Color Struck - Analysis, Critiques, and Literature On The Play

Analysis, Critiques, and Literature On The Play

According to Martha Gilman Bower, Emma is an exemplar case of the "damaging consequences of an obsession with skin tone among Blacks." The consequences of being "color struck" that one sees throughout the play is escalating anger, low self-esteem, paranoia, and schizophrenia. Bower also points out, Emma is does not show animosity towards segregation, but rather is angered by the intra-race hierarchy. Because of Emma’s "psychotic obsession with color", she is unable to truly be happy, love, overcome oppression, and consequently is "the only miserable character." Such obsession is self-destructive, distorts vision, and has the possibility of ruining opportunities.

According to Michael North, "’Color struck’ is a term for obsession but also for the retreat it causes." Yet, the term "color struck" was popularized by Hurston in at a party after the 1925 Opportunity awards dinner when she comes in and ", ‘Calaaaah struuuck." North interprets such triumph that Hurston imbues in the cry as what she intended to do with the play. North also points out the historical background of the cakewalk, highlighting its minstrelsy origins; he writes "the cakewalk a cliché of black life."

Faedra Chatard Carpenter offers an insightful analysis of "Color Struck" in the article, "Addressing the ‘Complex’-ities of Skin Color: Intra-Racism in the Plays of Hurston, Kennedy, and Orlandersmith. She writes:

The topical significance of Color Struck is in how it challenges assumptions associated with color-consciousness. Rather than staging the color-complex as a unilateral dynamic in which lightskinned blacks reject and separate themselves from their darker brethren (the narrative of the "uppity" light-skinned black), Hurston dramatizes the fact that color prejudice takes many forms. In effect, the dramatic twist Hurston portrays is twofold: both John and Emma are "color struck," albeit in opposing and unpredictable ways. Emma is drawn to light skin (notably, after her relationship with John fails, she presumably has a sexual relationship/encounter with a white man, resulting in the birth of a "very white girl"), while John exhibits color-consciousness in his preference for dark-skinned women (after the breakup, he consciously seeks out a darker-skinned wife that "was jus’ as much" like Emma as possible) (348).