Violence In Jean Toomer's Blood Burning Moon

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Recommended: Violence portrayed in the media

In the case of a lynching, the violence affects both the lynchman and the lynched. Other times the violence is psychological in nature and it is often indirect. No matter what, it poisons and corrodes everything and everyone, from the environment itself to the very self; the “i” within the environment. And it still does to this day. Jean Toomer’s short story, “Blood Burning Moon” and other works featured in Cane, visualizes depictions of violence through lynching and reveal the innermost madness of the psyche that is the product of racialized violence in the South. Tom Burwell,“whom the whole town called Big Boy” (Jean Toomer 39) and aptly so, is a manchild who never reaches maturity and understanding because of the environment around him.

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