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 in “Fern” and “Avey,” where the narrators enter the stories as characters.

In “Fern,” for example, the narrator empties Fern out with his rhetoric by claiming in part that her eyes “sought nothing” (16) and by describing them as a tabula rasa on which everything else—the land, the South—is painted: “the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia's South” (17). But at the same time, the narrator's ability to interpret Fern accurately is called into question. At first he expresses mere interpretive uncertainty: “Something inside of her got tired of [men], I guess …” (16, emphasis added). Later, he is unable to understand her “fit,” which he does not know (or claims he does not know) if he has caused:

I must have done something—what, I dont know, in the confusion of my emotion. She sprang up. Rushed some distance from me. Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying. Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her.

(19)

In this passage, the narrator seems to be withholding some action from us (“I must have done something”), but we never learn what it is. We can try to read Fern's response, but we only receive this response through the narrator, who claims not to understand it. The narrator seems to enter Fern's consciousness here (how else could he feel the sensation of “boiling sap” in her arms?), but he also says clearly that he is unable to enter her consciousness and that his attempts to understand her actions are hopeless. He describes her as “tortured with something,” but he cannot tell us what it is. And when Fern begins speaking, he cannot understand her words and reports instead that she uttered “plaintive, convulsive sounds” (19).

This episode embodies a central tension in Cane, which is generated by the male characters' efforts to interpret and project their desires onto women whose “true” consciousness is never revealed to them—or to the reader. This tension is evident at the narratalogical level as well. The narrators often fall into free indirect discourse with male characters in the stories, adopting their speech-patterns and locutions so that their consciousness seems to pervade the narrative.² For example, the narrator in “Blood-Burning Moon” slips into Tom's speech in the following passage:

Tom felt funny. Away from the fight, away from the stove, chill got to him. He shivered. He shuddered when he saw the full moon rising towards the cloud-bank. He who didnt give a godam for the fears of old women … Bob Stone. Better not be.

(32)

And he slips into Bob's speech at times as well.

His family had lost ground. Hell no, his family still owned the niggers, practically. Damned if they did, or he wouldnt have to duck around so … [Louisa] was lovely—in her way. Nigger way. What way was that? Damned if he knew. Must know.

(33)

But the narrator never slips into Louisa's speech, even though her role in the narrative is just as important as Tom's or Bob's. In fact, very few of the narrators ever merge with female characters in this way. The male characters and the narrators speculate about and act on women, but these women rarely take the foreground in their own narratives.

Seen in these terms, the narratological situation in Cane is not unlike the one that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., finds in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Gates argues that Hurston “introduced free indirect discourse into African American narration” by developing a narrative style that is halfway between direct discourse (rendered in dialect) and narrative commentary. In his words, “Hurston's innovation is to be found in the middle spaces between these two extremes of narration and discourse, in what we might think of as represented discourse, which as I am defining it includes both indirect and direct discourse” (191).

But while Gates's analysis of Hurston's use of free indirect discourse is persuasive, his comments about Cane are less compelling. He argues that Cane is split between “standard English” narration and the “black oral voice” (178), and he maintains that the latter is “a different voice from the narrator's, as a repository of socially distinct, contrapuntal meanings and beliefs” (181). As a result, he suggests, Toomer was unable to synthesize the narrator's voice and the characters' as Hurston had done, and was left instead with “a tension between the two voices” (194).

The narrators in Cane are often hopelessly separated from the characters whose stories they tell, and that separation is heightened when class distinctions exist between the narrator and a character. But gender distinctions are far more persistent than class distinctions here: male characters of many classes (including Bob and Tom in “Blood-Burning Moon,” Paul in “Bona and Paul,” and Dan Moore in “Box Seat”) do blend with their narrators, while female characters of any class rarely do. And when they do, the blending is always tenuous and fleeting.

“ESTHER”'S DISCOURSE: FLIRTING WITH SUBJECTIVITY

It is this tenuousness that makes “Esther” so disconcerting. Unlike Karintha, Becky, Carma, Fern, Avey, or Louisa, Esther is not merely a site onto which male narratives are projected.³ She is actually permitted an intensely privileged relationship with the narrator of her story.⁴ In the sections that begin “Sixteen,” “Twenty-two” and “Esther is twenty-seven,” Esther's consciousness pierces through the narrative, and the narrator and Esther seem to merge in what appears to be free indirect discourse. Describing Esther's dream, for example, the narrator comments that “She alone is left to take the baby in her arms. But what a baby! Black, singed, woolly, tobacco-juice—ugly as sin” (24). And while reporting her ruminations about her life, he says “[Esther] thinks about men. ‘I don't appeal to them. I wonder why.’ … She thinks of Barlo. Barlo's image gives her a slightly stale thrill. She spices it by telling herself his glories. Black. Magnetically so” (24-25). These passages blur the distinction between Esther and the narrator, and they contain several of the standard markers of free indirect discourse, including exclamatory sentences (“But what a baby!”) and an idiomatic, fragmented, speakerly style (“Black. Magnetically so”).⁵

At times, Esther's consciousness is foregrounded so intensely that it seems to permeate the narrative entirely.

