Previous
9. Georgia Dusk
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cane, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Navigating Identity
Racism in the Jim Crow Era
Feminine Allure
Nature vs. Society
The Power and Limitations of Language
Summary
Analysis
Fern’s eyes are so compelling that it seems like they’re the center point of her face, toward which everything else flows. No matter what other beauty a person might notice—like the curve of her lip, for example—their attention will always be drawn back to her eyes. They give the narrator of “Fern" the same sense of sadness he’s had when listening to a Jewish cantor sing.
Like “Karintha,” this short story features a muse-like woman who exists for readers only as the narrator experiences her. Although her sense of sadness and the curious, open way she regards the world suggest that she has an inner life, it is less important to the narrator than the effect of her beauty on him. The fact that he compares her to a Jewish cantor suggests his worldliness, that he isn’t from the small rural community where Fern lives.
Themes
Fern’s compelling eyes give men the sense that she’s an easy sexual conquest. She’s had her share of lovers, but the narrator feels that Fern has almost taken advantage of them—she seems to need nothing from anyone, but men fall so completely in love with her that the spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out what they can give to her to make her happy and to prove their love.
Also like the character Karintha, Fern is sexually available to the men around her. But where men use up and destroy Karintha, Fern seems impervious to men’s needs. Her ability to make her lovers fall in love with her suggests something elemental and powerful in her beauty, almost like the beauty and power of nature. In this vein, it is notable that Toomer has chosen to name her after a plant.
Themes
Fern spends most of her time sitting on her porch (her house is on Dixie Pike near the train tracks), letting the wide world flow into the deep whirlpools of her eyes. If a person tries to follow her gaze, though, he won’t get far before he finds himself staring at her mysteriously compelling eyes again. That’s what happens when the narrator of “Fern", visiting from the North, sees her for the first time. And it is what would happen to any other man, he asserts, who happened to see her, whether he is Black or White. Even if he sees her from a window of the train, her eyes will exert their gravitational pull on him, at least for a moment.
Like Becky, Fern lives near the train tracks, but it’s clear that she isn’t in a position to use them to escape her life in this small Georgia town. The way she stares at the horizon with her hungry eyes intimates that she would escape if she could, however. Fern looks for a better life elsewhere—a life that the narrator, a Northerner with enough disposable income and time to come to the South on a visit—presumably has. Her gravitational pull seems to be composed equally of her beauty and the strength of her desire for broader experience.
Themes
Drawn by Fern’s eyes and their mysterious sadness, the narrator of “Fern" goes to visit even though he has nothing to offer her but conversation about his experiences in the wider world. She’s polite but has little to say in return. He invites her for a walk, intending only to keep talking, and not to have sex with her. But when they sit next to a creek, screened from watchful eyes by sugarcane, he finds himself holding her in his arms “without at first noticing it.” He doesn’t know what he’s done, but then Fern is tearing herself from him, stumbling away, crying and singing in an inarticulate voice that sounds like that of the Jewish cantor. The narrator finds her in the cane. She faints in his arms.
The narrator presents himself as powerless against Fern’s allure. Yet, in the cane field, it is he who overpowers or overwhelms her—although he cagily omits the details and absolves himself of conscious responsibility by claiming he didn’t realize or notice what he was doing. Thus, the narrator’s actions show his claims about Fern’s mysterious power over men to be false, or at least incomplete. He might even be using her allure as a justification to excuse his inappropriate behavior toward her. While it’s not clear what happens, it is certainly possible to interpret this scene as a rape. This is one of many points in the book that thus critique the objectification of women by exposing the act’s underlying violence.
Themes
Get the entire Cane LitChart as a printable PDF.
People gossip about Fern and the narrator of “Fern" in the cane field, but nothing comes of it. Soon, he goes back to the North, passing Fern on her porch in the train. He still wonders what “fine unnamed thing” he could do for her, or what the reader would choose to offer her.
Although the narrator tries to suggest that he is the powerless one in this relationship, since he’s still obsessed with Fern after he leaves, it’s clear that he isn’t. He, after all, has the power to come and go as he pleases, while Fern remains stuck in her place in the world and at the mercy of men like him who believe they love her.
Themes
