"To Fashion the Wonderful Garment:" W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

The essay argues that Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand (1928), is an intertextual revision of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). In Quicksand Larsen registers the clothing and color symbolism running through Du Bois’s novel to articulate her critique of the gender politics such symbolism enshrines. Exploring this previously neglected intertextual relationship enables a deeper appreciation and revises traditional scholarly assessments of both novels, foregrounding the political significance of Larsen’s fiction and illuminating the critically underestimated literariness of The Quest of the Silver Fleece.