[The wind] is still blowing, but to her it is a steady, settled thing like the cold. She wants her mind to be like that. Solid, contained, and blank as a sheet of darkened ice. She will not permit herself to notice the peculiar phosphorescent glitter of the sweet-gum leaves.

(26)

While the narrator does step in with “to her, it is a steady, settled thing” (emphasis added), Esther's consciousness dominates the narrative here. Later, it becomes so dominant that if Esther misses something, so do we: “She is violently dizzy. Blackness rushes to her eyes. And then she finds that she is in a large room, Barlo is before her” (26).

Still, the narrator's relation to Esther is more tentative, and more troubled, than other narrators' relations to male characters. At two crucial points in “Esther” the narrator suddenly reveals that he is no longer “with” Esther, and, consequently, neither are we. The first is at the end of the long opening section, “Nine,” following an account of Barlo's religious ecstasy. Because this account begins with Esther walking down the street, it seems to be told from her perspective, and we are encouraged to believe this by passages such as the following:

She is about to turn in Broad from Maple Street. White and Black men loafing on the corner hold no interest for her. Then a strange thing happens. A clean-muscled, magnificent, black-skinned Negro, whom she had heard her father mention as King Barlo suddenly drops to his knees.

(22)

We seem to be with Esther here, but a page later, in the midst of the story of Barlo's fit, the narrator interrupts Barlo's words with a dash and says, “Years afterward Esther was told that at that very moment a great, heavy, rumbling voice actually was heard” (23). Suddenly, the narrator treats the situation as if Esther were not there at all. When did Esther leave? Or did she? We do not know, and the narrator does not tell us.

Similarly, in the last paragraph of the story, we move suddenly out of Esther's consciousness into Barlo's and then back into Esther's: “Esther doesnt hear. Barlo does. His faculties are jogged. She sees a smile, ugly and repulsive to her …” (27, emphasis added).

These two narrative shifts, slight as they are, undermine the connection between Esther and the narrator. And although the last line of the story (“There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared” [27]) presents an apparently unmediated transcription of Esther's perspective (there is no “It seems to Esther that …”), the reader is still left on unsteady ground, unsure whether the narrative voice embodies her consciousness or not.

The question of the narrative perspective in “Esther” is further complicated by the fact that we never hear Esther speak. This makes it difficult to be certain whether, or when, the narrative merges with her in free indirect discourse, since we have no way to trace the similarities between her speaking voice and the narrator's in such passages (though as McHale shows, there are other indicators of free indirect discourse, including exclamatory and idiomatic rhetoric).

The fact that we never hear Esther speak may suggest, on the one hand, that we never leave her consciousness, since the only way to hear her in conversation would be to enter a world outside her own mind. But on the other hand, it may suggest that we never enter her consciousness, that she is prevented from reaching us directly through either speech or interior monologue. This ambiguity further undermines the apparent closeness between Esther and the narrator, and leaves the reader uncertain whether the narrator is interpreting her accurately or projecting his own consciousness onto her.

“WHO TELLS?”: JOHN AND NARRATION IN “THEATER”

The narrative situation in “Theater” is almost the reverse of that in “Esther”: the main female character, Dorris, speaks both in conversation and in interior monologues, but she is blocked from free indirect discourse for most of the text. In addition, the story explicitly foregrounds its own concerns with narrator-character relations, and thus provides what is, in effect, a commentary on Cane's overall difficulty in approaching female consciousness.⁶

Unlike most of the women in the novel (with the prominent and problematic exception of Esther), Dorris is repeatedly foregrounded, as the narrative shifts to her voice, and unlike Karintha and Fern and Avey, who are seen and interpreted by male characters and their narrators, Dorris is permitted to “read” the primary male character in her story, John. But while John's consciousness is often so prominent that it seems to merge with the narrator's, Dorris's appears only at the close of the story. Moreover, while both John's and Dorris's viewpoints are explored, only John is permitted his own narrative, in his dream. And during this narrative, Dorris interprets him as shut off from her forever, hopelessly blind to her art and deaf to her voice.

The first lines of “Theater” serve both the set the scene and to highlight the subjective perspective from which the story is told. The narrator says,

Life of nigger alleys, of pool rooms and restaurants and near-beer saloons soaks into the walls of Howard Theater and sets them throbbing jazz songs. Black-skinned, they dance and shout above the tick and trill of white-walled buildings. At night, they open doors to people who come in to stamp their feet and shout.

