SOURCE: “‘Dorris Dances … John Dreams’: Free Indirect Discourse and Female Subjectivity in Cane,” in Soundings, Vol. 80, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 455-74.

In the following essay, Abbott considers the function of the female characters in Cane, maintaining that they are often the “sites onto which men project their judgments and desires.”

Many of the chapters that comprise Jean Toomer's Cane share a common textual anxiety, which is rooted in the relation between the narrators and the female characters.¹ In Cane, women are often the sites onto which men project their judgements and desires, and many of the chapters explore, implicitly or explicitly, the effect this has on the women involved. But while the narrators in these chapters often emphasize the extent to which women are damaged by functioning primarily as vessels of others' meaning, they inevitably become part of the same dynamic—either covertly, as in “Karintha,” or overtly, as...