to think that Helga’s thoughts of her purpose was even beginning to change. Somewhere where she thought would be of longevity had been turning out to be temporary, and her quest was far from over but just beginning. If her  career in teaching  was all of a sudden wrong , her thoughts about her environment were changing, and she felt that she had come  to Naxos and did not accomplish what was set out , but was already prepared to depart , then it is clear to me that Helga’s character would be developing into something different, maybe greater.

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From the first paragraph, Quicksand by Nella Larsen inspires the feeling of solitude. The way the setting is described and the fact that there’s a lack of other people around the main character, Helga Crane, create a feeling of emptiness and darkness. It’s possible to understand that Helga gets comfort from that lonely setup, where she isolates herself from the outside world, as described here: “It was a comfortable room, furnished with rare and intensely personal taste, flooded with Southern sun in the day, but shadowy just then with the drawn curtains and single shaded light. Large, too.” (362) Even while describing something dear to Helga, her room, the narrator goes on to explain how Crane was unhappy.

The main character is not pleased with her job, where she feels she doesn’t fit in well. That develops into a greater journey of self-acceptance where she tries to find a place to call home. She later decides to move to different places, trying to settle down somewhere. Her struggle, thought, is within herself. Her race and her background seem to always play a castrating role in her life, very clear in the following passage: “You see, I couldn’t marry a white man. I simply couldn’t. It isn’t just you, not just personal, you understand. It’s deeper, broader than that. It’s racial. Someday maybe you’ll be glad. We can’t tell, you know; if we were married, you might come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people. My mother did that.” (415) She just can’t accept that she is anything beyond skin color. Her pain is way too deep.

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When the novel begins, Helga is a twenty-two-year-old school teacher at Naxos, a Negro boarding school. Finding herself both frustrated by the complacent attitudes of the blacks in Naxos towards racism and unfulfilled as a teacher Helga decides to leave Naxos and her fiance fellow teacher James Vayle, who is black. James’ family does not approve of the match because of Helga’s mixed ancestry.

The first lines in the novel Quicksand are “Helga Crane sat alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the evening, was in soft gloom.” These opening lines anticipate both the plot and the development of Helga Crane as a character. Helga Crane is a lonely, isolated woman whose life appears to be very gloomy.Helga is biracial therefore not accepted by the blacks or the whites. The author states on page 9, “The great community, she thought. was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine. It was now a show place in the black belt, exemplification of the Whiteman’s magnanimity, refutation of the black man’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it” The school was an example of the theory that African Americans needed to improve their lot, the policy of “Black Uplift”. The education at Naxos, was a place where individualism was very discouraged. Helga becomes disenchanted with the hypocrisy at the prestigious school and begins re-evaluating her career choice as a teacher.

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