(52, emphasis added)

The rhythmic, stylized language in this passage creates such a strong sense of personality that one wonders who this narrator is—a question that becomes even more pressing when we meet John, whose speech is so similar to the narrator's that it makes these lines seem like an example of free indirect discourse. Equally important, this passage presents us with a narrator who explicitly sets himself apart from the “they” who dance and throb and shout.⁷ Is this a class distance (or even a race distance)? If it is, the connection to John becomes even stronger, since his speech is informed by class distinctions as well.

After setting the scene, the narrative shifts abruptly: “Afternoons, the house is dark and the walls are sleeping singers until rehearsal begins. Or until John comes within them. Then they start throbbing to a subtle syncopation. And the space-dark air grows softly luminous” (52). There seems to be little space between the narrator and John in this passage. If it read, “To John, the walls throb,” or even “It seemed that the walls throbbed,” the effect would be quite different. We would understand that the narrator is reporting John's view of the world to us. But as the text stands, with the walls that start throbbing and the air that grows luminous when John enters, John's subjectivity is greatly privileged. His perception is not even presented as such. His mere entrance into the theater, and the narrative, transforms his point of view into the narrative, the action. What John feels and perceives becomes the narrator's reality—and the reader's.

The movement here from the narrator's consciousness to John's also shows that neither point of view is superior to the other. Although the narration does shift to John's point of view, this perspective is not presented as more subjective and thus less “real” than the narrator's. After all, the narrator's comment that the “walls are sleeping singers” is a poetic prosopopoeia, a subjective, personal interpretation of the theater before the rehearsal begins. If the narrator's thought had ended with “the house is dark,” the contrast between the narrator and John would have been more clear-cut—a case of objective reporting versus subjective impressionism. But as the passage stands, we experience one subjectivity followed by another. This sudden but easy shift from the narrator to John makes one wonder whether the narrator is interpreting John or assuming his perspective, and it suggests that the narrator and John are tightly intertwined.

The relationship between the narrator and John soon becomes even more complicated. The narrative does not, at this point, remain with John. As we enter the next paragraph, we move out of John and back into the narrator, who can see John. He presents us with “objective” facts: “John is the manager's brother. He is seated at the center of the theater, just before rehearsal. Light streaks down upon him from a window high above. One half his face is orange in it. One half his face is in shadow” (52). But the sentence that follows is more subjective: “The soft glow of the house rushes to, and compacts about, the shaft of light” (52), and it is not entirely clear whose subjectivity is foregrounded. Is it the narrator's? Is it John's? Or both? The emphasis on the “soft” glow echoes the earlier description of the “space-dark air grow[ing] softly luminous,” which occurs in the midst of a passage in which John and the narrator seem to be merging. The repetition reinforces the connection between John and the narrator, and as Gates says of Their Eyes Are Watching God, it makes it “extraordinarily difficult to distinguish the narrator's voice from the protagonist's” (191). But while for Gates the use of free indirect discourse signals the protagonist's approach to selfhood (191), it serves here as a sign of gender tensions. The narrator's connection to John is not balanced (as we will see) by a connection to Dorris—and that difference is significant.

The narrator then says, “Life of the house of the slowly awakening stage swirls to the body of John and thrills it” (52). This passage tells us about John's sensate experience, but it also implies that he is a passive object, an inanimate figure on whom these sensory stimuli converge. It is as though John himself occupies the conventional narratorial position: he is at the center of the action without participating in it. He can observe and even feel, but at a safe distance. He is, after all, quite literally the audience here.

John's distance from the action is connected to what the narrator says is a split within him. This split was implied by the description of the shadow bisecting John's face, and it now becomes explicit: “John's body is separate from the thoughts that pack his mind” (52). The mind/body split is a persistent literary trope, of course, but here it serves very specific purposes in terms of class, gender, and narration—three terms that are inextricably bound in “Theater” and in other sections of Cane.

The narrator next offers a mysterious fragment: “Stage-lights, soft, as if they shine through clear pink fingers” (52). This impression seems to be the narrator's, but we cannot be sure that it is not John's. For the third time in as many paragraphs, the atmosphere of the theater is described as “soft,” and as McHale notes, such repetition is a frequent indication of free indirect discourse (255). The viewing position has once again become problematized, and the sense of mystery deepens when we learn immediately afterward that beneath the lights, “hid by the shadow of a set,” is Dorris (52). This is the first reference to Dorris, and it is significant that she is both visible (how else would the narrator know she's there?) and “hidden,” at least from John. As we will see, she is simultaneously visible and invisible for much of the text.

