A number of African American novels set in urban spaces focus on the motif of claustrophobia to convey the effects of racism. Richard Wright’s Native Son, for instance, opens with a rat trapped an killed in the apartment of a black family. The trapped rat serves as an allegory for the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who is as trapped in the South Side of Chicago as the rat is in his apartment. Bigger frequently laments the feeling of claustrophobia, of having his mobility–both physical and socio-economic–severely restricted by white people. Bigger can only live in certain slums and occupy certain jobs. He is trapped in the ghetto and it enrages him. Similarly, Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of Anne Petry’s somewhat less deterministic novel, The Street, also feels a sense of claustrophobia. She desperately wants to get an apartment on a better street, but she realizes that without substantially more money than she, a single mother, can earn, she will never be able to move to a cleaner, brighter neighborhood. Like Bigger, she also feels trapped, walled-in by inaccessible white people. Interestingly, Helga Crane, the biracial protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand expresses a sense of claustrophobia toward her fellow African Americans. Helga feels ambivalent toward blackness, both attracted to and repelled by it. Helga feels a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped as a member of a race with which she feels no kinship.
Tag: Nella Larsen
Women and Nerves
Early twentieth century literature often portrays women as being nervous, sensitive, and vulnerable to hostile environments. Such characterizations reflect a residue of the Victorian concept of female hysteria and apply to black and white women alike.
In section two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” an unnamed female speaker says, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.” The stress and commotion of urban life threatens to overwhelm her. She babbles disjointedly while her male companion ignores her.
Similarly, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Helga Crane, is frequently described in terms of her ever-shifting emotional states. She is sensitive and impulsive and subject to “frayed nerves.” Helga stumbles into a storefront church. Because “Her nerves were so torn, so aching, her body so wet, so cold” she is hypnotized by the charismatic service.
