Buried, Homelessness

Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women's Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann
Petry's "The Street"

Author(s): Evie Shockley
Source: African American Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 439-460
Published by: African American Review (St. Louis University)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027383
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Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black
Women's Sexuality, and (Living) Death in
Ann Petry's The Street
[A]ll through the darkest period of the colored woman's oppression in this coun-
try her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful
Evie Shockley is Assistant
and overwhelming odds, that often ended in a horrible death, to maintain and
Professor of English at
protect that which woman holds dearer than life. The painful, patient, and silent
Rutgers University in New
toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the Brunswick, NJ, where she
despairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons,
teaches 20th-century African
would furnish material for epics. -Anna Julia Cooper, "The Intellectual Progress American literature and cre-
of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation"
ative writing (poetry). Her
202
research interests include the
African American gothic and
the relationship between race
and innovation in African
black woman's embattled defense of her body and her American poetry. She is the
right to sexual self-determination constitutes a recurring author of two collections of
theme in African American women's literary tradition. poetry: The Gorgon Goddess
Addressing the World's Congress of Representative Women held (2001) and a half-red sea
in Chicago in 1893, Anna Julia Cooper, like numbers of other (2006).
black women intellectuals, activists, and writers in the last centu-
ry and a half, emphasizes the vulnerability of black women to the
sexual predations of white men (during and after slavery) and the
stereotype of black female lasciviousness and licentiousness that
has enabled and excused white men's rape- and the general sex-
ual exploitation- of black women.1 Cooper's description of these
tribulations might register for some as excessive in tone; it is
nonetheless an accurate marker of the intensity of black women's
desire to own their own images, to define their own sexualities, to
have the right to determine when, how, why, and with whom
they will be sexual. If white women have been far from immune
to sexual exploitation, characterization as "whores," and even
rape, white women of the middle and upper classes have at mini-
mum been able to take some shelter in the rhetoric of idealized
femininity (the "Madonna" side of the feminine dichotomy).
African American women, regardless of class or conduct, have
been excluded from this "sorority" of "true womanhood" and its
protections. The emotionally charged language of Cooper's
speech- "fearful . . . odds," "horrible death," and "despairing
fight"- encourages her audience to participate affectively in
African American women's experience of defenselessness.
Cooper's construction of their struggle as frightening fore-
shadows Ann Petry's employment of the terminology of terror,
over 50 years later, in her first novel. Published in 1946, The Street
is a fictional depiction of an African American woman's resolute,
ultimately violent efforts at sexual self-determination. In this
essay, I propose a reconsideration of The Street that reckons with
the extent to which social terror is constructed as a way of life for
the mostly poor, African American residents of Harlem- but
especially for the heroine, in her fight for control of her own sexu-
African American Review, Volume 40, Number 3

© 2006 Evie Shockley 439
ality. I locate the roots of Petry's lan- Lutie's quest for a normative home and
guage of fear in the literary conven- her defense of her sexual integrity in
tions of the gothic genre, a fantastic, the face of relentless challenges. I begin
sensational tradition popularized in by fleshing out my argument that the
English by Ann Radcliffe's late-18th- doppelganger trope provides us with
century romances.2 I juxtapose Petry's insight into Petry's relationship with
recourse to these gothic conventions her novel's protagonist; later in the
with her novel's implicit analysis of the essay, I will examine how this figure of
intersecting operations of race, gender, the double arguably haunts the novel's
sexuality, and class, and suggest the progression and leads inevitably to its
relationship of both to the tyrannical horrifying conclusion. Primarily, I
impact of domestic ideology upon the focus on the ways that the trope of
lives of African American women like "live burial" and other related gothic
Petry's heroine and even Petry herself. conventions mark moments of terror in
I highlight the novel's investment inthe novel that illuminate the powerful
the gothic, not to distinguish it withinforce of domestic ideology upon the
the African American literary tradition, meaning and performance of identi-
but rather to gesture towards the ty-particularly black women's sexual-
extent to which The Street is typical of ity, in terms of Lutie's experiences.
African American literature, whose While I do not dispute the value of a
deeply woven threads of gothic and naturalist reading of the novel, I hope
other fantastic elements go largely to illuminate some of what is missed
overlooked.3 when that reading dominates to the
Recognizing the centrality of exclusion of all others. A gothic read-
Petry's engagement with gothic con-ing of the novel highlights the fact that
ventions in The Street extends and Lutie is constantly negotiating her
enriches our understanding of her identity in the context of a set of
work. For many years, the definitive norms- for gender, sexuality, race, and
reading of The Street placed it squarely class- that are basically Victorian and,
within the naturalist tradition, connect-for a woman with Lutie's type of iden-
ing Petry's work famously (and oftentity, fundamentally punitive.
disparagingly) with Richard Wright's Petry's recourse to the gothic
Native Son.^ Because of the consequent should not surprise readers of her
emphasis on Petry's " gritty, realistic" autobiography who note this remem-
prose (Holladay 12), the decidedly brance: "I was eleven years old when I
"unreal" aspect of her aesthetics has read Wilkie Collins' s Moonstone- that
been woefully overlooked. As I will intricately plotted story about the theft
demonstrate, the novel draws some ofof an enormous yellow diamond . . .
its most structurally significant tropes from the head of an idol known as the
from among the conventions of the moon-god. . . . The Moonstone served as
gothic tradition. Not only does the my introduction to the world of books
gothic inform my meta-level readingwritten
of for adults and it turned me into
an omnivorous reader" (Petry, "Ann
the production of the text, in which the
heroine of The Street and Petry herselfPetry" 254). The prolific Collins's sen-
stand as doppelgangers, or "gothic dou-sational, gothic novels place him
bles," of one another. Additionally, the
among the foremost 19*h-century
novel teems with metaphorical figures English writers in the genre. Her ongo-
of vampires, monsters, and ghosts- ing appreciation of this style in
creatures whose status as the "living Collins's work suggests the likelihood
dead" reinforces the novel's central that, by the time she began writing fic-
gothic convention: the trope of "livetion seriously, Petry was steeped in
burial." This trope, as I explain below, works that, like much of her adult fic-
configures and connects two key ele- tion, borrowed heavily from the con-
ments of the novel's thematic structure: ventions of the gothic and other genres
440 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
of melodrama and excess. Her first 262). Petry put these values into prac-
published story, "Marie of the Cabintice. She had earned her degree from
Club/' shows the clear influence of the Connecticut College of Pharmacy,
such fantastic texts as The Moonstone become a licensed pharmacist (follow-
upon Petry's writing: in addition to ing the examples of her father and
publishing under an assumed name (a aunt), and worked in the family's
tactic not uncommon to gothic writers), drugstores for seven years before she
she included a near-stabbing, interna-married and moved with her husband
tional espionage, a kidnapping, and a to New York. It was then that she was
romance troubled by an unspeakable confronted with Harlem and learned,
secret, all within less than five long "with mixed feelings of hope and hor-
newspaper columns (Petry, "Marie" ror," what race and gender more typi-
248-49).^ Petry's autobiography and cally meant for African Americans
interviews also reveal that she general-(Holladay 9). The inescapable poverty;
ly used autobiographical detail in con-the attendant limitations on employ-
structing her characters and plots- one ment, educational, and residential
example being the way she "endowed"opportunities; the degradation of inter-
the protagonist of The Narrows, a later personal relationships; the temptations
novel, with her experience of seeing a to crime and the fear of it: these charac-
movie for the first time (Petry, "Ann teristic conditions under which too
Petry" 266-67; Petry, "Visit" 83). Takenmany African Americans were living
together, such biographical evidence in the urban north came as a shock to
invites a reading of Petry's relationship
Petry, calling into question much of
to the heroine she created through thewhat she had been taught about herself
gothic convention of the doppelganger. and her place in the world.6
The next few paragraphs enact such a Hillary Holladay, in a sketch of
reading and begin to outline its payoff.Petry's life, constructs the budding
Ann Petry grew up during the author's perspective of Harlem and her
early twentieth century as a member of motivations for writing about it in
virtually the only African American terms likely inspired by W. E. B. Du
family in the quiet, little town of Old Bois's well-known trope of "double-
Saybrook, Connecticut. Though even consciousness."7 Of Petry, Holladay
writes: "She looked at Harlem with the
this place constituted a racially "hostile
environment," through determined dual vision of an outsider, who had not
collective effort, Petry's family was grown up with the problems endemic
largely able to shelter her youth from to ghetto life, and an insider, who iden-
the brutal racism that has defined the tified with the people of her own race
collective experience of African and wanted to put their struggle into
Americans in this nation (Petry, "Annwords" (10). This duality of perspec-
Petry" 257; Petry, "Visit" 79; Holladaytive appears to have encouraged in the
9). Sexism, too, was unfamiliar to the young writer a disquieting recognition
of how tenuous were the distinctions
young Petry in some of its most stifling
forms; her mother and aunts were edu-
between herself and her new neigh-
cated businesswomen who, whether bors. Arguably, in other words, Petry's
married or not, "refused to be tradi- decision to focus her first novel on the
tional housewives" (Petry, "Interview" ways that Harlem residents' problems
100). Her parents imbued her and herwere related to their environment
sister with a belief in New England's reflected a growing understanding that
traditional Puritan values of "efficien- it was less an individual exceptionality
cy, thrift, and utility" and taught themthan it was her exceptional circum-
that the "early to bed, early to rise" dis-stances that had preserved her from
cipline of Benjamin Franklin would the more common fate of African
work for them as well as for any other Americans. Had she not been born into
an educated family whose careers pro-
person (Holladay 7; Petry, "Ann Petry"
GOTHIC HOMELESSNESS, BLACK WOMEN'S SEXUALITY, AND (LIVING) DEATH IN PETRY'S THE STREET 441
vided an economic stability relatively -tially and ultimately- truly telling.
