In Jean Toomer's Cane, women young and old, beautiful and broken, are the object of the author's gaze. With great care and poetry, he traces the shapes, movements, and despair of Ester, Fern, Carma, Becky, et al. But, as Alice Walker recognizes, "[t]o Toomer, they lay vacant and fallow as autumn fields with harvest time never in sight: and he saw them enter loveless marriages, without joy; and become prostitutes, without resistance; and become mothers of children, without fulfillment" ("In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"). Becky, for instance, who refused to admit who gave her "one Negro son," was devoured by the judgment and ridicule from both the white and black folks in her town. Toomer writes, "[h]er eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen […] [t]aking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising—then she broke" (Cane 8). Esther, like Woolf's Marys, "seeks her own room, and locks the door" (45), but Esther's mind is not free in this room of her own, but "a pink mesh-bag filled with baby toes" (45).
Toomer's renderings of these women in the South are incomplete, Walker elucidates, because "these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not "Saints," but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality-which is the basis of Art-that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane" ("In Search").
Each of our readings for this feminism unit offer strategies and examples for staving off the insanity of oppression. Current Black Feminists call us to Love as the antidote for prejudice, against ourselves and others. The quilters, painters, musicians, and bloggers call us to join into conversation and creation in an effort to re-present , represent, and therefore free ourselves. Through Love, and creativity, we own our own Beauty, as Walker recognized in her mother:
"I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty."
This call to action, to creative expression and self-representation and Love, is not gendered nor entirely new. In fact, for a time, Toomer wanted to disown Cane because he didn't want to be pigeon-holed as a Negro writer of the Harlem Renaissance; after all, "[r]acially, [he seemed] to have seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian" (Cane viii). However, his "growing need for artistic expression has pulled [him] deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as [his] powers of receptivity increased, [he] found [himself] loving it in a way that [he] could never love the other. It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent [he] may contain within [himself]" (ix).
So it should come as no surprise that Toomer dedicated Cane, just one of the "gardens" he tended, "To my grandmother…".
Toomer, Jean. Cane (1923). New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Print.
I understand this response is a bit late.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth weaves together thoughtful response to Walker’s “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens” revealing powerful insights regarding Love and Beauty, and reading Elizabeth’s words brought to mind another Walker text, her narrative “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” In “Beauty” Walker explores how a childhood accident disfiguring her eye child haunts her for years. It is not until the words of her daughter “Mommy there’s a world in your eye” (214)—revelatory in their innocence—crystallize for Walker that, as Elizabeth puts it, “through Love, and creativity, we own our own Beauty” (Aiossa).
Setting off the words “It was great fun being cute but one day it ended” (“Beauty” 208) from the rest of the text illuminates the significance of the childhood accident that left Walker’s eye with a “glob of whitish scar tissue” (“Beauty” 209). She further marks its profound meaning through juxtaposing Walker the precocious youth where she is “whirling happily in her starchy frocks” (“Beauty” 207) against Walker the dejected adolescent who “for six years [she] does not stare at anyone because [she does] not raise [her] head” (“Beauty” 209).
Time and again Walker couches her narrative through the refrain “Did I change?” She asks this question both in the context of free indirect discourse—abstractly asking herself—and concretely asking her family members. Invariably her question is met with confusion and the reply “You did not change” (“Beauty” 211 and 212). The reader understands clearly her family’s perception of Walker’s Beauty—inner, outer, and spiritual—was never obscured by the childhood accident and what Walker deemed “a hideous cataract” (“Beauty” 209).
In this text, just as in “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens,” Walker invites us to consider, as Elizabeth explains, “a call to action, to creative expression and self-representation and Love.” The very narrative act performed in “Beauty: When the Other Dancer s the Self” serves to re-present the childhood incident and its aftermath. In a sense, she becomes her mother both by “ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty” (“In Search”) and by explaining how the dialogic event between herself and her own daughter further reveals a “conception of Beauty” that is steeped in Love.
Walker, Alice. “Beauty: When the ther Dancer is the Self.” 75 Thematic Readings: An Anthology. Ed. McGraw-Hill. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. 207 - 214. Print.
---. “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” Ms.Magazine.com. Spring, 2002. Web. 18 Sep. 2012.
(J. Johnson)