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Summary
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
Because she’s so incredibly beautiful, men want Karintha even when she’s a little girl. Old men bounce her on their knees, and younger men dance with her at parties. The younger men anxiously count down the years until she’s old enough to “mate with,” willing her to grow up faster.
The book opens with a vignette describing one of its many female muses, the extraordinarily beautiful Karintha. Yet, Karintha has no voice or interiority—she is merely an object onto which the men around her project their desires. The book describes this desire in an animalistic, almost predatory way by using the verb “mate,” suggesting Karintha’s vulnerability.
Themes
As a child, Karintha is vivid and wild. She runs silently through the mist, surprising people when she appears. She sings out of tune, but no one tells her to stop. She throws rocks at cows, beats her dog and fights with other children. She even becomes sexually active at the precocious age of 12—perhaps because she witnessed her parents having sex in their tiny, two-room shack. The preacher catches Karintha with a boy, but he forgives her sins because of her beauty.
It’s only after the vignette has described the lustful way that men look at—and treat—Karintha that the narrator describes her precocious sexual activity. Thus it strongly implies that if there is fault, it lies primarily with Karintha’s community, specifically the way men view her, rather than with Karintha herself. Karintha merely lives up to the dreams of sexual fulfillment the men have about her.
Themes
When she is an adult, men still follow Karintha around. They run moonshine operations and commit robberies to make money with which to woo her. Karintha becomes pregnant and gives birth to her baby in the wood. It falls onto the soft pine needles not too far off from the sawmill. The piles of sawdust there smolder slowly. When Karintha comes home, their smoke is thick in the air. People sing songs about the thick smoke carrying their souls up to Jesus. Karintha is a woman who grew up too fast, and the men who love her will die without ever understanding her.
Like the use of “mate” for sex, Karintha’s childbirth in the forest suggests something elemental or animalistic about her. But it’s also deeply tragic. It implies that the child is unwanted or unloved (as Karintha seems to have been unappreciated except as an object of sexual desire in her own childhood) and suggests that it’s illegitimate or otherwise shameful. Like the smoldering sawdust piles, the vignette presents Karintha as a force that’s slowly being consumed and used up. Her beauty and allure make her valuable in the eyes of others, but as a commodity more than as a person. And the vignette’s final lines place responsibility for her spiritual and emotional stuntedness not in her natural beauty but in the way others took advantage of her.
Themes