rare for African Americans in that era, They are alike in a number of ways:
had she not grown up in a setting of both are smart, statuesque, determined
less pronounced racial hostilities (com- women who have acquired certain val-
pared to areas in the South and in ues that this society associates with the
northern and midwestern urban cen- (white) middle class, particularly the
ters, where the larger black popula- importance of education, honest work,
tions were perceived by whites as a a proper home, and respectability. Both
threat), her possi- place extreme
bilities would Lutie, as Petry's gothic double, importance on
likely have been their maternal
just as circum-
produces and is produced by
roles (Petry, "Ann
scribed by race as Petry's recognition that merely
Petry" 268; Petry,
most Harlemites' The Street 72).
were. In addition
adopting domestic ideology's
Both have lived
values is not enough to ensure
to these racially inside and out-
inflected class side of Harlem, at
that one will reap its rewards.
injustices, a less different points in
fortunately born Petry would their lives, enabling them to make illu-
minating comparisons between the
doubtlessly have suffered a greater
Harlem
economic and legal vulnerability toenvironment
the and other possi-
repercussions of a particular bilities.8
set of gen-Both adopt a Franklinian
dered liabilities, arising from and
model of industry and thrift, and they
overdetermined by her race are andso similar
lightin their attitudes that
skin color- including an increased when we sus-
read Petry's way of describ-
ceptibility to being sexualized ing and
her financial plans during a partic-
objectified by white and black men.
ularly lean year, we hear echoes of the
Interestingly, rather than distancing novel's accounts of Lutie' s obsessive
herself from the problems she budgeting.9
observed Given how much of her
by insisting upon some inherent own personality,
differ- appearance, and
ence between herself and the residents value system Petry invests in her nov-
of Harlem, Petry dove headfirst into el's
an heroine, and recalling as well her
exploration of how little separated heradmission to culling her own life for
from them. material to use in her fiction, it stands
Petry makes this dive through her to reason that Petry has consciously
portrayal of The Street's tragic heroine,created a double of herself. Moreover, I
Lutie Johnson, a character who embod- characterize this doubling as gothic,
ies the scenes of Harlem life that began because what Petry produces in Lutie
to haunt the sympathetic and outraged is not merely a character in her image,
author during her years of reporting its but one who perhaps also reflects
news and working with its students. Petry's ultimate, untapped potential
The novel can be understood as the site for behaving monstrously.
in which Petry imagines herself into This argument is grounded in the
Harlem by way of the convention offact that Petry has identified her autho-
rial concerns in this novel in terms of
the gothic double. As Heidi Strengell
has observed, this convention interro- environmental determinism: "In The
gates "the paradoxical existence of Street my aim is to show how simply

good and evil in the same person" (par. and easily the environment can change
1). If we consider whether Petry has the to course of a person's life. For this
some degree created in Lutie not only purpose I have made [Lutie] Johnson
her novel's heroine, but her own dop- an intelligent, ambitious, attractive
pelgiinger, the remarkable similarities woman with a fair degree of education.
between them take on increased signif- She lives in the squalor of 116th Street,
icance and make their differences- ini but she retains her self-respect and
fights to bring up her little son decent- each of us is capable of great evil"
ly" (Petry, "Talks" 71). Petry seems to (Strengell par.l). That is, through Lutie,
have given her heroine as many of her Petry can imagine herself struggling to
own characteristics and desires as she
negotiate the overwhelming challenges
of the Harlem landscape under a dif-
credibly could, in order to demonstrate
ferent
what a different direction from Petry' s set of circumstances- those
own trajectory the path of such a under which she might become indis-
woman might take. Petry's favorable tinguishable from "the masses" whose
behavior seems so debased when mea-
circumstances- the familial, economic,
and geographical advantages previous-sured against the standards of domes-
ly noted- were such that her adoptionideology.
tic
of normative values appears to have Thus, Lutie functions, at the meta-
rewarded her with a conventional, level of interpretation, as Petry's gothic
comfortable middle-class lifestyle. double, or doppelganger. Fred Botting
Though she and her husband lived in writes of this trope- as classically
Harlem for nearly eight years, when exemplified in Robert Louis
Stevenson's
they grew dissatisfied with life in New The Strange Case ofDrJekyll
and Mr. Hyde- that it "does not estab-
York, they were able to purchase a
lish or fix the boundaries of good and
house and move back to Old Saybrook, evil, self and other, but discloses the
where they successfully raised their
ambivalence of identity and the insta-
daughter (Petry, "Ann Petry" 266, 268).
bility of the social, moral and scientific
Here, the differences between Petrycodes that manufacture distinctions"
and Lutie become important. Lutie is(141). It is, in this regard, an ideal trope
also married, but has separated from for Petry's exploration of environmen-
her husband and, scorning to considertal determinism, enabling her in the
extramarital cohabitation, effectively
process to interrogate the types of dis-
becomes a single mother. Pop, her tinctions that are produced within the
father, can offer her some support, but
framework of domesticity. Insofar as
only to the extent she is willing to com-
Lutie fits the profile of the "bad moth-
er," for example- leaving her child at
promise her morals to accept his illegal
bootlegging and his hard-drinking home alone and unsupervised- the
difference between her and the "good
live-in girlfriend- and she has no other
family to rely upon for help or advice.mother" Petry will become is shown in
the novel to be a function of the limited
She has a high school education and
business school training in typing butopportunities open to poor black, sin-
no college degree or professional gle mothers. Lutie, then, as Petry's
license to improve her chances of gothic double, produces and is pro-
obtaining well-paying, non-menial duced by Petry's recognition that
employment. For these reasons, in
adopting domestic ideology's values-
contrary to the ideological rhetoric- is
combination with the de facto racial seg-
not enough to ensure that one will reap
regation of New York housing, Lutie is
its rewards. Indeed, Lutie is largely
basically unable to obtain safe, clean,
punished for her tenacious embrace of
aesthetically bearable accommodations these "middle-class" values, values she
for herself and her son. The Street, then,
literally cannot afford to put into prac-
depicts the process by which "the tice. We might say that Lutie's story is
squalor of 116th Street" ultimately calculated to demonstrate the incoher-
defeats Lutie, despite her (middle- ence of domesticity's norms as con-
class) values, rapidly turning her into a a black woman of severely limit-
cerns
woman who could murder a man and
ed means living in a racially segregated
abandon her son. Petry's constructionAmerica. In particular, Lutie's struggle
of Lutie as her double, in a sense, to perform the sexual role that domes-
allows her to explore "the fear that tic ideology assigns the middle-class
woman is revealed to be, if not the ological battles faced by African
heart of her dilemma, a critical and American women at the turn into the
unaccommodating point of articulation twentieth century, facilitates this con-
between her multiple identities as a textualization. Carby notes that "the
working-class African American cult of true womanhood" demanded
woman.10 that even married women "repress all
Lutie's struggle resonates with the overt sexuality," because " 'purity
larger one I identified at the opening of denied that [white] women had natural
this essay, in which Anna Julia Cooper sex drives' "; by contrast, "overt sexu-
and her contemporaries began to fight ality . . . emerged in images of the black
publicly to preserve the moral reputa- woman" (26-27). That such relational,
tion and the bodily sanctity of black racialized constructions of femininity
women in the US. In providing her continued to hold sway throughout the
readers with an individual yet fairly twentieth century has been document-
representative account of the continued ed by race and gender theorists.11
need to fight that battle a half of a cen- Thus, Lutie's aspiration to a normative
tury later, Petry provides us with a home life depends upon her ability to
depiction of what I call "gothic home- remain conventionally asexual- in
lessness." I use this term to describe accordance with the standards for a
the frightening uncertainty of the (white) "lady"- in a society that con-
domestic boundaries that are supposed structs her "black" female body as
to safeguard those within its walls- or inherently sexually deviant and exces-
to evoke the horrifying exclusion (orsive. Such contradictions, marked by
potential for exclusion) from member- the appearance of gothic tropes, can be
ship in one's would-be "family/7 As understood
I as the terrifying collision of
competing ideological norms at the
will illustrate, Lutie suffers from gothic
homelessness because she is unable to intersection of Lutie's race, gender,
create a "home" for herself and her son class, national, and sexual identities. By
Bub, no matter how diligently she per- reading The Street in light of these goth-
forms in accordance with the orthodox ic conventions, we can appreciate how
domestic role assigned to middle-class Petry makes an aesthetic choice inform
women. Her performance is either on a cultural phenomenon. That is, by
foiled by steps that she is required toreading Lutie Johnson's experiences as
take to survive as a black woman in a a tale of "gothic homelessness," we can
racist society or misinterpreted by oth-better appreciate Petry's critique of the
ers who are unable to see her behavior sinister manner in which the norms of
as anything other than the deviant, race, class, gender, sexuality, and
abnormal conduct (actual or potential) nationality are manipulated by the
that is constructed as "natural" to powerful to maintain the status quo.
