Color in Literature

Color in Literature

Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Color in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988)
What is useful, she said, is the images. "The controlling image is useful," she said, "because it determines the language that informs the text. Once I know what the shape of the scar is, once I know that there are two patches of orange in that quilt, then I can move. Once I have the controlling image, which can also work as the metaphor— that is where the information lodges. When I know where the white space is, when I know where the broad strokes are." (— Toni Morrison in Book Review of Beloved, NY Times, 8-26-1987)
Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talkthink it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There wasn't any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool-the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild-like life in the raw.
Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. it was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it.
(Beloved, pp. 38-39) (Text)
"Yes it is. Blue. that don't hurt nobody. Yellow neither."
"You getting in the bed to think about yellow?"
"I like yellow"
"Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?"
"Can't say. It's something can't be planned."
(Beloved, p. 179)
See if the grass is gray-green or brown or what. Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before. Took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow, then gree. She was well into pink when she died. I don't believe she wanted to get to red and I understand why because me and Beloved outdid ourselves with it. Matter of fact, that and her pinkish headstone was the last color I recall. Now I'll be on the lookout. Think what spring will be for us! I'll plant carrots just so she can see them, and turnips. Have you ever seen one, baby? A prettier thing God never made. White and purple with a tender tail and a hard head. (Beloved, p. 201)
Color in Goethe's Theory of Color (1810)
Unlike Newton's analysis of color in terms of frequency and wavelength, Goethe's studies (Farbenlehre, 1810) were based on an artist's observation— "At noon, the sun appears, colorless in its brightness. This changes as the sun begins to set: at first it turns yellowish, then gold, then finally orange, and even deep red, as it sets on the horizon... Through the slight resistance of a translucent medium, pure light is softened to a cheerful sunny yellow, which has a light, expansive quality."
(John Barnes, Goethe & the Power of Rhythm,
Adonis Press, Ghent, NY, 1999, pp. 57-58 [Stanford: PT2049.B37.1999])

Color Symbolism In Buddhist Art
Color Symbolism in Buddhist Traditions
Buddhist Flag Color Symbolism

— Peter Y. Chou
Mountain View, 2-13-2008

These notes were inspired by Elaine Scarry's seminar
"Imagining Colors" at Stanford on February 13, 2008