Beauty in Jean Toomer's 'Cane'

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• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9783638266000
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A (1), Southern Connecticut State University (English Department), course: The Harlem Renaissance, language: English, abstract: Jean Toomer is one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. His majorcontribution to literature is Cane, a novel comprised of poetry and prose. Cane's structure isof three parts. The first third of the book is devoted to the black experience in the Southernfarmland. The characters inhabiting this portion of the book are faced with an inability tosucceed. The second part of Cane is more urban oriented and concerned with Northern life.The writing style throughout is much the same as the initial section with poetry interspersedwith stories. The concluding third of the novel is a prose piece entitled "Kabnis" and can beregarded as a synthesis of the earlier sections. Cane is therefore designed as a circle.Aesthetically, it goes from simple forms to complex ones and then back to simple forms.Regionally, it goes from the South up into the North, and back into the South again.The emphasis of Cane is on characters as well as on setting. The sections entitled"Karintha, " "Becky, " "Carma, " "Fern, " "Esther, " "Rhobert, " "Avey, " and "Bona and Paul"illustrate psychological realism and truths about human nature. The reader is drawn into thecharacters' lives, and learns by sharing their everyday trials and feelings. Theircharacterizations become indistinguishably merged with the landscape that surrounds them.Characteristically, beauty functions as a deceptive tool in Cane. Flowers, women, andthe word, all of which generally represent beauty, are reduced to emblems lacking dimensionin Toomer's text. Meaning is flawed and violated. The reader is intentionally deceived by theforms of beauty and left with absence instead of significance. By means of linking beautifulimages with violent, explosive, and disturbing thematic openings, Toomer confuses hisreaders' sense of meaning. In Cane, Toomer moves the reader with deeply beautiful andintricate language by exploring many different kinds of beauty, such as the abstract qualitiesof aestheticism, the intimacy of nature's beauty and the immediacy of human beauty.However, though Toomer begins many of his pictures with seemingly beautiful imagery orqualifies a female character in his writing by her beauty, the breakdown of the aestheticwithin his work is widespread. Although beauty seems to be in proportion with reality it israther distorted. It gives way to nightmarish images and relationships. [...]