Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The feeling of loneliness essay
Explore the theme of loneliness
Scientific essays of loneliness
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The feeling of loneliness essay
One is the Loneliest Number
The feeling of never truly belonging wherever you are and whomever you are with can be paralyzing. That feeling can affect every part of your life. As the band, Three Dog Night, so eloquently put it: “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” Everyone feels lonely and sad at times throughout his or her lives, but when that feeling is never satisfied, it becomes like an illness. Trying to desperately find where you fit in and feel at home can be exhausting and in some cases never ending. In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, there is a constant theme of isolation and alienation, which subsequently affects every aspect of the main character, Helga Crane’s, life throughout the novella.
When we first meet Helga in the beginning of Quicksand we right away get the sense that she is unhappy where she is in her life. Helga very quickly decides to leave her teaching job at Naxos to move to Chicago. Continually all through most of the rest of the novella, Helga makes impulsive choices just like this one and moves somewhere else to try to find something that she can never find. She always believes that the next place will bring her happiness and the feeling of truly belonging that she longs for. Larsen explains Helga’s feelings of discontent with her life:
But it didn’t last, this happiness of Helga Crane’s. Little by little the signs of spring appeared, but strangely the enchantment of the season, so enthusiastically, so lavishly greeted by the gay dwellers of Harlem, filled her only with restlessness. Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of someth...
... middle of paper ...
...h century, when there was a very conservative society that had explicit gender and race roles. Through these themes in Quicksand, Larsen could be pointing out her own feelings towards her bi-racial heritage and life.
Nella Larsen wrote Helga to be ahead of her time. She’s a fiercely materialistic and intelligent woman of bi-racial ethnicity in a time that did not allow for bending of social norms and roles. Because of these strict societal barriers and her own self-doubt and internal struggle, Helga continually lets herself drown in the quicksand that is her isolationist feelings and life.
Bibliography
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Print.
Honor Code
I, Julia Cohn, pledge my word of honor that I have abided by the Washington College Honor Code while completing this assignment.
Many years later, in desperation for a remedy to cure his tortured soul, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale takes to the scaffold where Hester had once suffered her shame. He is envious of the public nature of her ...
While walking downtown with her girlfriend, the author describes as, “[her] heart began to skip every other beat, pounding, pounding, pounding … [as she stood] paralyzed like a frightened, little jackrabbit.” Repetition of the word “pounding” in the text develops a fast pace, indicating the urgency and panic felt by the author; terms such as paralyzed are utilized to emphasize the urgent, panicked mood. However, sanguine moods still persist throughout the narrative. For example, in the opening paragraph the author describes how she, “watch[ed] the golden dots of morning light glide across [her] ceiling, [and she] melted into a feeling of peace specific to the freedom of early summer.” Terms such as “golden,” “glide,” “peace,” and “early summer” help the reader detect a placid mood in the text, directing the reader towards the state of contentment the author feels surrounding her relationship. Mood differentiations in the text, from the urgency of the narrator’s walk downtown to the tranquil peace of the narrator’s relationship, indicate the contrasting aspects of the LGBT+ community, both in terms of the impending fear of violence, and the love that is the
Everyone feels alone at times, but the way we cope with it internally, is different. In Marie Howe’s poem Watching Television she starts by telling us about a mother spider who has a hundred babies, who were learning how to spin their webs. But, the poem switches and she starts talking about herself and how she imagines herself places where she is isolated. She explains that she is arguing with the man she loves, she hasn’t heard from him and she stands and waits for him to show up, but he never does. She finishes the poem with saying “Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost,” which is a harsh ending.
Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” depicts a young woman who lives her life around her dyer need to find her place in society. In the setting of Quicksand, discrimination is a key factor in the text because Helga Crane, who is a biracial woman, is expected to settle in a race in which she does not necessarily call her own. With this said, Crane maintains her status as an outsider in both the white and black community, and is never content with her surroundings. She also disregards her peer’s philosophies on life as annoying or absurd. She is constantly looking for a “better” life that will bring her self-fulfillment, but to her misfortune she never finds it. In the text Quicksand, Helga Crane shows great dissatisfaction with her life because of the racial barriers she has set for herself psychologically. She has formed these barriers in her life to keep distance from facing racial discrimination and conformity. Crane fights to keep differentiation between herself and the rest of society, and makes a life choice to not repeat the same mistakes as her given mother. While trying to find her own happiness, Helga Crane looks towards her materialistic views which prove to dissatisfy her in every situation.
