Part One [of Cane] shows the South's passionality through its portraits of instinctively natural sexuality, of irrationally embraced tradition and social order, and of the tragedy which erupts when these conflict. Part Two, in contrast, illustrates order rationalized and idolized; machinery, industry, and sophistication have repressed and purged persons of any genuine passion. Despite its also offering tragedy, then, that the South at least experiences the passions of love, lust, anger, and murderous hate is preferred to the sterility of the North; Part Three, then, shows the incompatibility of the Northern lifestyle in the South. (p. 320)

Ambivalence and ultimately failure in human interrelationships seem to characterize not only the episodes of Part One but also those of the entire work…. The intensity of [the failure to communicate] is tragic…. (p. 321)

This tragedy is so deep because of the meaning that interaction has for Toomer, for his characters seeking wholeness in relationship … [never realize] that the chaos is within themselves and is further fragmented by their superimposed order. It is, then, a struggle for involvement in life, acceptance of chaos. To illustrate this, Toomer uses the device of men (as limits, controls, definitions) seeking to possess women (as instinctive, silent, passive, elusive)…. The intended redemptive outcome, could these two forces/sexes come together, would be self-knowledge. This seems to depend on instinctual spontaneity of the self, which has been repressed in the North/in men and reduced to sex in the South/in women whereas mutuality of passions in balance to rationality could produce salvation. That encounter remains merely carnality between strangers is essentially out of fear; though self-knowledge is desired and necessary for interpersonal wholeness, fear of its disclosures is stronger. A secondary theme within this abortive quest for self-knowledge occurs at the level of equally unrequited striving for racial fusion and spiritual harmony against the damning social order, which is also shown as a conflict of active males and passive females…. (pp. 321-22)

[The] women in Part One actually stand in the forefront, the men serving only as ploys in the conflicts the women incarnate. The women are the frustration of the dreams and visions of self-knowledge, the instinctive, passional victims of both men's and society's inability to transcend depersonalizing orders…. Finally, even as woman cannot neutralize man, nor passionality be harmonized by rationality, neither is Toomer's God/Messiah in natural processes able to embrace the ordering materialism of non-natural, mechanized society. The women also incarnate and express this hopeless, natural Jesus/God, whether in Dionysian acts or Jewish chanting. Thus seeing the scope of Toomer's women, generalized out of his themes, a detailed character-by-character study will give this flesh, incarnating the tragedy of Toomer's … vision, the impossibility of genuine I-Thou human interrelationships and their consequence, the frustration of redemptive self-knowledge-in-relationship. (pp. 322-23)

Toomer's women are one-sided. They basically all stand under the rubric of sex object, whether as passive (Karintha, Becky, Fern), or as active (i.e., irresponsible—Carma, Louisa), whether as Virgin (Esther, self-defined by sex) or as mother (Becky). Equally objectionable, however, is his one-sided treatment of men. Men are no more generalizable as coldly rational, ordered, and carnal than women are all passional, chaotic, and ethereal. From a feminist perspective, one can appreciate that at least women carry the seeds of redemption; men apparently do not and are by inference hopeless, damned. Unfortunately, many, although not all men and women, especially in the South, do still see themselves in this way. Toomer's use of this motif cannot further the demise of stereotypical self-punishment whose results are tragic (e.g. Esther). Perhaps, however, Toomer is to be actually credited for he does indeed portray not only stereotypical caricatures, but also the tragedy accruing to them—frustrated redemption for all. His, then, is a prophetic call to transcend our stereotypes and roles and enter into genuine relationships. (pp. 333-34)