African American women. "Gothic This reading of Lutie's consistent con-
homelessness" in The Street is closely dition of "live burial" teaches us that
tied to Lutie' s determined, but repeat-life within the ideological (and materi-
edly unrecognized, performance of al) confines of her social position is as
sexual propriety; the anxieties that much a prison as the one she risks
haunt her as a result are marked, aptly entering when she finally commits
enough, with the gothic convention murderof in defense of her chosen sexual
"live burial." identity.
Petry' s augmentation of the tradi- The Street opens with Lutie's search
tional psychological association for a home where she and eight-year-
between "live burial" and repressed old Bub can live safely and peacefully
sexuality demands a socially and his- alone. We soon learn that the apart-
torically contextualized reading of the ment they now share with her father,
trope. Hazel Carby's Reconstructing his girlfriend, and a number of
Womanhood, a cultural study of the ide- roomers is unacceptable because her
son is too much exposed to vice: her male partners. Not only are these
father's girlfriend, in particular, gives familial roles naturalized (that is, made
him beer, puffs of her cigarettes, and to seem biologically determined and
glimpses of her ample bosom through inevitable- "human nature"), but they
the always unbuttoned opening of her are also metaphorically transferred and
housecoat. We learn in subsequent imposed upon all kinds of social orga-
chapters that Lutie lost the little house nizations-schools, clubs, even
where she had once lived in a conven- nations- with all their hierarchical
tional nuclear unit with her son and
baggage intact. Thus, for example,
husband when her husband's adultery "Founding Fathers" are "naturally" the
precipitated a permanent separation ones to make decisions about how a
(in lieu of a prohibitively expensive nation is to be governed, while women
divorce). Lutie' s (American) dream of(as teachers, nurses, and homemakers,
the good life centers around the Eden"naturally") serve as the "mothers of
of a single-family home "filled with our country" by (re)producing and
sunlight and good food and where raising the next generation of its citi-
children were safe" (155), the kind of
zenry.13
residence that domestic ideology con- Moreover, those who stand to ben-
structs as the proof and reward of efit from it would claim that the rhetor-
virtue.
ical logic underwriting the ideological
Domestic ideology, often associat-
ed with the middle classes of Victorian narrative of "the happy home" is uni-
versally applicable; however, this "uni-
England, is commonly and vaguely
associated with the maxim that locates versality" unevenly masks the fact that
domestic ideology's network of norms
the woman's place in the home, main-
justifies the retention of power by the
taining a clean, orderly, comfortable
powerful and perpetuates the exclu-
house for her family.1^ But this ideolo-
sion of the relatively disempowered
gy's prescriptions encompass more
from access to social, economic, and
than just middle-class women, and its
political resources. For instance,
prescriptive reach extends far beyond wealthier women are not able to man-
its originary era and locale, still exert-
ing social force in present-day age large households and families
America. After all, the creation of a without domestic "help"; the poor
"home, sweet home" depends not only women- typically women of color
upon women playing a designated and/or immigrants- who work as
maids and cooks in wealthy house-
social role as nesters and nurturers, but
also upon men and children behaving holds are, then, by definition unable to
in accordance with their roles: men as fulfill the normative role of wife and
mother in their own households.14 We
loving but firm patriarchs and bread-
winners, and children as dutiful, obedi- see this scenario played out in Lutie' s
narrative: her New York home and her
ent little men- and women-in-training.
When proponents of domestic ideology marriage disintegrate while she is
insist that these social roles are "natur- working in Connecticut as a live-in
maid for the well-to-do Chandler fami-
al," they overlook the way that numer-
ous positive and negative incentives ly. In another example, on the figura-
continually work to encourage confor- tive level, "civilized" western nations,
mance to these behavioral limitations including England and the US, take the
(parental/paternal) responsibility for
(McClintock 35-36). For instance, girls
who express distaste for housework "developing" the "primitive" countries
may be warned that they will be seenof the global South and "raising" their
"childlike" peoples (McClintock 357-
as less desirable marriage partners, and
the words "spinster" and "old maid"58). People of color, poor people,
still threaten young women with thewomen, "Third World" people, and
stigma associated with not marryingmembers of other relatively disempow-
ered groups must fulfill their natural- September 11, 2001, is evidence of how
ized, but far from ideal, social roles for widely and strongly held was/is this
the current economic and political sys- belief in the invulnerability of the
tems to be sustained- even as the nation's "domestic" boundaries. But
members of these groups are nonethe-the subsequent experiences of Arab
less measured against the idealized and/or Muslim Americans have
norms of domestic ideology, to theirdemonstrated that US citizenship is
disadvantage.15 One example of this insufficient to guarantee that the
boundaries of the national "home" will
paradox, which Petry illustrates
through Lutie's story, is that Africaninclude them. These Americans have
American women have been denigrat- not been "safe" or "protected" within
ed as "unwomanly" for not being full- the national borders; indeed, they have
time homemakers and child-rearers, seen these borders shift so that they
even as they were deemed by middle- may be treated like "outsiders" in their
own "home."17 The "national" borders
class white women to be "naturally"
skilled at doing the (womanly) cook- longer appear contiguous with citi-
no
ing, cleaning, and caretaking choreszenship, but are exposed as signifying
they were paid to perform in whitenot nationality so much as a range of
homes. other possible identities, including reli-
In this light, Lutie's fixation on gion, geopolitical origin, and "racial"
obtaining a normative home for Bub phenotype. Lutie's experience of being
and herself crystallizes as both logical made to feel unsafe in or foreign to her
and futile. And it is at this paradoxicalown "home" -of being figuratively
juncture, where some of the contradic-"homeless"- is analogous.
tions inherent to domestic ideology are The terminology of fear is particu-
larly apt for discussing Lutie' s story,
made frighteningly manifest, that Lutie
because Petry carefully and thoroughly
becomes susceptible to the dis-ease
weaves gothic tropes into her narra-
that I call "gothic homelessness."16
tive. The gothic genre, perhaps most
"Home" is a word deeply invested
popularly represented by Bram
with ideological meaning; unlike
Stoker's novel Dracula, is frequently
"house," "apartment," "residence," or
defined by the conventions it uses to
other such terms, "home" signifies not
create an atmosphere of terror or hor-
simply lodgings, but also safety, ror within which its characters and
belonging, comfort. The term signifies
readers must operate. Of the "classic
similarly at both the local, literal level
gothic" romance, the type written dur-
and larger, figurative levels (especially, ing Radcliffe's era, Eve Sedgwick
for the purposes of this essay, at the writes:
national level). A "home" is a "haven"
You can predict its contents with an
from the world, precisely because its
unnerving certainty. You know the
boundaries ostensibly separate the important features of its mise en scene:
"family"- those who belong inside- an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a
from outsiders, strangers, foreigners. Catholic or feudal society. You know
about the trembling sensibility of the
These boundaries are highly desirable
heroine. . . . You know about the tyran-
to those they include because they offer nical older man with the piercing
the illusion of fixity and impenetrabili- glance who is going to imprison and
ty. To those they exclude, these bound- try to rape or murder [her]. . . . You
also know that . . . certain characteristic
aries seem impenetrable because of
preoccupations will be aired. These
their lack of fixity, their shiftiness. For include . . . sleeplike and deathlike
instance, America is thought of as the states; subterranean spaces and live
national "home" of its citizens, who are burial; doubles; . . . unnatural echoes
or silences, unintelligible writings, and
protected within its boundaries from
the unspeakable; [and] . . . the poiso-
the dangers of the world. The response nous effects of guilt and shame. . . .
of many Americans to the events of (9)18
Reading The Street with this catalogue that the domestic space is purported to
in mind, one is struck by the omnipres- exclude.19 Petry's title reminds us that,
ence of gothic conventions- which are for Lutie and Bub, the concept of a
the essence of fantastic, unreal excess- boundary between the home and the
in a novel that has too often been criti- street, in the traditional, idealized
cally pruned to fit neatly into the cate- sense, is virtually meaningless, in the
gory of literary naturalism or realism. traditional, idealized sense.
