49 pages • 1 hour read
Danzy SennaColored Television
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mirrors
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and includes racist terms for Black and biracial people in direct quotes from the source material.
Mirrors are a motif in Colored Television that represents Jane’s struggles with her identity and her fear as a biracial person of being erased. In one early scene, Jane looks in the mirror in the house they are touring in “Multicultural Mayberry” and is unable to see herself; “for a moment, she was overwhelmed with a fear that she didn’t exist” (75). The trope repeats later when she receives the news that her novel has been rejected. She has “the odd sense again that she was not a real person—that if she were to walk over to the mirror […] she’d find nothing staring back” (78). As the novel continues, she finds herself “checking her face in the mirror sixteen times a day […] because she wanted to make sure her face was still there” (235). Finally, when Jane realizes that Hampton has betrayed her, “she rose up to look in the mirror, half expecting to see nothing but a blank space where her face should have been” (256).
Senna uses the fictional academic Hiram Cavendish’s final “excerpt” found in the novel as an explanation for the fear of disappearing that Jane experiences as a biracial woman. Cavendish, as Jane summarizes, states that “mulattos” would eventually integrate into either Black or white culture and subsequently “cease to exist” (264). This notion is shown in the text through what Jane calls “mulatto mirroring,” or her tendency to match the speech and social expectations of the person with whom she is speaking. All of this contributes to Jane’s unstable identity and fear of disappearing— figuratively represented in her not being able to see herself in the mirror.
American Girl Doll
The American Girl doll is a symbol of racial identity in the United States and Jane’s aspirations for financial stability. The American Girl dolls are a series of expensive collectible dolls that have backstories related to different American experiences. Jane decides to splurge on an Addy Walker doll for her daughter Ruby’s birthday. Addy’s backstory is that she had been born into enslavement and sought freedom in the North. Jane feels eager to give the doll to Ruby, seeing the doll as a “child of hope” and a “child of resilience” (61). This is representative of Jane’s hopes for a better life for children.
Ruby is initially disappointed with Addy. Ruby is quick to clarify that it is not because Addy is Black but because it serves as a painful reminder of the family’s relative poverty compared to her friends. When allowed to pick another doll, Jane is disappointed that Ruby picks an Indian American doll, Kavi Sharma, instead of a Black one; Jane overlooks the possibility that Ruby picked the doll because it more closely resembles Ruby herself as a light-skinned biracial girl. Jane is mollified when, by the end of the novel, she sees that Ruby is sleeping with the Addy doll, “dressed like the doll’s twin” (271). This is symbolic of Ruby’s embrace of her racial heritage, albeit through a commercialized representation of that identity.
Divorce
In Colored Television, divorce is a motif that illustrates the precarity of relationships with a focus on intersecting racial, class, and gender dynamics. There are two cycles of divorce discussed in the novel. The first cycle is the divorces of Jane and Brett’s parents, who were part of the first generation of legal interracial relationships in the United States. The divorces of Brett and Hampton from their wives and the specter of divorce in Jane and Lenny’s relationship make up the second cycle of divorce.
Jane defines herself as a “child of divorce.” She describes how “she was part of the first baby boom of mulattos” because (42), before her parents’ generation, interracial marriage was illegal in the United States. Her parents’ relationship was acrimonious and characterized by both parties’ selfishness. Jane quips that she feels more “part of the Hating Generation” rather than “the Loving Generation” (42). She feels connected to Brett because they were both “the product of an unsuccessful interracial marriage that had ended in divorce” (14). With this in her background, Jane seeks to avoid the mistakes of her parents. She wants to stay in her marriage to provide her children with financial and emotional stability.
Brett and Piper’s divorce highlights their privilege in comparison to Jane. Because of their wealth and Piper’s white racial identity, they face less stigma and, therefore, less pressure to stay in their marriages. Jane thinks that “Piper would stay wealthy” no matter what happens (236). By contrast, Jane fears that if she gets divorced, she will become a “statistic” as a low-income biracial woman. To those with privilege, divorce is an opportunity, and to those with less privilege, divorce poses a financial and societal challenge.