The narrator continues to merge in and out of John: “Other chorus girls drift in. John feels them in the mass. And as if his own body were the mass-heart of a black audience listening to them singing, he wants to stamp his feet and shout” (52). This passage brings us directly into John's emotions, and it also repeats the phrase “mass-heart,” which the narrator used earlier to describe those who attend the nightly shows. The repetition again links John and the narrator—both discursively, through the insertion of the narrator's discourse into John's consciousness, and in terms of their class allegiances. Just as the narrator referred to the “mass-heart of black people” as “them,” John is not part of the audience he watches so emotionally here. Instead, he responds “as if” he were part of this audience; he feels what he thinks they would feel, and his body acts as he imagines they would act.

John's distance from the action, and the separation between his mind and his body, are reinforced by the next sentence: “His mind, contained above desires of his body, singles the girls out, and tries to trace origins and plot destinies” (52). John is clearly not part of the action here, and his mind is described as quite separate from his desire-plagued body. In addition, John is described here as a kind of author who is trying to “write” the women he watches. This description connects him once again to the narrator, indeed to most of the narrators in Cane, many of whom are also concerned with tracing the “origins and plot destinies” of the women in their narratives.

A pianist then begins to play, the women begin to dance, and we enter a passage that embodies one of Toomer's many narrative experiments:

John: Soon the director will herd you, my full-lipped, distant beauties, and tame you, and blunt your sharp thrusts in loosely suggestive movements, appropriate to Broadway. (O dance!) Soon the audience will paint your dusk faces white and call you beautiful. (O dance!) Soon I … (O dance!) I'd like. …

(52-53)

Because this passage is not in quotation marks, it does not appear to be direct discourse, and because it begins “John:” it does not appear to be mediated by the narrator. Instead, it seems to be an interior monologue, an unmediated transcription of John's thoughts. Similar passages recur throughout the text, and because they appear to give us direct access to John's thoughts we might expect them to help us to distinguish between John and the narrator. But this is not the case. Instead, as we shall see, the style and language of these passages often bleeds into those before and after them, making it even more difficult to determine where John and the narrator begin and end.⁸

At the most superficial level, this passage describes the way in which a director restrains and guides wild talent, and the way in which spectators transform what they see to suit their own desires. But because of the obvious parallels between a director and a writer or narrator, and between a spectator and a reader, the passage also provides an implicit description of the complicated interplay between writer, narrator, and reader in Cane.

In addition, since the passage ends with John apparently trying to articulate what he would like to do to or with the dancers, it suggests that he is or would like to be a director, writer, or narrator himself, further reinforcing the connection between John and the narrator of “Theater.” And since the subjects of John's meditation here are women who dance but do not speak, the passage explicitly foregrounds a central dynamic in this story and many others in Cane—the efforts by men to interpret and control women without understanding them or, at times, even allowing them to speak.

The next paragraph does not begin “John:” so it presumably embodies the narrator's perspective, and it does offer a more objective description of the women dancing: “Girls laugh and shout. Sing discordant snatches of other jazz songs. Whirl with loose passion into the arms of passing show-men” (53). But this could be John's perspective as well. And although these sentences are punctuated by periods instead of ellipses, two are actually sentence fragments, similar to those at the end of John's interior monologue. Immediately following this description, in fact, we switch back to John's monologue, which is partly couched in sentence fragments as well: “John: Too thick. Too easy. Too monotonous. Her whom I'd love I'd leave before she knew that I was with her. Her? Which? (O dance!) I'd like to …” (53). Once again, the rhetorical similarities make it difficult to distinguish clearly between John and the narrator.

At the beginning of the next paragraph we are back in what is ostensibly the narrator's more objective perspective: “Girls dance and sing. Men clap” (53). But once again, this could be John's perspective as well, and by the end of the next three sentences the narrator's consciousness and John's have clearly merged. “The walls sing and press inward. They press the men and girls, they press John towards a center of physical ecstasy. Go to it, Baby!” (53). When we learn that the “walls sing,” we are reminded of the narrator's comment in the first paragraph, “the walls are sleeping singers,” which also preceded a switch to John's consciousness. In that passage there was a shift from the factual (“the house is dark”) to the metaphoric; here there is a similar shift from factual declaration to narratorial prosopopoeia. Not surprisingly, the ensuing lines offer an impressionistic review of all John and the narrator see, hear, and feel:

Fan yourself, and feed your papa! Put … nobody lied … and take … when they said I cried over you. No lie! The glitter and color of stacked scenes, the gilt and brass and crimson of the house, converge towards a center of physical ecstasy. John's feet and torso and his blood press in. He wills thought to rid his mind of passion.

(53)

The last two sentence here, which echo previous descriptions of the split between John's mind and his body, do seem to leave John's perspective, offering the narrator's interpretation of his experience. But they can also be read as embodying John's own interpretation of his experience. And it is perhaps most accurate to say that they highlight the ambiguous space between the narrator and John—a space that often blurs, raising the question of how distinct they really are.

