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Metaphors
Definition of Mood
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes in the reader. Every aspect of a piece of writing... read full definition
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes in the reader. Every aspect... read full definition
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes... read full definition
Mood
Explanation and Analysis:
The mood of "How it Feels to be Colored Me" shifts between hopeful and defiant throughout the essay. As the essay itself is a recollection of multiple memories from her younger years that produce a diverse array of emotions, Hurston's mood is far from static. Although she details negative experiences about "realizing" her race amidst a sea of Whiteness and White power—whether in Jacksonville or New York—Hurston's mood throughout the essay remains largely hopeful:
The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Occurring near the end of the essay, this passage evokes Hurston's feeling of hope for herself, even if she stands amidst a tidal wave of racial intolerance and systemic racism sewn into the very fabric of the United States. The pressure to associate herself with the negative legacies of slavery—which, as Hurston reminds readers, ended 60 years ago as of the 1920s—is not a pressure to which Hurston is willing to succumb. She refuses to box herself into the categorizations of "Black," "American," or even both. Her sense of patriotism for her country, "right or wrong," is not a patriotism built on ignorance about her and others' history; it is a patriotism built on the hope that the "Great Soul" can encompass all Americans regardless of race or time. Hurston is more than her race or her genealogical ties to slavery. She can believe in more, achieve more, and even be more when she rejects limiting notions of societal categorization—especially during a time in history when legalized racial segregation was at its peak.
While Hurston's mood is hopeful regarding her sense of self and its metaphorical freedom from categorization, she also sets forth a mood of defiance:
I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it.
Hurston's refusal to associate herself explicitly with the legacy of American slavery evokes a mood of defiance. She separates herself from what she identifies as the "school" of Black Americans who curse the unluckiness of their birth, and she charts a new path for herself as someone who chooses to look forwards rather than backwards:
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past.
Once again, Hurston defies the expectation that she feel depression over her grandparents' enslavement. Although she may be slightly satirical in implying that 60 years is long enough for slavery to safely be "in the past," she nonetheless rejects the additional expectation that a Black author in the 1920s must only write about the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism. Amongst Harlem Renaissance authors and artists, there was tension about whether or not to center slavery and, if so, how. Hurston chooses to acknowledge its legacy but center new ideas of personal identity and freedom from expectation in her work. Her essay ties together hope and defiance to create a fresh type of narrative rarely published (or rarely allowed to be published) by Black women during the 1920s.
Related Themes:
