Status Codes in COLORED TELEVISION and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Do markers of success define fate or not?

                          Colored Television and Pride and Prejudice

I read Colored Television by Danzy Senna and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin for two different book groups. I was surprising that the plots of these books, a hundred years apart; seemed to hinge on similar status codes. Though the personal stakes differed.  The Bennett sisters, heroines of Pride and Prejudice, navigate the Bristish aristocracy’s marriage market, while Jane, Lenny the talented African American couple in Colored Television are chasing careers in Los Angeles media markets. Both sets of contenders must crack social codes to gain entry. They are aware that perceived status can make or break their future prospects.

Indicators of status here includes desirable neighborhood, clothes, physical attractiveness, well-born or estimable friends and family, appropriate education or employment. In Austin’s world, the answers determine whether a girl or young man is worthy as a dancing partner, let alone a marriage prospect. Beauty is an asset that might be nullified by low financial prospects. Yet there’s urgency for Jane and Elizabeth, the eldest of five Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice. Fated to lose their home to a male heir after the death of their father, a reality though not imminent, is presented by the appearance of the heir, a minister. His quest for a wife, fuels their mother’s pressure to find husbands before the girls are spinsters, “on the shelf..” (Unmarried noble women were considered a financial burden, often compelled to find an appropriate job, like a governess.) Yet, though flogged through the marriage system, Elizabeth Bennett creates her own “codes.” 

Jane in Colored Television, an African American woman of mixed parentage who thinks of herself as a “mulatto,” is an academic at a university. Her position, offered after her first, groundbreaking book, is jeopardized without her status as an important writer sealed by a second book. The first, written before her two children, has proved an interminable project. Economic stability for her family rests on publishing that book. Her husband, Lenny, a sophisticated abstract painter, produces unsold paintings with an opacity of meaning both intriguing and off-putting. Though the couple are desperate to have a settled successful life, Jane appears to be the only one trying to make it happen. Though Lenny, who disavows all need to compromise his vision, is learning Japanese for an upcoming show in Japan. 

As the novel opens, they are enjoying a few months “sabbatical” at the beautiful, eccentrically designed Los Angeles house at Jane’s writer friend, an African-American, who’s found commercial success. Jane and her family are living a borrowed life is in a highly desirable neighborhood with “blue ribbon” schools. As temporary rich people, the pleasure comes with pressure.  Jane, who thinks she doesn’t fit in either White or Black society, wants to save her children from the pain of being without a stable racial group. The history of Mulattos, the topic of her ongoing book, is more about “passing” than definition. It’s intrinsic to her fears about her children’s “issues.”  As much as she yearns to be defined as “fitting-in,” her own standards, as she knows, are about separation. 

Both Jane and Elizabeth, have official and unofficial “codes” of status. Elizabeth is a born “gentlewoman,” but lives in “genteel” poverty, as her mother watches every penny so that her girls “pass” as respectable gentry.  They hike miles instead of hiring coaches, eat food from bartered stock and the garden, wear old hand-me-down dresses disguised with clever alterations. Yet Elizabeth muses, do these economies matter to their value as human beings? Does “marrying well” mean a better life or bartering your freedom for better clothes?”  

Jane, who borrows the designer clothes of her friend’s White “trophy” wife, to go to school events, parties, feeling a little absurd, as she adheres to the stylish status codes of her neighborhood. Her kids play with borrowed toys of their Host’s kids but are making affluent new friends at school. And, though briefly, there’s space for her office and for Lenny to have a studio. But the pressure’s on for her to finish her book before they have to move again to “temporary” low-rent housing. Publishing her “big” book will seal her status at the university. She knows she can do it.  Visitors at her daughter’s birthday party, impressed by the house, neighborhood, assume Jane and Lenny must be successful. And she knows how to fake it, she thinks. 

At events, both Jane and Elizabeth carefully access, who’s valuable to know and get information they need. When Jane’s academic status impresses a Hollywood agent, she asks herself, How can she make some serious money? Elizabeth plays her values, refusing practical marital choices over her own worth. But then she wonders, Can love exist within a “good” match?  Then, later agonizes, whether she has  overplayed her hand?  In these books, as in real life, status is a signifier and a code to crack. 

Discovery is what happens when the game seems over.   

S.W.