“ENTER DORRIS”: A VOICE FROM THE STAGE

Dorris enters the text a few paragraphs later: “Above the staleness, one dancer throws herself into it. Dorris” (53). It is unclear whether this introduction embodies the narrator's perspective or John's; which of them sees her as a spark of life in a stale routine? The narrator does tell us that “John sees her,” suggesting that he is outside of John. But the ensuing description could once again be John's as well: “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” (53). What we have, in fact, is a three-tiered view: the narrator, John, and the reader are all looking at Dorris, and all are focused on her body. This triple perspective heightens Dorris's role as spectatorial object. She is not an agent but a site of desire, just as Karintha and Fern are.⁹

The next paragraph contains another of John's interior monologues:

John: Stage-door johnny; chorus girl. No, that would be all right. Dictie, educated, stuck up; chorus girl. Yep. Her suspicion would be stronger than her passion. It wouldn't work. Keep her loveliness. Let her go.

(53)

This passage embodies a struggle between John's desire (his attraction to Dorris) and his mind (his decision to “Let her go”), and between his class (“dictie, educated”) and Dorris's (“showgirl”). The mind/body split blends disturbingly with the class division, and with the gender division as well. Dorris is entirely physical here; John is at least half-cerebral. But Dorris's tempting, “low-class” sexuality brings out a physical response in him that he resists intellectually.

John does not present these views as his own, however; after all, he is not saying, “Show-girl, loose, no-good.” Instead, he couches them as Dorris's view of him, and he assumes that her attitude would cause their relationship to fail: “Her suspicion would be stronger than her passion. It wouldn't work.” But he has no way of knowing any of this, since he and Dorris have not yet spoken. He reads and interprets her without any input from her at all, and he begins and ends their relationship without ever moving beyond the act of seeing her.

Dorris's lack of agency is reinforced by the continuing connection between John and the narrator—suggested here by his comment about her “loveliness,” which echoes the description of her legs as “lovely” in the previous paragraph.¹⁰ If John ignores her views entirely in his mini-narrative of their relationship, and if he is more and more entwined with the narrator, then where is Dorris to emerge, if at all? Is she doomed to be only read, never reading others or controlling how they read her?

At this moment, Dorris herself is foregrounded, but in a cryptic way. “Dorris sees John and knows that he is looking at her” (53). At last, Dorris's perspective is presented—even if by the narrator. But the next line complicates this apparent shift to Dorris: “Her own glowing is too rich a thing to let her feel the slimness of his diluted passion” (53). In this sentence we are narratorially in a place that cannot be Dorris's. We are looking at her again, at her “glowing,” through the narration. The narrator is being extremely subjective here. He is making a judgment about what Dorris feels, and also categorizing both Dorris and John (the former “glowing” richly and the latter having “diluted passion”). But we have lost our brief connection to Dorris.

The narrative shifts again to Dorris's perspective:

“Who's that?” she asks her dancing partner.

“The manager's brother. Dictie. Nothin doin, hon.”

Dorris tosses her head and dances for him until she feels she has him. Then, withdrawing disdainfully, she flirts with the director.

(53)

But while the last paragraph here does embody Dorris's point of view, the diction is still clearly the narrator's, our engagement with Dorris's consciousness is very brief, and what we learn about her is purely physical—she is focused entirely on performing for the male gaze.

In the following paragraph, however, we finally get Dorris's internal voice, presented as John's has been three times already.

Dorris: Nothin doin? How come? Aint I as good as him? Couldnt I have got an education if I'd wanted one? Dont I know respectable folks, lots of them, in Philadelphia and New York and Chicago? Aint I had men as good as him? Better. Doctors an lawyers. Whats a manager's brother, anyhow?

(53-54)

Dorris's voice is idiomatic and slangy, very different from the narrator's or John's, or from their merged voice, and what she says reveals the extent of John's misreading. Instead of considering John “stuck-up,” Dorris reveals anxiety about her own class status and insists that she is as good as he is. Here we have Dorris as we never have Karintha or Fern or Avey—who are all near-mute receptacles, puzzles read by men and left silent by a narration that circles but never enters their consciousnesses.

Over the next few paragraphs, Dorris and her dancing partner, Mame, grumble at the director, who tries to make them perform the routine his way. Mame tells him to “Go to hell, you black bastard,” and Dorris asks, “Whats eatin at him, anyway?” (54). But the more they resist his strictures, his attempts to write their movements (“Now follow me in this, you girls”), the more he tries rhetorically to control them (“I told you to stay on the stage, didnt I?” [54]). Once again, the director serves implicitly as a stand-in for the narrator, for any narrator or writer, and for John. In fact, the director's speech segues directly into John's at one point. The director shouts “and then you shimmy,” and the narrative shifts to one of John's internal monologues, which begins “—and then you shimmy” (54).

