Cane

Literary Modernism rose in the late 19th and 20th centuries and is characterized by a focus on individual, subjective experience while breaking away from traditional literary formats. Authors typically associated with this writing style include James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. While Modernism is typically identified with white authors from the United States and Europe, Simon Gikandi argues in his essay “Race and the Modernist Aesthetic” that race was integral in developing such a transformative literary and aesthetic movement. He explains that “[i]t was in celebration of the mentality and body of what it considered to be its primitive other that [M]odernism reinvented its aesthetic strategies as one way of freeing itself from [...] the dogmatic authority of the nineteenth century” (Gikandi, Simon. “Race and the Modernist Aesthetic.” Writing and Race. Longman, 1997, p. 148). In other words, creatives looked to an exoticized African aesthetic as a way to introduce newness and otherness to their literary and artistic production. This appeared most obviously in abstractions of the Black female body that often excluded her interiority but overrepresented her physicality. Such representations appeared in Black and white Modernist literature alike. Toomer’s Cane is a prime example of an aesthetic Modernist phenomenon.

In “Blood-Burning Moon,” Toomer describes Louisa as follows: “Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns” (37). In beautiful prose, Toomer deconstructs Louisa from a woman to a female. She is stripped down to her anatomy, her sexuality, and her role as desired and desirous. This is not unlike the recurring trope in Cane of women who are given little interiority but who are the objects of immense male sexual desire. This resonates with the words of scholar Daphne Brooks: “Black women’s bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden of spectacular (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture.” She goes on to describe Black women’s bodies as “[s]ystemically overdetermined and mythically configured,” “consistently render[ed] […] as ‘infinitely deconstructable “othered” matter’” (Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Duke University Press, 2006, p. 7). Although speaking to Caribbean iterations of Modernism, it speaks pointedly to how Toomer uses the Southern Black female body in Cane.

In “Theater,” John gazes at Dorris. He writes, “John sees her. Her hair, crisp-curled, is bobbed. Bushy, Black hair bobbing about her lemon-colored face. Her lips are curiously full, and very red. Her limbs in silk purple stockings are lovely” (67). Similar to Toomer’s description of Louisa, John’s gaze deconstructs Dorris into parts of her body. It is evocative of Pablo Picasso’s painting, Les femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) or Wifredo Lam’s La Jungla. These paintings come from the mid-20th century, emerging from artistic movements—such as the Afro-Cubanist movement for Lam—with roots in Modernism. Both of these paintings feature the bodies of women abstracted and deconstructed. They reflect what is apparent in the writing—a vision of the Black female body that is aesthetically central.

Toomer’s Cane is a text of its moment, drawing on Modernism’s literary and artistic aesthetics. Toomer’s engagement with Modernist writing does go beyond his attention to the female body; his writing in chapters such as “Seventh Street” disrupts traditional literary conventions. Toomer uses heavy repetition, sometimes disregards the imperative for words to make sense in relation to one another, and leans into a stream-of-consciousness style in chapters such as “Theater.” However, it is most interesting to see how the Modernist style comes to bear on his depiction of women in Cane.