Petry begins in the first pages of the Indeed, if the boundary around
novel to enmesh her heroine's search this building functions at all, it serves
for a home in a web of gothic conven- to lock its inhabitants in, rather than to
tions, conveying to her readers a sense keep danger out. The novel consistent-
of what Lutie will experience as ly constructs Lutie's apartment as
Harlem's horrors. claustrophobic. She "can't stand being
The "oppressive ruin" of shut up in this apartment," where the
Sedgwick' s discussion was typically, "walls
in push in against" her (83). It is no
the classic gothic romances, an ancient coincidence that expressions of such
castle or a medieval monastery or con- feelings immediately follow thoughts
vent: a vast, gloomy place in which the of the grinding poverty that prevents
heroine never feels at ease. In this mid- her from progressing towards her
20th-century urban setting, it becomes dream of making a normative home for
the eponymous "street" on which her family. Nor is it a coincidence that
Lutie' s prospective apartment is locat- those expressions, in turn, are followed
ed, a trash-infested, dirty, odorous by invocations of Lutie's sexuality.
street where the "buildings were old Petry's metaphorical depiction of the
with small slit-like windows, which apartment building as a dungeon or
meant the rooms were small and dark" prison in which her heroine feels suffo-
and the "hallways . . . dark and nar- cated draws significantly upon the
row" (4). Lutie' s sense of dis-ease gothic trope of live burial.
begins while she is still standing on the In the classic gothic romances, this
sidewalk, estimating with unfortunate convention has perspicuous ties to sex-
accuracy the condition of any place she uality. "Live burial," Sedgwick notes,
can afford on her typist's salary. was "a favorite conventual punishment
Entering to look at the vacant apart- in Gothic novels" (20), assigned to
ment, she finds her prognosis con- those unfortunate nuns who were
firmed: "The stairs went up steeply-(accused of being) guilty of breaking
dark high narrow steps. She stared at their holy vows- implying some fail-
them fascinated. Going up stairs likeure of chastity. These women were
those you ought to find a newer and standardly locked away in dark, cav-
more intricate- a much-involved and ernous dungeons beneath the convent
perfected kind of hell at the top- the and left, for an endlessly indefinite
very top," where her apartment would period, to repent of evidencing (or,
be (6). Since the cellar- the hot, dark, worse, consummating) corporeal
underground province of the build-desires. The convention has thus been
ing's "super"- proves to be no less available to later writers in the gothic
hellish a space, Petry has not simplytradition as a shorthand for represent-
inverted the landscape of the building, ing buried or repressed sexuality. But
she has re-imagined the whole struc- importantly, Petry's recourse to the
ture as a "subterranean space" trope of live burial does not rely pri-
(Sedgwick 9), a labyrinthine dungeon marily on the Freudian psychoanalyti-
in which even stairs going up lead cal model for its intelligibility. Instead,
down. This apartment building, then, Petry's use of the trope exposes the
is the very antithesis of "home": rather ghastly gap between the efficacy of
than being a safe haven, this building Lutie's determined performance of the
quite evidently houses the kinds of gender,
evil race, sexuality, and class iden-
tities that she desires and the results immediate idea of simply taking a
that such behavior promises to bring in walk is spontaneously transformed
terms of the rhetoric of domestic ideol- into having a drink at the local bar, an
ogy-that is, Petry invests the trope excursion for which she prepares her-
with a sociohistorical, more than a psy- self "as slowly and as carefully as
choanalytical, significance. In other though she had a special date, putting
words, the gothic convention of live on a plain black dress and fastening a
burial marks the eruption of terror that gold-colored chain around her neck"
Lutie experiences when faced with the(83). She puts on her "best coat," the
contradictions of domestic ideology one "she only wore . . . when she was
and their implications, particularly forgoing somewhere special at night" (83).
her sexuality, given her class, gender, This language evokes sexuality and
and race. clearly suggests that part of what Lutie
For example, the language of live needs on this evening is to think of her-
burial quoted above appears in the nar- self as a desirable (and desiring)
rative not long after she has begun a woman.
life in the dismal apartment. She soon The next paragraph of the n
realizes that this move has done noth- brings all these elements into a
ing to relieve the dis-ease of her gothic tighter juxtaposition: "When sh
homelessness. While getting Bub out of the coat on, it was with the thou
the environment of her father's girl- that wearing it would give her
friend seems initially like "a victory" ing that she was on her way to
(56), just a few weeks later she is des-where she could forget for a lit
perate to escape from the "dirty trap"about the gas bill and the rent
she feels closing in on her (74). She seesthe light bill. It would be a pla
only two ways out of this bleak exis-there was a lot of room and the walls
tence-only two that will allow her to didn't continually walk at you- crowding
improve or at least maintain her per-you" (83; italics added). Petry uses the
formance of domesticity: she could trope of live burial to convey to her
increase her income, enabling her to readers another aspect of the horror of
afford the rent in a safer, cleaner sec- Lutie' s position. After a few short years
tion of Harlem, or she could "find a of sharing an ideologically "proper"
man who had a good job and who sex life with her husband Jim, this
wanted to marry her" (82). The prob-warm, beautiful young woman is grad-
lem with the first option is that, as a ually forced into an asexual existence:
first intermittently, when her job as the
civil servant, her pay increases are tied
to examination ratings, which means Chandlers'
it "help" requires her to live
might be two years or 20 before she several hours away from Jim, except
obtains a raise.20 The second option during one-week visits every two
offers no quick solution because she is months; then continually, after he
proves unwilling to sacrifice his sexual-
still legally married to Bub's father and
would need several years to save up ity for the sake of their mortgage and
enough money for a divorce. Although they separate.21 As a married woman,
she has suitors aplenty, none remain Lutie' s desire to perform "true woman-
interested in marrying once they learn hood" precludes her from having sex
that she is only separated from her with anyone besides her husband,
husband, but quickly modify their despite his no longer filling that role in
marriage proposals to offers of cohabi- any but the most nominal sense.
tation, which Lutie will not even enter- This ideological prohibition on
extramarital sex is magnified in its
tain. Tellingly, just as her mind reaches
these two dead-ends in her future importance because of the ways Lutie' s
plans, Lutie complains, "I can't stay gender and race have historically been
here in this little place for another constructed in US society. Carby notes
that post-Reconstruction-era black
minute" (82). Equally telling is that her
women "had to confront the dominant that Lutie is her haunting double, in
domestic ideologies and literary con-that it not only serves to register the
ventions of womanhood which exclud- horror enveloping Lutie, but also
ed them from the definition 'woman' " points toward another similarity- and
(6). As mentioned earlier herein, the instructive difference- between Petry
"cult of true womanhood" had defined and Lutie. The live burial trope, with
the white woman's performance of its long associations with sexual
repression, evokes the realm of sexuali-
middle-class, largely asexual feminini-
ty as the ideal, using black women-ty without requiring explicit mention
and their alleged proclivity for sexual
of the subject; that is, it enables Petry to
excess and promiscuity, among other signify the depth of Lutie' s dilemma
detriments- to visibly mark the without having to refer to her overtly
boundaries encircling the privilegedas a young woman with sexual desires.
gender and class identities (Carby In 1946, it would likely have been
important for Petry to be able to
30). 22 Lutie is very aware of the contin-
ued viability of these constructions of achieve this almost paradoxical effect.
