The Absence of Female Voices and Perspectives in Jean Toomer's 'Cane' Anonymous College

In his biographical introduction to Cane, Darwin Turner quotes William Stanley Braithwaite as saying, “In Jean Toomer, the author of Cane, we come upon the very first artist of the race, who with all an artist’s passion and sympathy for life, its hurts, its sympathies, its desires, its joys, its defeats and strange yearnings, can write about the Negro without the surrender or the compromise of the author’s vision.” This claim of primacy is both lofty and inaccurate, as it completely overlooks the works of previous black authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and Frederick Douglass, to name a few obvious contenders. After reading and rereading Toomer’s stories and poems, I could find no reason to hail the author as “the first artist of the race” who could “write about the Negro without the surrender or compromise of the author’s vision.” The most prominent issue in Cane is the overt absence of a female voice. There are numerous female characters and several stories named after them, but the women are presented more as objects for observation than as fully-formed characters. This is a bitter irony: Jean Toomer is celebrated as a literary voice for African American people, yet he does not permit the female half of...