Use of Imagery in Jean Toomers Cane Essay -- Toomer Cane Essays

Use of Imagery in Jean Toomers Cane Dusk. It is that darker side of twilight when the sun has honourable set, but the stargaze has yet to take full charge. It is a time of mergings, of vagueness and ambiguity, when an end and a beginning change places. The sun steps aside and lets the moon and stars take over for a while. As the most pervasive image in the first section of Jean Toomers Cane, it is the time of day when the sky, lazily disdaining to dog/The setting sun, too indolent to hold/ A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,/Passively darkens (Georgia Dusk, 15). It is also a reflection of the souls of the characters, like Karintha, sodding(a) as dusk when the sun goes down (3). Dusk and its smoky, dreamlike derivatives form the connective mental imagery joining light and dark, day and night, black and white. It is the kind of imagery that most closely articulates what George Hutchinson called Toomers dream of a new American race in his essay Jean Toomer and Ame rican Racial Discourse (227). He says, Toomers pot of a coming merging of the races makes perfect sense within the framework of the first section of Cane the dystopia of the contemporary South implies a corresponding utopia (234). spell Hutchinsons theories rely heavily upon miscegenation and Toomers use of racially mixed characters, the more compelling evidence seems to lie in the murkiness of both the mystic-like atmosphere of inelegant Georgia and the half created characterizations of its people. Through his distinctly modern use of imagery, Toomer creates a new iconography that defines a vision of the future where colors merge and race is no longer the harbinger of identity. To call Toomers agenda and use of imagery modern implies ... ...on, George. Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 35, 2 (Summer 1993). 226-245. Reuben, Paul P. Chapter 9 Harlem Renaissance - Jean Toomer. PAL Perspectives in American Literature - A Research Guide. URL http//www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/toomer.html Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York Norton, 1988. Toomer, Jean. Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. ed. Robert Jones. Knoxville UT Press, 1996. Whyde, Janet. Mediating Forms Narrating the ashes in Jean Toomers Cane. Southern Literary Journal. 26, 1 (Fall 1993). 42-52. Williams, Scott. A Jean Toomer Page http//members.aol.com/bonvibre/toomer0.html Yeats, William Butler. Into the Twilight. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. eds. Richard Ellman and Robert OClair. New York Norton & Company, 1988.