She can’t be completely at home in either of these places but in all actuality, during this time period, there isn’t truly a place where Helga can feel completely at home. What she wants is to be fully accepted and in a world where racial mixing is practically a sin, and one of the races that she is mixed with is treated as no better than animals she can never be fully accepted. Tragically, her mere existence accounts for a huge amount of her unhappiness and even though she can choose to completely pass as one or the other she’ll know in her heart that no one accepts the real
Hulga has been to college for many years, earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Coming from such a rural background, she feels that her education raises her status in the intellectual world, and therefore life in general, above anyone not as educated as she is. "You poor baby…it’s just as well you don’t understand"(404). The young woman fails to see that there is much more to life than what you can learn in a book. Due to a heart condition, however, Hulga is forced to remain home on the farm, instead of being in an academic setting where her education would be recognized and encouraged. This attitude that she is above most other people isolates Hulga from everyone around her. Even her mother c...
As he slouches in bed, a description of the bare trees and an old woman gathering coal are given to convey to the reader an idea of the times and the author's situation. "All groves are bare," and "unmarried women (are) sorting slate from arthracite." This image operates to tell the reader that it is a time of poverty, or a "yellow-bearded winter of depression." No one in the town has much to live for during this time. "Cold trees" along with deadness, through the image of "graves," help illustrate the author's impression of winter. Wright seems to be hibernating from this hard time of winter, "dreaming of green butterflies searching for diamonds in coal seams." This conveys a more colorful and happy image showing what he wishes was happening; however he knows that diamonds are not in coal seams and is brought back to the reality of winter. He talks of "hills of fresh graves" while dreaming, relating back to the reality of what is "beyond the streaked trees of (his) window," a dreary, povern-strucken, and cold winter.
The first encounter with Helga Crane, Nella Larsen’s protagonist in the novel Quicksand, introduces the heroine unwinding after a day of work in a dimly lit room. She is alone. And while no one else is present in the room, Helga is accompanied by her own thoughts, feelings, and her worrisome perceptions of the world around her. Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that most of Helga’s concerns revolve around two issues- race and sex. Even though there are many human character antagonists that play a significant role in the novel and in the story of Helga Crane, such as her friends, coworkers, relatives, and ultimately even her own children, her race and her sexuality become Helga’s biggest challenges. These two taxing antagonists appear throughout the novel in many subtle forms. It becomes obvious that racial confusion and sexual repression are a substantial source of Helga’s apprehensions and eventually lead to her tragic demise.
The definition of home is: the place where one lives permanently. Home is a place where one feels accepted, loved, and comfortable enough to be themselves completely. In Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand”, main character Helga is a bi-racial woman in the 1920’s who struggles internally with where she feels she belongs and where she can call home. Throughout the entire novel Helga moves to many different places to try and feel at home. In the society that Helga is cursed to have to live in, biracial people are not common and rarely accepted in many communities. Personally I don’t feel like Helga would have ever found a place to call her real home, using the definition where home is a permanent place to comfortably live, where she would chose to stay
The story opens by embracing the reader with a relaxed setting, giving the anticipation for an optimistic story. “…with the fresh warmth of a full summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green (p.445).”
We can see this in the play, as we read we learn more about the character of Hedda Gabler. She is the daughter of a General who expected a life if glamour and wealth and rebels against the boredom of a dull, narrow existence by vindictively scheming against everyone around her. Hedda also strives to ruin Eilert Lovborg, the intellectual she once rejected as a suitor. She is meddling in Eilert’s life for her own amusement and control.
In Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Helga Crane passively opts out of situations; her actions are consistently reactionary. Helga’s anxiety is the figurative “quicksand” in which she sinks throughout the novel: Helga is too afraid to commit to a decision and thus flees geographically, failing to realize she can not find happiness through avoiding decisions.
according to the plot of her own play. Hedda finds a “way out” after the internal conflict
She was forced to cross beneath her social class and marry this commoner in the hopes that he would make a name for himself as a professor. As for love everlasting, Hedda disgustedly comments to Judge Brack, "Ugh -- don't use that syrupy word!" Rather than having become a happy newlywed who has found true love, "Hedda is trapped in a marriage of convenience" (Shipley 445). Hedda was raised a lady of the upper class, and as such she regards her beauty with high esteem. This is, in part, the reason she vehemently denies the pregnancy for so long.
Throughout the play, there is a feeling that the room gets darker and less lively with the piano removed as well. The play takes a turn to Hedda being more clear and intentional with her manipulations. She is very bored and irritated in her general life. Her obsessive nature to cause trouble and trying to control everything is evident very early on in the play. She starts out in a quite middle-class setting and seems very annoyed at Tesman, she does not want to be close to him, yet they just returned home from their honeymoon which is supposed to be the most romantic thing at the beginning of marriage, but hers seems just tolerable. She appears to enjoy the fact that Tesman gets worried about the competition with Lovborg, it appears to give her new “fun” activity in her life. There are parts of the play that lean towards Hedda seeming slightly hysterical or bipolar as she goes from being bored and calm to loading pistols as if it is not a big deal and then grasps Thea wildly announcing her expectations for Lovborg. She seems obsessed with trying to control those around her because she has no other “outlet” to her life. Physically, she is repelled by marital sex and, however, flirtatious with the Judge, frightened by extramarital affairs. Like so many women, she is left miserable among the