Blood-Burning Moon (Style)

Style

Setting

Set in an unnamed town in the American South during the early part of the twentieth century, “Blood-Burning Moon” tells the story of an ultimately fatal rivalry between two men, one white and one black, for the love of a black woman. Segregation and Jim Crow laws are still in effect, and white supremacy shapes and threatens the lives of the African-American members of the community. Within this historical and social context, the events and eventual conflict between Tom Burwell and Bob Stone take place during the early evening hours while the full moon — an evil omen in African-American folklore — is rising. This also adds to the sinister and foreboding atmosphere that pervades the story.

Point of View

The story is told in the third person, from the perspective of each of the three main characters in turn. Thus, each section of the story is told from what is called a limited omniscient point of view: the third person narrator sees into the mind of a single character and recounts the events of that part of the story from that character’s perspective. In the first section, the narrator tells the reader Louisa’s thoughts as she walks home. The narrator in the second section relates Tom Burwell’s thoughts and experience beginning with his visit to the cane boiling and ending with his visit to Louisa. The third section begins with Bob Stone’s thoughts as he leaves his house before his planned meeting with Louisa in the canebreak and follows them until his confrontation with Tom. At this point the narrator switches to a simple third-person point of view, reporting events from the outside, until the very end of the story, which ends as it began with Louisa’s point of view.

Imagery

As the title suggests, the moon is a principal image in “Blood-Burning Moon.” The story begins and ends with the image of “the full moon in the great door,” and each of the story’s three parts ends with a refrain from the song that the women improvise to counter the moon’s “evil omen.” The description of its movement and its reflecting light helps set the ominous mood of the story and foreshadows the violence to come.

In addition to the belief that the full moon represents an evil omen, several other folkloric beliefs about the moon lend it symbolic significance in the story. The full moon has traditionally been associated with the unleashing of powerful emotions, especially those associated with animal instincts. The story of the transformation of a man into a werewolf during the full moon is an example of this tradition. When the women stop singing against the threat of the full moon, Tom and Bob have their fatal encounter. The moon is also traditionally associated with women. The Greco-Roman goddess of the moon, Artemis or Diana, is a chaste goddess, and the white of the moon is associated with chastity. The redness of the moon in the story might be interpreted as a sign of Louisa’s lack of chastity.

The moon also plays a part in the imagery of dark and light that pervades the story and parallels its racial conflict between black and white. Each scene is bathed in an eerie glow, whether from the moon, the glow of the cane fire, the searchlights of the lynch mob, or the fire in which the mob burns and kills Tom. Usually white, but here described as a “red nigger moon,” the moon throughout the story is about to be engulfed or is being engulfed in a “deep purple” bank of clouds. The image of white obscured by dark is repeated when Bob Stone first appears: “The clear white of his skin paled, and the flush of his cheek turned purple.”

Structure

“Blood-Burning Moon” is divided into three sections. The first section and the end of the third are told from Louisa’s point of view. In this way, Toomer frames the story with Louisa’s point of view and her aloneness. Each section also ends with the song: “Red nigger moon. Sinner! / Blood-burning moon. Sinner! / Come out that fact’ry door.” The first two instances of the song foreshadow the violence and death that will occur, while all three emphasize the central image of the moon and serve to unify the three sections. This division of the story into three parts, each of which ends with the same refrain, is reminiscent of the structure of folksongs and ballads.

Modernism

Modernism is a literary style and movement of the first half of the twentieth century. It was marked by a break with traditional literary forms and a rejection of mainstream Western civilization and culture. “Blood-Burning Moon” can be seen as a modernist text primarily because of its experimental style and its unorthodox treatment of African-American life. The story’s lyrical, rhythmic prose, its song-like structure, and its shifting perspectives represent a departure from the style and techniques of conventional pre-twentieth century literary storytelling. Its frank and complex depiction of racial conflict in the segregationist South also contrasts sharply with the images of African-American life typical in earlier American literature, which tended either to sentimentalize or to sensationalize the topic.