Migration, Fragmentation, and Identity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck and the Geography of the Harlem Renaissance

Melancholia and Fragmentation

Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination?
                               -Marita O. Bonner (1925)¹

The unpredictability that from the outset dwells in the relationship between Emma and John results from John’s disloyalty and Emma’s displaced condition. Emma’s effort to keep John from leaving takes the form of reaching out, yet her intimacy risks ridicule and rejection. Her fears extend throughout her everyday life; every prospect of social engagement becomes a potentially dangerous emotional encounter. At the end or the scene two, John and Emma are called to the dance floor as the representatives of Jacksonville, but Emma refuses. She is now alone.

Emma: (She stands and clenches her fists) Ah, mah God! He’s in there with her- Oh, them half whites, they gets everything, they gets everything everybody else wants! The men, the jobs-everything! The whole world is got a sign on it. Wanted: Light colored. Us blacks was made for cobble stones. (She muffles a cry and sinks limp upon her seat.)²

The final line reminds us of Emma’s condition, that she is nothing more than cobblestones for others to walk on. Her desperation is not mere self-indulgence, but something more relevant: melancholia.

Melancholia as a dramatic conceit has significant value. It has an honored history in Western aesthetics and philosophical traditions. When, as literary historian Juliana Schiesari points out, “women fall into the depths of sorrow,” they “are all too easily dismissed with the banal and unprestigious term ‘depression.'” Cultural expressions of melancholia, or loss, are not given the same “representational value as those of men within the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.”³ Properly understood, melancholia provides a clear understanding of the protagonist, placing Emma within a complex emotional matrix of social conceptualization. From the point where John leaves her, Emma says little. Paucity of speech is highly unusual in melodrama, where the tendency is toward effusive dialogue. In Color Struck, melancholia could all too easily lead to verbal excess resulting in satiation. Hurston avoids this, with the consequences that her technique becomes theatrically rich and somewhat unique. In strong contrast to the melodramatic overflow of words in Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (discussed in the previous chapter), Hurston rejects verbal cascades and grand speeches, opting instead for silence, evasiveness, and indirection. Both Grimké and Hurston experiment with different dramatic forms to emphasize their points.

Hurston’s employment of dashes, ellipses, and circumlocution in the text are indices of what both literary historians Saidiya V. Hartman and Claudia Tate call “textual enigmas.” These markings embody black women’s discourse. Hartman asserts that the dashes and elisions are “literal and figurative cuts in the narrative,” displaying “the searing wounds of the violated and muted body” acting out its remembrances without the linguistic and symbolic tools to articulate its history of injury.⁴ The violated body in Color Struck is represented as a fragmented soul, separated from community and respect. Claudia Tate argues along similar lines, maintaining that the ellipses are “enigmatic illocutions” indicative of a “surplus” of unattainable desires.⁵ Emma’s halting words, inarticulate responses, and enigmatic behavior require dashes and ellipses in their textual representation. They are emblematic of the body acting out a speechless articulation of desire and pain. The “melancholy moment,”⁶ a term coined by psychoanalyst and cultural historian Julia Kristeva, reveals a condition frequently misinterpreted as mere self-effacing “rage” typifying exaggerated jealously and little else. This view of mere rage and exaggerated jealousy, however, misses the main point of the play.

Emma’s anguish transcends language because her world is too fragmented for conceptualization. Words as signifiers of felt experiences are, in this case inadequate. The structural relationship between the signifier (language) and the thing signified (event) falls apart in the face of multiple and contradictory meanings. The play reveals this complexity in strong theatrical terms. For example at the end of the third scene, John and Effie have won the cakewalking contest. While the dancing inside is joyful, Emma stands outside, alone, listening to the announcer declare John and Effie the winners. A man approaches Emma, and says, “You’re from Jacksonville, ain’t you?” Then there are the following stage directions: “He whirls her around and around.” “Ain’t you happy?,” he says; “Whoopee!” The final stage direction notes that he releases her, and “she buries her face in the moss.”⁷ John, dancing inside, will soon leave with Effie for parts north, abandoning Emma.

The striking juxtaposition of the lively dance inside and Emma being thrust to the ground with her face in the moss outside is Hurston’s visual projection of a powerful content. Emma’s silence during the moment of her greatest humiliation is Hurston’s way of making the action carry meaning within the unfolding theatrical process. The audience must see Emma alone and face down while the black community in the background dances with joy; only through the visual, not the verbal, can we grasp the tragic dimension of Emma’s existence. Emma, cut off from lover and culture, is diminished in value. Hurston’s folk tragedy depends on a background of folk life (dance and celebration) displayed against the foreground of isolation. The author has juxtaposed a world fragmented between two opposing images. The image of Emma thrown to the moss epitomizes her being thrown from house, home, and community. Lying there in silence, she bespeaks a tragedy beyond words.

1. Marita O. Bonner, “On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored,” Crisis 31.2 (December 1925), 64. [↩]
2. Hurston, Color Struck, 11. [↩]
3. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3-4, 13. Schiesari observes that the term melancholia is a Latin transliteration of the Greek word meaning “black bile” or “atra bilis” a bodily fluid whose excess is responsible for the condition of melancholia. According to Aristotle, the melancholic temperament affected all “great men” (6). [↩]
4. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 108. [↩]
5. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13. [↩]
6. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 128. [↩]
7. Hurston, Color Struck, 12. [↩]