The director does finally let Dorris and the other women dance as they wish: “They forget set steps; they find their own. The director forgets to bawl them out. Dorris dances” (54). This dance is in many ways the high point of Dorris's appearance in the story, and the narrator clearly thinks it is a glorious thing. But he also describes it almost entirely in terms of the effect it has on John and the other male spectators.¹¹ As Dorris begins to dance, for example, the narrator tells us that “Odd ends of stage-men emerge from the wings, and stare and clap. A crap game in the alley suddenly ends. Black faces crowd the rear stage doors” (54). Similarly, in the midst of the dance, Dorris looks directly at John, but the narrator gives us this gaze from John's perspective: “Dorris's eyes burn across the space of seats to him” (54). And when the dance momentarily unites John and Dorris and heals the split within John, the narrator is once again with John, not Dorris, and his language echoes earlier passages of free indirect discourse in which he and John merged.

Glorious songs are the muscles of her limbs.

And her singing is of canebrake loves and mangrove feastings.

The walls press in, singing. Flesh of a throbbing body, they press close to John and Dorris. They close them in. John's heart beats tensely against her dancing body. Walls press his mind within his heart.

(55)

At this point, in fact, the narrative shifts from what John is experiencing externally to what he is imagining—a shift that initially seems surprising but that makes more sense once we realize that the narrator has been with John all along: “And then, the shaft of light goes out the window high above him. John's mind sweeps up to follow it. Mind pulls him upward into dream. Dorris dances … John dreams” (55). For the next four paragraphs (all but two of the last six in the story), John's dream takes over the narrative, cutting off the reader's access to Dorris and to her dance.

John's dream does more than block our access to Dorris, however. It is a separate narrative that tells of his imagined courtship of Dorris. As a separate narrative, John's dream replaces the “real” Dorris of the story with an imaginary one, a point I will return to below. It also allows John to tell a story of his own, a power and privilege denied to Dorris. And it makes him the structural equivalent of the main narrator for this portion of the text. This privilege gives his perspective additional authority, since as Susan Sniader Lanser writes, “If the persona uttering a given stance is in a position of dominance in the narrative structure, then his or her ideology carries more authority than it would carry if expressed by a subordinate personage” (220).

The authority that accrues to John as a narrator here is reinforced by the similarities between his dream narrative and the other narratives in Cane. In the dream, for example, John tells us that as he walks toward the stage door to meet Dorris “his feet feel as though they step on autumn leaves” (55), which echoes the moment in “Fern” when Fern and the narrator of her story sit down “where reddish leaves had damned the creek a little” (19). Similarly, John tells us that the scent of Dorris's perfume resembles “a southern canefield” (55), which echoes the many references to canefields in “Carma,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” and “Fern.” Indeed, Cane is virtually written on Dorris's body in John's narrative: “Her face is tinted like the autumn alley. Of old flowers, or of a southern canefield, her perfume” (55). And this passage itself echoes a similar moment in “Fern” when the narrator says of Fern that “the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia's South” (17).

Even more important for our purposes, however, are the similarities between John's dream narrative and the passages of free indirect discourse in which he and the narrator of “Theater” merge. In John's dream, for example, Dorris wears “a loose black gown splashed with lemon ribbons” (55), which echoes the earlier description of her “lemon-colored face” (53). And later in the dream, John finds himself with Dorris in a room that has “singing walls” and “Lights, soft, as if they shine through clear pink fingers” (55), both of which echo the description of the theater in the opening pages of the story. These and other similarities further reinforce John's narrative authority, and they reveal once again that his consciousness and the narrator's are closely linked.

The connection between John and the narrator, and the importance of John's role as a narrator, are made even more clear in the last paragraph of his dream: “John reaches for a manuscript of his, and reads. Dorris, who has no eyes, has eyes to understand him. He comes to a dancing scene. The scene is Dorris. She dances. Glorious Dorris. Dorris whirls, whirls, dances …” (55). In this passage, John is doing explicitly what he and the narrator have been doing implicitly throughout the story: he is “writing” Dorris. It is his manuscript; he has written Dorris onto the page, into the text, in his own hand. And he therefore contains her, within his dream.¹² Once we leave the dream, it is clear that Dorris has been dancing all along, her own dance, not the dance inscribed for her in John's manuscript. But John has not been watching, and therefore neither have we.¹³

When we leave John's dream, however, we are fully with Dorris; we see things, including John, from her perspective; and for the first and only time in the story, she and the narrator merge. All of this is evident in the first few sentences of this passage: “Dorris, flushed, looks quick at John. His whole face is in shadow. She seeks for her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream” (56). Dorris reads John's dreaming state as a death mask, her attempt to reach him through her dance as an utter failure. Crucially, the narrator shares Dorris's perspective here; he gives no hint that he knows what John is dreaming about, suggesting that both he and Dorris are cut off from John by his dream. And Dorris shares the narrator's perspective as well; her description of John's face “in shadow” echoes and extends the narrator's earlier comment that “One half [of John's] face is in shadow” (52), and like this earlier description, it implies that there is a split between John's mind and his body.

