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Analysis of Jean Toomer’s novel ‘Cane’
Jean Toomer is one the famous novelists of the Harlem Renaissance era and was a very renowned figure in the African American literature. Cane was Toomer’s modernist experimental novel that was published in the year 1923 and won accolades from all walks of the society. The novel as well as Toomer was regarded as a representation of African American life. This work of Toomer is regarded as probably the earliest during the Harlem Renaissance period. Race or rather racial ambiguity is the most significant themes of this novel. This is being stated so because, almost all of the characters and the poems presented in the book are apparently ambiguous in terms of race as the challenge most of the socially acceptable multiethnic relationships. This is applicable even to the black protagonists found in the poem like for instance, “Karintha” and “Portrait in Georgia,” also portray the intricacy of understanding and accepting race beyond its physical features and advocate the pressures of racialization. Hence, the black color of these characters becomes intertwined into the writing of Toomer and more into the larger inquiry of the very meaning of being a human.
Toomer deals with race through this work at various levels. Most apparently, there is a specific manner in which blacks in American society are treated, both in the South as well as in the North. In the South, the component of danger always exists. For example, Becky is banned by both blacks as well as the whites alike for the offense of crossing the color line, having a relationship with a black man and for becoming pregnant through him. There is an enduring distrust about the blacks in the minds of whites, like for instance, the sheriff in "Esther" constantly watches the man who is in the throes of religious frenzy as "y cant never tell what a nigger like King Barlo might be up t." More often than not, it is generally believed that this distrust is more than sufficient to keep the black people in their place in the society.
Cane does not exist in emptiness, restricted to specific implications in instants of time; rather, its interpretations continue to develop in conjunction with shared perceptions of race and identity in the American society. This work of Toomer essentially beseeches an understanding of former racial attitudes; interpretation of this work as racially indistinct is possibly made more freely obtainable to the readers of the twenty-first century readers than for those belonging to the early or mid-twentieth century because of its uniqueness of the corresponding racial climates.
Cane backs the penchants of the text to alter racial outlooks by denying the affliction towards representation. The inference of each and every prose narrative in novel expresses its multiracial or racially ambiguous characters to be misconstrued by the dualistic racial system of Jim Crow; they hold a negligible and isolating place that leaves them with nowhere to go.
Toomer’s Cane is not indicative of Imagism alone, but it has resulted in Toomer being contextually placed amongst an explosion of African American scholarly and creative life arising in the era of Harlem Renaissance, precisely during the 1920s.
Works Cited
Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Boni and Liveright, 2011.
