Jean Toomer's Cane: a spell of the feminine

• Autores: Anabela Gonçalves
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 437-450
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper will focus on Cane’s first section, especially on “Karintha”, “Becky” and “Blood Burning Moon”. Its purpose is to analyze characters, feminine ones, and to discuss their functions as possible foundations of Blackness in African-American communities. Adding erotic force and subliminal political aims to the text, women are presented as primitive forces, roots, centers of life, echoing at the same time the emptiness and harsh disunity of sensibility felt by most modernist authors.

    Through women, Cane, on the one hand, surely hits us hard with the inequities of Black life in the South but, on the other, it discloses strength, belief, self-esteem and resilience where the eye can only see weakness, submission and delusion. Women will be proved in this paper as ultimate exits for the dead ends that Cane exhibits.