The Modern Experience in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Jean Toomer’s Cane elucidates the complicated racial plight of early

twentieth century America. His assumably conscientious attempt to consider a

social panacea is belied only by the appearance that the entire work fails to

provide any direct solution to the modern experience. There exists, however,

a referential significance that realigns his project with messages of Sherwood

Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, an earlier work from the modernist canon. A

close reading of Cane’s structure and thematic content suggests that the

importance of sophistication and companionship found in Winesburg, Ohio

epitomize the aspirations of modern maturity that Toomer recognized.

Though Cane’s diverse characters aspire to find love and the

sophisticated, complex truth of life, it is the misunderstanding of these ideas

that connects the stories. In what may be the most obvious formulaic

consistency in the collection of chronicles, each tale, almost by necessity,

concludes with an anti-climax. These occurrences abruptly disrupt the

expected narrative trend, as in the case of each of the six women in the first

demarcation of the book. Karintha endlessly involves herself in relationships

that deny her anything meaningful, Becky dies accidentally without forming

any worldly existence or belonging, Carma is unfaithful and is never made to

acknowledge the consequences, Fern inspires intangible desire in all men

and denies it an outlet, Esther conjures a great love for years that dissolves in

seconds, and Louisa neglects to decide what man can claim her.

Similarly, Winesburg, Ohio avoids the culmination of any great

conclusive narrative energy in almost every section. “Sophistication,” the last

chapter before the main character le...

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...e concept of the grotesque, the

disturbance of an overbearing dedication, Enoch sacrifices his established

family and friends, and by doing so he rejects the sophisticated outlook and is

consumed by the petty insignificance of critique.

Toomer permits the burdens of minutiae and inconsequential desires to

control his characters, with George Willard’s realization in the periphery. Cane

adapts the concept of a grotesque to unite its characters. It explores the

negligible differences between certain characters in order to get at the

overwhelming similarities. “Sophistication” and companionship burden the

modern experience only inasmuch as they are overestimated and become a

preoccupation of desire.

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.