1074 Toomer, Jean
However, at the moment when he issues the chal-
lenge, Pierre’s uncertainty about his wife and his
marriage is clarified for him: “At the second Pierre
did this and uttered these words he felt that the
question of his wife’s guilt . . . was finally and incon-
testably answered in the affirmative. He hated her
and was severed from her for ever.” After killing
Ellen’s lover in the duel, Pierre asks himself how
and why it happened and answers himself, “Because
you married her.” All of his concerns before their
marriage are realized in this moment. For Pierre,
everything terrible that has happened is the result of
his marriage and Ellen’s fault.
Pierre regrets his marriage; for him it is based
on lust and for his wife it is based on greed, and
finally it results in murder. Prince Andrey regrets his
marriage and his love for his wife because he now
dreams of glory and feels hampered by his domestic
situation. Regret only comes in hindsight and is next
to impossible to alter as the past cannot be changed.
Melody Marlow
ToomEr, JEaN Cane (1923)
Cane was first published in 1923. Heralded by crit-
ics as a major work of the Harlem Renaissance and
highly experimental in form, the book is a collec-
tion of interrelated sketches, stories, poems, and
drama. Jean Toomer’s 1921 visit to Sparta, Georgia,
prompted him to write about the southern folk
culture that he saw disappearing with the Great
Migration (the period of 1910–30 when more than
4 million African Americans moved from the South
to the North, Midwest, and West).
Sempter, the setting of the stories in the first part
of the book, is loosely based on Sparta. The stories
and poems present lyric portraits of field work and
African-American women such as Karintha, Fern,
and Carma. Toomer (1894–1967) repeatedly uses
images of pines and dusk to convey the rootedness
of these characters in the land.
The second section depicts the fast-paced,
restrictive, urban African-American experience in
Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Here, those who
are in touch with their southern roots retain a sense
of vitality, while those who have assimilated to white
civilization consign themselves to empty, material-
istic lives. Rhobert, for example, is drowning under
the weight of his house, and characters such as John
and Muriel cannot find love because they bow to
social convention.
The third section brings the book full circle
through the story of Kabnis, a northern, educated
black man who comes to the rural South to teach.
Unable to connect to the southern past in a mean-
ingful way because of his fears, he is crushed by his
sojourn rather than rejuvenated by it. Together, the
three sections represent Toomer’s swan song of the
South and offer a powerful call for a preservation
of southern African-American identity amid the
rapid social changes of the early 20th century.
Amanda LawrenceaLIenatIon in Cane
In Jean Toomer’s Cane, the reader witnesses the
vexing conditions that racial inequality has histori-
cally produced for African Americans. In the United
States, race has persistently and consistently served
as a powerful source of alienation. Ralph Kabnis, one
of the central characters in Toomer’s text, experi-
ences the harsh realities of being an African-Amer-
ican male in the South subjected to the oppressive
dominance of Jim Crow laws. The amalgamation of
race and location is significant in understanding the
alienation that Kabnis experiences. As an educated
black man with the desire to make a tremendous
contribution to humanity as an educator, Ralph
finds that both the dominant culture and his fellow
African Americans are not willing to embrace his
commitment to education. The dominant culture
rejects this commitment because of its racist beliefs
in Ralph’s intellectual inferiority, and the black
community rejects it because the racial inequities
and limitations of Jim Crow laws have diminished
tremendously their ability to see the meaningfulness
of education.
While it may be easy to understand why rac-
ist members of the dominant culture would not
embrace Ralph’s desire to teach in Georgia, the
lack of his own community’s support is much
more psychologically vexing for Kabnis: He cannot
understand why the members of his own race are
not able to see that gaining knowledge is essential
to combating the economic oppression that the