Colored Television

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.