Self‐made women in a (racist) man's world: The ‘tragic’ lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head

Abstract

Nella Larsen, the ‘mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,’ and Bessie Head, the famous ‘woman alone,’ are known for their ambiguous origins and their fabrication of personal ‘facts.'This article argues that these mixed race female writers, born under Jim Crow and apartheid respectively, carved out niches in these segregationist societies through the art of self‐invention. Because of their precarious positions as ‘mulattas’ in anti‐miscegenation worlds, clear parallels are identifiable between Larsen and Head, such as the creation of multiple selves and the realisation of the ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype through such characters as Helga Crane in Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Elizabeth in Head's A Question of Power (1973).The representation of the ‘mulatto’ as a tragic figure caught between races is primarily an American literary trope, but both Larsen and the African‐born Head evoke this stereotype in their personal and written stories. These two writers also resist labelling, however, by inventing new identities through pseudonyms, autobiographical heroines, and imagined ‘truths.’ This article examines the overt parallels between two mixed race women writers from different generations and continents, initiating crucial dialogue about the development of racial stigmas across cultures and temporalities.

Keywords:

• Harlem Renaissance
• Bessie Head
• Nella Larsen
• miscegenation
• self‐invention
• tragic mulatto

Notes

1 The terms ‘mixed race’ and ‘Coloured’ are both fraught signifiers with complex, heterogeneous histories. For the purpose of this article, I use these terms to indicate Larsen's and Head's liminal status between the monolithic racial constructs of black and white in segregationist societies. I also use the term ‘mulatto/a,’ initially in scare quotes, as an historical label with a specific literary and cultural currency.

2 Such texts as Lydia Maria Child's ‘The Quadroons’ (1842) and William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), published before the Civil War, manifest elements of what would later be referred to as the ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype. These works focus on mixed race female characters that are the products of illegitimate unions and predestined by their indeterminate racial status for unhappy lives and sad deaths. However, the literary stereotype crystallised in much later texts, such as Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces (1899), Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex‐Colored Man (1912), Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and Jessie Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree (1931). In these postbellum novels, especially those written in the twentieth century, the subjectivities of the tragic mulatto's parents are secondary and the trauma of slavery is superseded by the torment of interraciality.