helga crane failed! if only she had taken the uni high hero's journey class...

     In Quicksand, Helga attempts to embark on a Heroine's Journey, travelling from place to place to seek a life that grants her satisfaction and happiness. Yet, despite her attempts to go through the motions of a Heroine's Journey, she eventually fails decisively. In the later chapters of the novel, instead of finally achieving self-actualization, she finds herself trapped in a hellish and stifling life of child-rearing as a reverend's wife. Why is that so? How does Helga, after all this travelling and experiencing, fail so devastatingly on her journey? The answer lays in how she eventually diverges from the Heroine's journey, in which she eschews the final step of integrating the masculine and feminine, accepting the  role which stops her journey in its tracks.

    In Maureen Murdock's version of the heroine's journey, the final stage of the journey involves integrating the masculine and feminine after a continuous reckoning with gender expression and gender roles. The heroine initially rejects femininity for masculinity in order to first embark on the journey and achieve success, only to end up unsatisfied with the boon. After realizing that a change in strategy is required, the heroine then yearns to reconnect with the feminine which they abandoned when they began on the journey. The heroine proceeds to "heal the wounded masculine" as they did with the abandoned feminine, and then embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of themselves, integrating them to achieve self-realization.

    As we discussed in class, Helga begins Quicksand roughly following the heroine's journey, leaving Naxos in a separation from the feminine, and then travelling from place to place in a road of trials. She becomes dissatisfied in Harlem, goes to Denmark, and once again becomes dissatisfied there. By the later chapters of the book, Helga, now in despair, finally comes across a religious procession, and embraces spirituality, marrying the pastor. However, instead of bringing Helga along in the heroine's journey, this experience marks the point in which she diverges from it, effectively dooming her chances at success. 

    Helga's life in the last parts of Quicksand is characterized by her acceptance of subjugation to others - subservience to God, oppression by whites, and obedience to her husband. 

    She moves back to a rural town in Alabama, where her community, as her husband puts it, engages in "labor in the vineyard of the Lord" (Larsen 109), in language that uncomfortably mirrors the way slaves do farm labor for their masters. The reverend thus inadvertently implies that their way of worshipping God is like a form of self-subjugations, in which worshippers slave themselves to a higher power. Religion is also used as a way to promote acceptance of other forms of subjugation. Instead of writhing against injustice and poverty, people are made content by the promise of God saving them all. We see one instance of this religious contentment being employed on page 114. As Helga begins to have doubts about rearing more children, the reverend responds by making statements such as "The Lord will look out for you...we must accept what God sends...My mother had nine children and was thankful for every one," asking Helga: "Had not the good God saved her soul from hell-fire and eternal damnation? Had He not in His great kindness given her three small lives...Had he not showered her with numerous other mercies...?" On the next page, the Reverend then implores Helga to "trust the Lord more fully." The promise of being saved by the Lord and a happy afterlife works to keep Helga and people like her content, hoping for salvation in the next life rather than actualization in the present one. Giving God the agency to fix her problems prevents Helga from actually trying to break free of subjugation. 

    Helga also appears to accept racial subjugation, having spent the entirety of the novel trying to break free of it. She moves back to the Deep South, home to Jim Crow segregation. Unlike her time in Naxos, there is no promise of uplift for black people or improvement of race relations. Rather, Helga's community is poor, and makes little mention of race at all. Most likely, they live as second-class citizens, in the shadow of white oppression.

    And of course, the most glaring way in which Helga accepts subjugation is through the adopting of feminine gender roles in its entirety. She is defined as a pastor's wife, and gives birth to 5 children within the span of a few years. While living most of her life fairly independent and single, she adopts the traditional subservient gender roles of women of that era, being a complete home-maker and child-rearer. 

    So, instead of trying to 'integrate the masculine and feminine', Helga adopts a solely 'feminine' identity, subjugated under multiple layers of oppression and adopting the role of a stay-at-home wife. Without any way to complete the journey at this point, and dislocated from her support system, her heroine's journey grinds to a screeching halt.

Yeah. Maybe don't try to marry a Southern reverend if you're trying to escape from racial and gender subjugation.