The link between Dorris and the narrator continues for the rest of the paragraph.

She rushes from the stage. Falls down the steps into the dressing room. Pulls her hair. Her eyes, over a floor of tears, stare at the whitewashed ceiling. (Smell of dry paste, and paint, and soiled cloth.) Her pal comes in. Dorris flings herself into the old safe arms, and cries bitterly.

(56)

This is Dorris at last. Her sensory experience (the smells hovering in her dressing room), her colloquial diction (“Her pal comes in”), and her personal history (Mame's “old, safe arms” hinting that this is not the first time Dorris has cried in them) all enter the narrative here, while John is gone entirely, presumably still lost in his reverie.

Taken as a whole, this paragraph is the purest expression of Dorris's perspective in “Theater.” We no longer have just her direct discourse and her actions. We now have her consciousness merging with the narrator's, the two sensibilities temporarily intermingling, just as John's consciousness has merged with the narrator's throughout most of the rest of the story.

But while Dorris has achieved a narratological victory here, the story's last sentence renders it hollow. “'I told you nothin doin,' is what Mame says to comfort her” (56). In these words, the narrator takes control of the narrative and passes judgment on Dorris's situation. Mame's words are not comforting; they are an ironic “I told you so.” They also serve to distance the narrator from Dorris, leaving him free from blame despite his closeness to John and his role in her degradation. The over-arching power of the narrator, of any narrator, has never been clearer.

Of course, reaching any definitive conclusion about Cane's gender politics is neither practical nor appropriate. Many critics have wrestled with the complicated stances that the text takes towards women.¹⁴ But what has been less-often discussed is the relationship between Cane's gender politics and its narrative structure. On the narrative level, as we have seen, Toomer replicates the text's thematic ambivalence toward female subjectivity in a variety of ways. Indeed, the audacious complexity of Cane's justly-praised narrative structure multiplies the levels at which we must confront the text's startling slipperiness in relation to female consciousness—and its bold awareness of its own slipperiness. The narratological play reveals the text's ultimate reflexivity and self-consciousness about its thorny gender politics, and makes Cane its own most artful critic.

Notes

1. It is impossible to establish a universal narrator for Cane. The narrator of “Becky,” for example, sounds like a native of the town (he is a member of the congregation and a friend of Barlo), while the narrator of “Fern” admits to being new—a Northerner.

2. As a number of critics have pointed out, the term “free indirect discourse” is not without problems. Indeed there is substantial disagreement among scholars about its origin and meaning. For a useful summary of this controversy, see Gates 208-09. Among the best introductions to free indirect discourse are Stephen Ullman's Style in the French Novel and Brian McHale's “Free Indirect Discourse.” Ullman refers to free indirect discourse (which he calls, alternately, free indirect “speech” and free indirect “style”) as the third alternative “stand[ing] halfway between the two orthodox types”—these types being direct style, where “words are reproduced as they were uttered” and indirect style, where the words are “embedded in the narrative itself” (95). He goes on to note that free indirect style “agrees with direct speech in preserving various emotive elements which have to be sacrificed in indirect reporting: questions, exclamations, interjections; adverbs … which give the utterance a subjective colouring; colloquial, vulgar and slang terms which are expressive of the speaker's character and attitude” (97).

3. W. Edward Farrison notes that—in contrast to the “simple recountings” that constitute “Fern” and “Avey”—“Esther,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” “Box Seat,” and “Theater” all offer a “blending of associationism and stream of consciousness” (301)—though he does not explore the specifics of the narrative approach, nor does he note the use of free indirect discourse.

4. Susan Blake argues that the “spectatorial artist” (“represented sometimes by a narrator, sometimes simply by the narrative voice” [516]) who controls Cane's narrative “remains aloof from both the men and the women” (518; emphasis added), and that only in “Esther” and “Blood-Burning Moon” “does the creative voice attempt to enter into the conflict” (518). While I am arguing that gender plays a more problematic role in the narratorial dynamics, Blake's discussion of the “spectatorial artist” and his ambivalent relationship to the characters is most compelling.