black women, based upon her treat- Kimberly Drake, among other scholars,
ment by the women in her former has noted that, prior to the middle of
employer's family and circle. She the twentieth century, African
observes: "Apparently it was an auto- American women writers rarely por-
matic reaction of white people- if a trayed their black heroines as having
girl was colored and fairly young, why, an active sexuality (65). Such writers,
it just stood reason she had to be a in response to the very ideological con-
straints that plague Lutie in the novel,
prostitute" (Petry, The Street 45).23 For
Lutie to be seen as a "woman," ideo- constructed their characters as "largely
logically speaking, she must overcome asexual" in order "to fight the Jezebel
the racist presumption that she is sub- stereotype and to prove that black
ject to an "unfeminine" (and immoral) women could and did adhere to mid-
sexual appetite. In other words, to per-dle-class values" (Drake 65).25 Thus
form the privileged, domestic gender Petry, as author, arguably confronted
role to which she aspires, she must limitations upon her identity and self-
prove her "femininity" by refraining expression deriving from the operation
from extramarital sex (indeed, from of domestic ideology's norms upon
expressing sexual desire at all)- which,black women- limitations, in other
given her financial inability to obtain words,
a with their source in the same
divorce, condemns her to an entirelyassumptions against which Lutie must
asexual young adulthood and, at thefight for her own complex sexual iden-
same time, precludes her from taking tity. As Drake observes: "Petry seems
advantage of one available means ofto want to challenge the literary repres-
bettering her material condition quick- sion of black female sexuality, yet she
ly (that is, by having a man help sup- cannot explicitly celebrate [a] trans-
port her and Bub). 2^ Lutie is deter- gressive sexuality without offending
mined to prove herself capable of per- bourgeois black readers and confirm-
forming "femininity" and thus "wor- ing stereotypes in the minds of white
thy" of an identity as "woman." Yetreaders" (68). Significantly, however,
the horror of having to bury her sexu-Petry is able to negotiate her confronta-
tion successfully, in that the gothic con-
ality alive drives Lutie, on this evening,
from her entombing apartment and vention of live burial offers her a
means of implicating Lutie' s sexuality
into a social setting where she can be
affirmed, if only for a few hours, in indirectly.
her Lutie, by contrast, can nei-
ther overcome her desire nor get
sense of herself as a (potentially) sexual
being. around the boundary sealing off her
Indeed, Petry' s deployment of the sexuality (for it remains alive and
gothic trope of live burial reminds us buried). Her ultimate confrontation
with this ideological dilemma results ment (when he "disappears]"). But we
in her bludgeoning to death her some- are also to understand this seemingly
time suitor and would-be rapist, the self-contradictory statement to suggest
musician Boots Smith. that Lutie, by giving him an opening to
Lutie meets Boots at the Junto Bar pursue her, has managed to escape
and Grill, on the same evening dis- halfway the figurative walls entombing
cussed above. Petry takes pains to dis- her sexuality, to feed her desire just
tinguish Lutie from the "young women enough to keep it alive a while longer.
[who] had an urgent hunger for com- This ambivalent success becomes more
panionship" and came "to the Junto promising
to in her eyes, however, when
pick up a man or to quench a consum- Boots suggests that Lutie could make a
ing, constant thirst" (144). Lutie is good living singing and invites her to
there, rather, "to replace the haunting sing with his band the following night.
silences of rented rooms and little apart- Lutie is aware that Boots is tempt-
ments with the murmur of voices, the ing her with this opportunity for a
chance to seduce her and that she will
sound of laughter" (147; italics added).
In this way, the language of the narra-have to work hard to get what she
tive both reinforces Lutie' s perfor- wants from him- a steady gig as his
mance of a "properly" asexual woman- band's vocalist- without giving him
hood and simultaneously reminds uswhat he wants from her. But her com-
through gothic terminology that mitment to domestic values is unwa-
Lutie7 s hungers and thirsts are buried,vering; indeed, in keeping with the
not dead. Her enjoyment of the two philosophy of environmental deter-
beers that she orders is nearly over- minism that underwrites the novel, her
whelmed by her compulsive calcula-commitment gets stronger the longer
tions of how much the drinks are cut- she lives on "the street." The less she
ting into her tight budget. The scene can afford (economically) to conform
unfolds as if purposefully to reiterateher lodgings and her life with Bub to
the previously established connections the ideals for "home" and "family," the
between class, sexuality, race, and gen- less she can afford (ideologically) to
der, which are marked here again by relinquish the performance of asexual
the trope of live burial. Boots appears("true") womanhood. She should not
behind her- initially attracted by theneed a healthy bank account to main-
mournful tone in her voice when she tain her sexual integrity, she believes,
sings along with the juke-box, then by regardless of the racial presumptions
her beauty- and offers to pay for herworking against her. But, in fact,
drinks. She fights an internal battle Petry's narrative makes a very explicit
before replying. Lutie is certain that if connection between class (and racial)
she makes it clear up front "that there identity and sexuality. The novel
wasn't any inducement he could offerrepeatedly depicts attacks, physical
that would make her sleep with him,"and otherwise, on Lutie's determined
he will "disappear" (149). But the asexuality, offenses and indignities that
thought of going back to do her laun-the narrator assures us Lutie would not
dry in "the three rooms with the have had to suffer with such frequency
silence and the walls pressing in" is had she not been a poor, African
more than she can bear (150). She American woman. Lindon Barrett's
allows him to pick up her check, think- analysis of the novel deconstructs the
ing that "the walls had beaten her or legal and economic discourses that
she had beaten the walls. Whichever inscribe "the bodies of African
way she cared to look at it" (150). That American women" with "the sign
is to say, first, that the literal walls of'whore' " (122). Barrett incisively
her apartment, oppressive and dull, explores the way that the legal status of
have forced her into an encounter with "slave" and the economic status of
a man that is sure to end in disappoint-
"prostitute" cooperate on the space of
the black female body so as to signify a Or rather, as it cannot rightly be
woman who both chooses to make her- said that either Jones or Mrs. Hedges
self sexually available and has no right does not belong in the building- they
to choose not to (121-22). Petry repre- live there, too- Lutie' s terror may just
sents this discursive situation, accord- as accurately be deemed a response to
ing to Barrett, by investing most of the becoming a part of a frightening "fami-
novel's characters with "the notion that ly," a "home"-less family very different
access to Lutie' s genitalia is almost asfrom the kind she wants. Petry
uncomplicated a matter as the purchas- metaphorically constructs both the
ing of groceries or a newspaper or any super and the brothel owner as gothic
other number of routine transactions" figures: Jones as a vampire or devil and
(122). Mrs. Hedges as an other-worldly
Thus, Lutie suffers increasingly "monstrosity" (241). In the case of the
from gothic homelessness while she former, a subplot of the novel describes
remains on "the street": whereas the the disintegration of the threadbare
heteronormative "home" is rhetorically relationship between Jones and Min, a
impermeable to any threat to a "lady's woman who moves in with him to
virtue/' Lutie' s accommodations seemescape the burden of paying rent. A
day by day to invite more and greater "root doctor" counsels the worried Min
sexual threats and attacks. She is to hang a cross on the wall above their
solicited at the doorstep by Mrs. bed. Jones's instinctive and inexplica-
Hedges, her downstairs neighbor, onble fear of this cross prevents the gen-
behalf of "a nice white gentleman" erally abusive man from laying a hand
(84). This massive, inscrutable, blank-on her- and marks him figuratively as
eyed woman, who unnerves Lutie ter-a vampire (358-59). Mrs. Hedges, on
ribly, is used to taking advantage of the the other hand, is described as "a crea-
financial worries that plague the ture that had strayed from some other
numerous separated, single mothers planet"on (237). Her large size, combined
the street, by recruiting them for the with the "mass of ... terrible scars"
that have covered her body since she
brothel she runs in her first-floor apart-
ment. The building "super," Jones, vio- barely escaped a burning building,
lates Lutie figuratively: he befriends evoke "sheer horror . . .-undisguised,
Bub to gain access to her bedroom uncontrollable" in those who see her
when she is not at home and takes the (247). I want to highlight the connec-
opportunity to fetishize her clothes, tion between these two gothic figures.
making "great smudges of dirt and Both vampires and monsters fall into
tight, small wrinkles" with his hungry the category referred to in the gothic
hands on her white blouse (208-09)/^tradition as the "living dead."
