#JUNGLE QUICKSAND WOMEN FREE#

“The Baptist women spoke as if ever-cognizant of the gaze of white America, which in panoptic fashion focused on each and every black person and recorded his transgressions in an overall accounting of black inferiority,” she argues. Higginbotham writes about the fear that Baptist women had of nonconformity to their morals.

The black elite believed that individual behavior reflected on everyone.

The politics of respectability emphasized that the individual determined the fate of the race. They became, like Helga, psychologically incomplete, needing sexual fulfillment but denied this by dominant society.

#JUNGLE QUICKSAND WOMEN FREE#

Echoing the thoughts of Helga Crane in the cabaret, they said going to jazz halls amounted to “a voluntary return to the jungle.” Black women were no longer free to enjoy themselves without judgment. The black elite also attacked jazz, perhaps the most significant contribution to American culture at the time. The Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., required individuals caught dancing and drinking to come before a church court. The black elite censured people who engaged in inappropriate behavior. But, as Larsen illustrates in Quicksand, the politics of respectability promoted strict conformity and erased individuality. They took on white society’s norms and morals and instructed black women on issues from proper conduct on streetcars to appropriate colors for clothing. Thus, the black elite sought to reinvent the image of the black female. Higginbotham argues that “black womanhood and white womanhood were represented with diametrically opposed sexualities.” She gives the example of a white woman quoted in a newspaper as saying, “I cannot imagine such a creation as a virtuous black woman.” Whereas American society saw white women as chaste, it viewed black women as sex-crazed and loose. Among the most ingrained stereotypes-and therefore most contested- was the promiscuous black woman. Griffith’s Birth of Nation and other media. The politics of respectability aimed at thwarting the dissemination of negative black images that occurred in films like D. They reasoned that if whites saw that blacks had similar morals, they would have no basis for treating them unequally. The black elite intended the politics of respectability to prevent discrimination. Although the politics of respectability had good intentions, it severely curtailed individual freedom and prevented black women from forming their own identities. Thus, uplift stopped black women from embracing their sexuality in a healthy way. They were either lascivious “jungle creature” or the ideal Victorian lady. Her unhappiness arises because the politics of respectability prevented black women from defining the terms of their sexuality. Helga moves from place to place and searches for happiness without rationality. He writes, “Racial uplift ideology’s gender politics led African American elites to mistake the effects of oppression for causes…” Larsen’s Quicksand shows the psychological consequences of repressing sexuality. Gaines argues in his book Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, racial uplift supported an internalized form of racism. Instead of stopping whites from unfairly labeling black women, the ideology of racial uplift forced black women to change their behavior in response to stereotypes. The politics of respectability shifted the blame for racist stereotypes from whites to blacks. But, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham refers to it, this “politics of respectability” had profound consequences. Thus, described as primitive and promiscuous since slavery, black women hid their sexuality under socially accepted behavior.

Maintaining a good image was intended not only to produce change within the race, but also to combat white stereotypes that caused discrimination against black people. In its fight for equality, the black social elite wanted women to emulate the conventions of mainstream society. As Larsen shows in the cabaret, black women of the early twentieth century repressed their sexual desires so that white America would perceive them as respectable. But when the music fades, Helga returns to reality and asserts that “she wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.” Helga feels this struggle between sexual freedom and restraint throughout the novel. Helga is “blown out, ripped out, beaten out by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra” in a moment suggestive of a sexual climax. She loses herself in the “sudden streaming rhythm” and delights in the sexually suggestive moves of the dancers. The entertainment of a Harlem cabaret hypnotizes Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.

Jungle quicksand women