5. For these and other indicators of free indirect discourse, see McHale 249-83.

6. John M. Reilly argues that there is a shift in narrative style from the first section of Cane (in which “Esther” appears), where the “impressionistic style … conveys the sensations of instinctual life as the narrator comes to feel them,” to Part 2 (in which “Theater” appears) where the “expressionistic writing … projects subjective states of mind without the intervention of a first person narrator. In this style [Toomer] uses name tags, as in a playscript, to introduce his characters' thoughts, while their appearances and actions are stated with emphasis on physical appearance and without the evident presence of anyone's consciousness” (202). I would problematize the way Reilly reads the first section by noting “Esther”'s complicated narrative structure. I would also question Reilly's elision of a narrative consciousness in “Theater” and the other stories in the second part of Cane, since it seems to me that there is a narrator in “Theater,” though not the explicit first-person narrator that appears in much of the first section of the book. And I will argue in my reading of “Theater” that we should attend to the differences between the narrative treatment of John and of Dorris as well.

7. I will refer to the narrator as “he” not just for the sake of convenience, but also because I believe there to be an implicitly male narrator who aligns himself primarily with John, or is aligned with John, due to their common view of Dorris as the gendered other.

8. George Kopf argues that the parenthetical “(O dance!)” moments in this passage embody an “interior monologue by way of third-person omniscience.” He suggests that “The remainder of the story's action can be read as a quest for identification of [this] third voice which appears in John's monologue,” and he asks, “Is John conscious of these words, or does he merely feel that somewhere below the point of recognition?” (500).

9. Janet Whyde writes, in her useful piece “Mediating Forms: Narrating the Body in Jean Toomer's Cane,” that while Dorris's “body evokes the physical freedom of passion and desire, she remains a slave to John's interpretation of her” (48). This is certainly true at this point in the story, but as we will see Dorris does not remain completely bound by John's reading of her.

10. As I argued above, that paragraph itself showed evidence of the merging of the narrator and John, but even if one reads it as presenting the narrator's views alone, the repetition here suggests the connection between them.

11. Dorris is given another interior monologue in the midst of her dance, which allows her to express some of her feelings about John (“I bet he can love. Hell, he can't love. He's too skinny.”) and some of her own desires (“O will you love me? And give me kids, and a home, and everything?”). But it also paradoxically reinforces her role as an object of male attention, since it ends “Just watch me” (54).

12. As Whyde writes of this moment, “What does he read [when he picks up the manuscript]? He reads the Dorris of his creation, the Dorris of his text” (49).

13. One could consider Dorris's failed attempt to elicit the response she wants from John as an example of what Barbara E. Bowen describes as the use of a call-and-response structure in Cane. Bowen cites “Theater” as one of the pieces in Cane—along with “Bona and Paul” and “Box Seat”—in which Toomer explores the “problematics of response” (200). As she writes, “Toomer's story of failed response begins in the middle of the book, and takes him back through all the narrators whose failure to consummate love is emblematic of their failure to hear a response” (201). Bowen uses this approach to Cane to argue that “The untroubled assumption of voice at the heart of the call-and-response pattern is no longer possible in a world altered by Romanticism,” adding interestingly that this “clash of traditions” may be secondary to an even more stunning “confrontation” that is staged in Cane, a confrontation between “self-consciousness [and] nostalgia for untroubled voice” (201-02).

14. Among these critics are Gates, McKay, and Blake. Blake comments about the first part of Cane, “Superficially the stories are about the women, but the real interest—the interest developed throughout the book—is in the men who labor to possess them. They are the active characters, artist figures with the will to limit, control, define experience. The women—silent, passive, elusive—represent the experience that the men are trying to grasp” (517).

Works Cited

Blake, Susan L. “The Spectatorial Artist and the Structure of Cane.” CLA Journal 17 (June 1974): 516-34.

Bowen, Barbara E. “Untroubled voice: call and response in Cane.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. NY: Routledge, 1990. 187-205.

Farrison, W. Edward. “Jean Toomer's Cane Again.” CLA Journal 15 (March 1972): 295-302.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. NY: Oxford UP, 1988.

Kopf, George. “The tensions in Jean Toomer's ‘Theater.’” CLA Journal 17.4 (June 1974): 498-503.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point-of-View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

McHale, Brian. “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978): 249-83.

McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Reilly, John M. “The Search for Black Redemption: Jean Toomer's Cane.” Studies in the Novel 2 (Fall 1970): 312-24. Rpt. in Cane: A Norton Critical Edition, Ed. Darwin T. Turner. NY: W. W. Norton, 1988. 196-207.

Toomer, Jean. Cane: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Darwin T. Turner. NY: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Ullman, Stephen. Style in the French Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957.

Whyde, Janet M. “Mediating Forms: Narrating the Body in Jean Toomer's Cane.” The Southern Literary Journal 26.1 (Fall 1993): 42-53.