Later he attacks her physically, Vampires have given up their mortal
attempting to drag her down to the lives in exchange for a parasitic immor-
basement and rape her. Ironically, it tality
is siphoned nightly from the veins
the powerful Mrs. Hedges who savesof the living; monsters symbolize not
Lutie from this violation- her motiva- only inhuman, but also "unnatural"
tion being that Lutie has been claimed life, in the tradition of Frankenstein's
by the "nice white gentleman" whomcreature (whose body was cobbled
Mrs. Hedges represents and is there- together and reanimated through an
fore off-limits to Jones. All of these ungodly use of scientific knowledge).
episodes take place in or on the thresh- Petry uses these figures of living death
old of Lutie' s dwelling, emphasizing to dramatize metaphorically the
the extent of her gothic homelessness: process by which Lutie, as a result of
she has no "proper home," no domes- her live burial in the same "tomb" with
tic "safe haven" that is invulnerable to such characters, is gradually (or sud-
those who do not belong to her "fami- denly and violently, one might argue)
iy" transformed into a member of this
ghastly gothic " family." The street so incredible (as characteristics of an
itself is figured as actively vampiric: African American woman in 1940's
"Lutie thought, No one could live on a Harlem) that she should be understood
street like this and stay decent. It as an " 'anti-heroine' " and the novel as
would get them sooner or later, for it a satire (503). By contrast, I submit that
sucked the humanity out of people- slow- Petry is far from ridiculing her doppel-
ly, surely, inevitably" (229; italics ganger; rather, the author's gesture
added). Petry's gothic double here requires her readers to recognize that
voices the fear that the novelist bravely the existence of a woman like Lutie is
explores in her fiction: the terrifying entirely possible.
possibility, even probability, that Petry Petry herself, at Lutie's age, was
could far too easily be Lutie, that she is living proof that a young woman could
protected from suffering Lutie7 s fate by hold and live by the values that domes-
not much more than the family, hus- tic ideology prescribes and that under-
band, and saleable professional skills write the American Dream, even while
that provide or enable her to procure being well aware of the existence and
an address far (or far enough) from the power of oppressive forces like racism,
hell of 116th Street. classism, and sexism. Petry's family
With these lines, Petry inscribes folklore included a profusion of refer-
explicitly in her novel the conclusion ences to the evils of racism and other
that she had come to after a few years such obstacles. Her maternal grandfa-
of living and working in Harlem: that, ther had been a fugitive slave, whose
" 'simply and easily[,] the environment "nursery song" offered some grim
can change the course of a person's advice: "Run, little baby, run / or pat-
life' " (Petry, "Talks" 71). Petry's con- terrollers / goin' come, / run, little
clusion conflicts fundamentally with baby, run" (Petry, "Ann Petry" 255).
the philosophy of self-determination in Her aunt, Anna Louise James, had
which her parents had raised her to been the only woman in her class in the
believe. As I noted earlier, Petry was Brooklyn College of Pharmacy and was
taught as a child to take Benjamin refused membership in the Connecticut
Franklin's recipe for success for her Pharmaceutical Association specifically
own. When we recognize Lutie as on the grounds of her sex ("Ann Petry"
Petry's doppelganger, we are not taken 261). But exceptionalism is a seductive
aback- as some critics have been- to doctrine, and Petry's family, even
find that Lutie has also absorbed while sharing their experiences of
"Franklin's optimistic guidelines for oppression with her, did everything in
achievement" into her understanding their power to shelter her from the
of self and world (Holladay 7). Lutiedirect
is effects of racism and to encour-
age her to believe that her own disci-
frequently taken to task for this charac-
teristic that she shares with Petry- forpline, thrift, and effort- essential quali-
seeing Franklin as a feasible model for ties of the ideal domestic woman-
her upward mobility. Nellie McKay is were the key factors in her ability to
typical of many scholars of the novelachieve her goals. To see Lutie's expe-
when she criticizes Lutie for having rience
"so as not the same as Petry's, but
assimilated and accepted the [Puritan] sufficiently similar to produce in her a
values [of hard work, thrift, and moral-like mindset, we must read closely and,
ity] her grandmother touted that they as much as possible, without the obfus-
became thought barriers that prevent- cating lens of stereotypes of the ghetto.
ed her from realizing the true nature ofThough the first seven years of Lutie's
her situation as a black woman in a life are barely hinted at, we learn,
white patriarchal society" (133).27 importantly, that her home life was
Keith Clark's reading goes even fur- more domestic in this period before her
ther, asserting that Lutie's "obtuse- mother's death than afterwards. Only
ness," "gullibility," and "naivete" aresubsequently did her father begin boot-
legging in preference to the ongoing, obliterated by her personal experi-
futile search for steady employment ences, though she learns to question it
(80). But his defection was balanced byby observing and participating in
her grandmother's vocal disapproval, Harlem life. Similarly, Lutie, except in
and the remainder of Lutie's childhood brief moments of despair and self-
was spent in the domestic security thatdoubt, remains certain that she can
her Granny's constant, soothing pres- exempt herself from the alcoholism,
ence provided (404). Upon Granny'sbad health, moral concessions, and
recommendation, as a means of ensur- dehumanization that overcome her
ing that Lutie remained protected from parents and neighbors, simply by
the sexual advances of dubious men, refusing to give into the economic and
she was married at 17 years old, as social pressures that make such out-
comes seem inevitable. But Lutie's
soon as she was out of high school (76).
determined inflexibility- Petry 's
Petry constructs Lutie's past with light
but careful strokes that make her quiteunwillingness to represent her heroine
a plausible character. And perhaps as compromising any further on her
values and standards- becomes a key
more important for Petry than whether
a woman like Lutie was possible in element of her downfall. It is a painful
1940's Harlem was the question of irony of the novel that Lutie's "fight"
whether it was possible for such a against dehumanization is, in a sense,
woman, upon reaching young adult-what dehumanizes her. The gothic
hood in that grim arena, to come to tropes
any that structure the novel's
other end than the violent, tragic fatedenouement, then, might be said partly
that her heroine meets in The Street. to mark Petry' s horror at being unable
Petry creates a character enough like to imagine herself succeeding against
herself that she can interrogate the Lutie's odds.
beliefs she was raised with by imagina- Along with the trope of live burial,
tively testing them in Lutie's fictional another gothic convention from
experience. Sedgwick's catalogue becomes increas-
Given Petry' s authorial interest in ingly significant: the trope of "unnatur-
environmental determinism and my al ... silences" (Sedgwick 9). It appears
related reading of Petry and Lutie as throughout the novel; again, for exam-
gothic doubles, Lutie's stubborn adher- ple, I referenced the "haunting
ence to domestic ideology does not silences" that characterize apartments
constitute gullibility as much as resis- like Lutie's (147). This trope begins to
tance. Granted, it is a resistance loom larger and larger in the narrative,
grounded in exceptionalism, but not in however, as it approaches the climax.
ignorance. As Lutie puts it, after cata- Lutie's attempt to get a place in Boots
loguing all the physical, spiritual, and Smith's band fails when his employ-
psychological damage suffered by her er-Mr. Junto, the owner of the dance
neighbors, Mrs. Hedges, Jones, and club and the bar where they originally
Jones's girlfriend Min: "None of those met- prohibits Boots from hiring her.
things would happen to her . . . because We learn why later, when Mrs. Hedges
she would fight back and never stop reveals that the "nice white gentleman"
fighting back" (57; italics added). for whom she panders is Junto (417).
Indeed, it is here that we come to see Lutie's despair at losing the opportuni-
that the doppelgdnger trope is a double- ty to earn money by singing is unmis-
edged sword: that is, Lutie shadows takable even to her son, who- in his
Petry, but Petry also haunts Lutie. The eagerness to assist her financially- is
fictional Lutie cannot imagine giving tricked by Jones into robbing mailbox-
up on her performance of domesticity es. Believing he is keeping only the ill-
because Petry, her author and gothic gotten gains of criminals whom the
double, cannot imagine herself doing super has been asked to spy on by the
so. Petry' s exceptionalism is not wholly police, Bub is soon arrested for mail
GOTHIC HOMELESSNESS, BLACK WOMEN'S SEXUALITY, AND (LIVING) DEATH IN PETRY'S THE STREET
theft. Lutie comes home from work to quarters on empty consumerism- pur-
find two policemen serving her with chasing the "glitter" and glamour of
the long white legal paper that repre-cinema and style (412), which are of no
sents the utter ruin of her domestic more use to her than the rhinestone
dream. Her search for money to pay earrings Boots gives her instead of a
for the lawyer whom she (wrongly) job- she begins to imagine the silence
believes she will need leads her to rushing ahead of her to the apartment,
Boots's door, and to her surprised able to "seep in ... before she got
relief he tells her he will have the there, so that when she opened the
money for her the next evening. It is door it would be there. Formless.
Shapeless. Waiting" (413). Lutie does
while she is waiting for this provisional
not have a "home" whose walls and
salvation that Lutie begins to notice the
unnerving silence as a constant pres- threshold form boundaries that such
ence, shadowing her every step. frightening societal forces as poverty
The silence begins to take on sub- and racism must respect. And indeed,
stance in the waiting room of the once inside her apartment, Lutie recog-
Children's Shelter where Bub is being nizes "the deep, uncanny silence that
held. Here Lutie notices "a smell- a filled it" as the man who has been
distinct odor that filled her nose until it
responsible for so many of her prob-
was difficult for her to breathe" (410).lems: Junto (418). She believes that she
The waiting room is full of women sees him sitting on her couch with his
who are not all black- but who are all feet planted on her rug and feels an
poor. Petry's critique thus spotlights almost uncontrollable panic rising.
the societal systems that herd so many Petry's gothic silence takes the shape of
poor women into this role of "bad the wealthy, white man with a persis-
mother." While Lutie, employing the tent desire for bodies like Lutie' s. First,
logic of domestic ideology, thinks that it helped to place her at odds with her
"it was always the mother's fault when neighbor, Mrs. Hedges, who might
a kid got into trouble, because it meantotherwise have been a source of useful
she'd failed the kid somewhere" (405), information. Further, it played a part in
Petry's gothic silence reminds the read-transforming her from an object of lust
er that a poor mother could hardly to an object of hatred in the eyes of
help but "fail" in domestic ideology's Jones, who assumed and resented that
terms. Lutie had not known this threat- Lutie would prefer the white man's
ening silence as a child, "because advances to his own and determined to
Granny had always been there," rock-hurt her by getting Bub in trouble.
ing in her chair and humming (404). And, finally, it essentially precluded
But Bub had faced this silence every Lutie from obtaining a well-paying
day after school because Lutie could singing job and possibly even a pro-
not be home to protect him and earn posal of marriage from Boots, because
the money she needed to feed and Junto, as his employer, forced the
clothe him, at the same time. The trope musician to choose between his lavish
of silence thus becomes the "unspeak-lifestyle and his incipient affection for
able" indictment of the ideological con-Lutie. The last straw for Lutie is find-
tradictions that force poor mothers intoing Junto waiting with Boots at his
this lose-lose situation. apartment that evening, standing
Petry's reliance on the gothic con-between her and the money she needs
vention of silence increases as its sub- for her son.
stance builds. It follows Lutie to the The two gothic conventions that
movie theatre, where it begins to Petry has most emphasized in Lutie's
assume a human form, "coming at her narrative come together in this closing
softly on its hands and knees" (412). It chapter. Lutie realizes that the haunt-
sits down in the next booth at the hair- ing silence occupies Boots's apartment,
dresser's shop. As Lutie wastes her too, despite its spacious, elegantly
appointed rooms; that Junto can cross mous" outlet for her rage against all
this threshold at will, just as easily as kinds of societal inequities (429-30).
he can enter her dismal little dwelling, But Petry, as author, makes her doppel-
which he in fact owns. The silence rep- ganger's choice for her, and she chooses
resents the power of wealth, of man- to have Lutie continue to fight. Barrett
hood, of whiteness: the power to describes Lutie' s most definitive, exces-
achieve the American Dream that Lutie sive action- murdering Boots to pro-
does not have and cannot access with- tect herself against rape, cudgeling his
out giving up her sexual virtue.28 Thathead until it is bloody and deformed-
claim to a "properly" asexual identityas "her most violent effort to resist
has become increasingly valuable to[the] imagined legitimacy" of the
Lutie as her performance of domestici- inscription "of the sign- 'whore' - . . .
ty has become decreasingly normative on the bodies of African American
in so many other uncontrollable ways. women" (122). But for Lutie, self-
Her performance of asexuality is allpreservation is self-destruction. Boots
that distinguishes her, according to dies,
the and with him dies her dream of
ideological rhetoric, from Jones, Mrs. domesticity, despite the continuing
Hedges, and all the others living (dead)
sanctity of her body. What she has not
in Harlem. And this terrifying silence eradicated, of course, is Junto, the nov-
el's representative of the powerful peo-
that is Junto threatens to strip that per-
formance away from her: "All the time ple who benefit from all of the ideolog-
she was thinking, Junto has a brick inical contradictions that combine to
his hand. Just one brick. The final onedestroy the disempowered like Lutie
needed to complete the wall that had (and even Boots, who is no innocent
been building up around her for years, and has a good deal of masculine and
and when that one last brick was economic power vis-a-vis Lutie, but
shoved in place, she would be com- who unarguably takes the fall for
pletely walled in" (423). In other Junto). Before Lutie can flee for
words, Lutie would be permanently Chicago, she must cross a room that is
buried alive- not just her sexuality, "alive with silence- deepening pools
but all of her (which is to say, Bub, of an ominous silence" (433). This goth-
ic omen apprises us that Lutie will find
too), locked into a different wing of the
same ideological prison in which herno room in Chicago large and loud
desires had been buried for so long. To enough to drown out the rhetoric of
obtain the money she needed to save domestic ideology, US society's self-
her son from the street, she would have contradictory mantra for maintaining a
to sacrifice her already-damaged per-status quo that structures so forcefully
formance of idealized womanhood and the identities of its citizens.
play the stereotypical role of the "black My reading of The Street situates
woman"- by definition, in this the novel in relation to the gothic tradi-
schema, a role of sexual availability. tion-one distinctly different from
Though Junto agrees to leave, those traditions with which the novel is
when faced with her enraged refusal usually
to associated. But Petry's use of
accept his proposal, Boots promises the gothic does not simply link her to
him that upon his return he will find athe tradition of English literature with-
cooperative Lutie awaiting him. Boots in which the Wilkie Collins novel she
plans to rape her in the interim. His loved so much was written; it addition-
aggression pushes Lutie to make a ally calls our attention to the wide-
choice: she can sacrifice her self for her spread appearance of gothic language
son, or she can sacrifice her son for her within the African American tradition
self. Yet Lutie does not consciously to which she equally belongs. Her
choose: the narrative deals at length employment of gothic conventions to
with the way Boots is reduced in her mount a critique of domestic ideology
mind to nothing more than an "anony- constitutes a commonality, rather than
a distinction, between Petry and Gothic: The Haunting of Toni
African American authors as diverse as
Morrison's Beloved in Light of
Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hawthorne's The House of Seven
Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison.Gables."29 As yet, however, there has
Some of these writers have been dis- been no sustained consideration of
cussed in terms of their relation to the
what the gothic might mean in or for
gothic tradition, though not in light of the African American literary tradition.
domestic ideology as a possible provo- The critical neglect of this fantastic ele-
cation to employ gothic conventions. ment of African American literature, in
For example, Teresa Goddu's Gothic
favor of an overdetermined emphasis
America: Narrative, History, and Nation
on the tradition's realism, ultimately
includes a chapter concerning Jacobs's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; addi-impedes our comprehension of what
tional treatments of the gothic in the literature represents as the exces-
African American texts from which I sive, horrific nature of the African
have benefited include Joseph American social real.30 My reading of
Bodziock's "Richard Wright and the Petry thus points to the amount of
Afro- American Gothic" and Wesley challenging, exciting work that awaits
Britton's "The Puritan Past and Black scholars in this field.
Notes 1 . See, e.g., Cooper's contemporary, Terrell, as well as later 20th-century thinkers including Carby,
Giddings, and White. Recent events at Duke University provide dismayingly up-to-the-minute evi-
dence of the ongoing applicability of Cooper's observations. At the crux of these events was the
alleged rape of a young black woman by members of Duke's virtually all-white men's lacrosse team;
the woman had been hired to dance at a team party. For incisive analyses of some of the issues
raised by these events, see Holloway, Lubiano's "Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim," and Neal.
2. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian were wildly popular, oft-imitated instances
of the gothic romances written in England during the tradition's original Anglophone heyday (1764-
1830).
3. This essay is drawn from a larger project in which I analyze the profound relationships between
the gothic, identity, and domestic ideology in African American literature from as early as the mid-
1800s through the present.
4. Bone's dismissal of The Street as a derivative, unanalytical work in "the Wright School" might
have unfortunately been one of the most influential articulations of this comparison (157-60, 180).
More recently, critics-especially those sensitive to Petry's particular and unprecedented literary rep-
resentation of issues of gender and sexuality in relation to race and class- have rehearsed the con-
nection between Petry and Wright to challenge or complicate it. See, e.g., Holladay's literary biogra-
phy (12-13) and essays by Bell (105-09), Henderson (850), and Hicks (21-22). McBride's recent
essay, in particular, rejects the construction of Petry's novel as derivative of Wright's in the context of
a wonderfully nuanced re-reading of The Street as a naturalist work. For a useful summary of the crit-
ical history of the novel from its publication through the 1970s, see Pryse (130n3).
5. Jarrett, who introduces the first reprinting of Petry's story (in PMLAs "Little-Known Documents"
feature), frames her choice to use a pseudonym within a tradition of "African American Noms de
Plume." Jarrett argues that "Pseudonymity . . . allowed African American writers to advance [a]
polemic against racial realism" by instead "offering] literary entertainment through genres of popular
fiction, such as romance and mystery" (245). While I find this to be an extremely instructive lens
through which to view Petry's choice to publish as "Arnold Petri," it is important to recognize that use
of the pseudonym as a sign of "authorial disavowal" has also long been associated with the conven-
tions of one such genre of popular fiction: the gothic (Botting 49).
6. Though Petry's experience and the setting of The Street centralizes late 1930's-early 1940's
Harlem, the disproportionately dismal conditions described here and in the novel are not limited to
that time and place. As Petry writes in her autobiography: "The sad and terrible truth about The Street
is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto.
Because life hasn't changed that much for black people" ("Ann Petry" 265). While the way of life in
the rural South is certainly different from life in urban northern centers, numerous disadvantages and
dangers that were and are typical of the latter setting are also common to the former, albeit some-
times in variant forms.
7. This famous language appears in the first essay of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk: "It is a
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the
eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and
pity. One ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder" (364-65).
8. According to Ervin's Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography, Petry lived for eight years at 2 East 129tn
Street, which is sometimes designated as Harlem proper and in other instances as East Harlem. In
any event, the conditions on Petry's block appear to have been quite different from those that charac-
terized the section of 1 16th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) where Lutie was renting her apart-
ment, even though they are only about 16 blocks apart. Lutie's years outside of Harlem were partly
spent in Jamaica (Queens), where she and her husband had a small house, and partly in Lyme,
Connecticut, where she worked as a live-in maid for a well-to-do white family.
9. Petry has written of the period when her husband was serving overseas and she wanted to work
full-time on her novel in this way: "I decided that if I lived as frugally as possible I would be able to pay
the rent and buy food. I would have to develop a life-style that was simple, inexpensive" ("Ann Petry"
265). Lutie, in a similarly penny-counting manner, calculates how she can get by on her salary and
still save enough to move out of Harlem: "if she and Bub were very careful they would have more
than enough to last until her next pay-day"-because if they weren't "very careful," they might "have to
go on living here year after year . . . [w]ith just enough money to pay the rent, just enough money to
buy food and clothes and to see an occasional movie" (Street 64, 74).
10. When I speak herein of the performance of a social role defined in terms of one or more
aspects of identity-usually sexuality, race, gender, or class, for purposes of this essay-l am drawing
and expanding upon the concept of performativity developed by Butler in Gender Trouble (25). This
theory sees socially constructed identities as highly unstable ways of being that we become by con-
tinually doing them, to encapsulate Butler's understanding of gender (33), and is helpful for thinking
about the way that domestic ideology's rhetoric presents certain identities as the product of specified
behaviors (rather than the privilege of economically, politically, or otherwise relatively empowered
persons).
11. For example, Lubiano's "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War
by Narrative Means" discusses the impact of this ideology on the portrayal of Anita Hill in the media;
Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights registers the implications of her race and gender identi-
ties, and how they are perceived by her students and colleagues, for her career as a law professor.
12. While domestic ideology has a much wider application, as I discuss further herein, victonan-
era England is quite accurately isolated as the site of the ideology's fullest flowering. See, e.g., Hall;
McClintock; and Davidoff and Hall.
13. For an extended discussion of gender and nationalism, including an analysis of nationalists
reliance on the terminology of domesticity to communicate national relationships, see McClintock,
especially pages 352-60.
14. The Victorian-era woman needed "domestic help" in part to maintain her performance of mid-
dle-class leisure (McClintock 162). Today, a different reason obtains. Writing about the experiences
of women emigrating to the US from Mexico, Hondagneu-Sotelo identifies a direct correlation
between the influx of numerous middle- and upper-class US women into the workforce and the
increase in demand for (poorly) paid labor to perform the domestic work that "the woman of the
house" is still held responsible for having done (151). Harris highlights the conflict between the
domestic worker's own household and her employing household, by asking, "To whom could the
black woman complain if she were forced to leave her children alone for two hours to cook dinner for
a white woman . . . ?" (10).
15. See McClintock s discussions of domestication (34-3b) and abjection (72), in which she
explores the way domesticity authorizes the labels by which, and the reasons for which, disempow-
ered groups are stigmatized, even as those groups perform social roles that the powerful "cannot do
without."
16. My thinking of "gothic homelessness" as a dis-ease is indebted to Wald s description of the cul-
tural and medical phenomenon of the "healthy carrier." This figure occupies the boundaries between
sickness and health, medically speaking, and, in cultural terms, represents the dangers that arise
when social borders are transgressed or exposed as permeable. See Wald 185-86, 193.
17. For a discussion of the impact of the post-9/1 1 US climate on Arab Americans (and Arab immi-
grants), see Ibish 7-9, 38-47.
18. 1 borrow Wilt's phrase "Classic Gothic" to signify romances written during the genre s formative
period, approximately 1764-1830 (12, 23).
19. Petry's narrative, however, should not be read as supporting the dominant rhetoric, which
would have one believe that the white, middle-class home, with all its luxuries, is, by contrast, actual-
ly impenetrable. Her portrait of the Chandlers' would-be "home," where Lutie works for over two
years, exposes it as vulnerable to all kinds of "un-domestic" behavior, including Mrs. Chandler's prob-
able adultery, her neglect of her son, and the Christmas Day suicide of her brother-in-law. Petry thus
undermines racist, classist constructions of the working-class/black home as the exclusive and natur-
al site of immorality and violence.
20. Shulman deconstructs the "myth" that "low-wage work is merely a temporary step on the ladder
to a better job." To the contrary, upward mobility does not follow inevitably from hard work and
"play[ing] by the rules," she writes in an analysis of the potential political power of the working class.
The author of The Betrayal of Work, Shulman cites a University of Michigan study that followed a
group of workers over the course of their careers and "found that half of those whose earnings ranked
in the bottom 20 percent in 1968 were still in the same group in 1991" (par. 3 and 5).
21 . An important aspect of the narrative, which space does not permit me to address fully here, is
the way racism, sexism, and classism collude to masculinize Lutie as the family breadwinner. Petry
points repeatedly to ways that racist employment practices exclude African American men from
steady, well-paying jobs and push African American women into the workforce, leaving the men feel-
ing emasculated. Harris observes that this system kept a steady supply of African American women
to fill positions as paid domestic laborers; she applies this analysis specifically to Lutie's situation in
The Street (9-1 0,88-89).
22. Put differently, Lutie's gothic homelessness here is a product of her exclusion from the "sister-
hood" of "women." For additional illuminating discussions of the relationship of race to the "cult of true
womanhood," see Tate and Giddings.
23. Lindon Barrett makes the same point in his excellent reading of the capitalist market as a vio-
lent force in The Street "African American female bodies are ... established as what might be under-
stood as the ur-site of 'prostitution,' a site of both social and natural pollution" (120).
24. Obviously, this "option," in which Lutie's economic possibilities depend upon her relationship to
a man, is grounded in the same ideological network that this essay criticizes-specifically, in domes-
ticity's idealization of the heteronormative "nuclear" family and the male breadwinner. While I decry
the sexism that underlies this route to financial security, I nonetheless wish to note the way that class
and race circumscribe Lutie's opportunities to participate in even the marginal "benefits" of the gen-
der hierarchy.
25. Other scholars noting this phenomenon include McDowell (37-38) and duCille, whose essay
acknowledges the "widely held critical opinion" that most women writing during the so-called Harlem
Renaissance "tried to rebut racist imaging of black women as morally loose," but nonetheless faults
this observation for preventing critics from noticing the ways in which these texts circumvent and
challenge the convention of portraying "prim," "proper," "bourgeois" black "ladies" (422).
Drake sees Lutie in this tradition of African American heroines, though she argues that Petry modi-
fies the tradition by contrasting Lutie's asexuality to "sexualized minor female characters" who "sur-
vive and even flourish during the course of the novel, while the protagonistQ suffer[s]" (66-67). My
reading of Petry's use of gothic conventions in portraying these "minor female characters" does not
accord entirely with Drake's view of them as "flourishing" in comparison to Lutie; while they do indeed
"survive," so does she, surviving and suffering not being mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, I find com-
pelling the main thrust of Drake's point, that Petry attempts to show us the then-unfamiliar picture of a
black female character whose increasing troubles can be linked with her adamant asexuality.
26. Petry's symbolism here draws upon domestic ideology's mandate that white things be kept
"clean" and "pure." See, e.g., McClintock (207-31).
27. Cf. Bell (108-09), Pryse (117), and Clark (497), for similar perspectives on Lutie's Franklinian
philosophy. Instances of Lutie's assimilation of Franklin's values include The Street (68-69).
28. Pryse's research on Benjamin Franklin makes clear that Junto can be seen as a stand-in, or
double, for him: "The name Junto is also a direct allusion to the first significant men's club in
American colonial history, the name Franklin gave his secret group of friends. Formed ostensibly for
moral and intellectual improvement, Franklin's Junto actually served its members as a central sphere
of social and political influence. . . . [l]t became ... 'an instrument to help him and his associates to
rise in the community' " (118). By associating Lutie's (and Petry's) "model," Franklin, with her neme-
sis, Junto, Petry in effect concedes that the rhetoric of the American Dream (and domestic ideology)
has a much more limited application than her parents' teachings indicated.
29. Cf. Bryant.
30. Cf. Glave.
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Buried, Homelessness

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Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women's Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann

Petry's "The Street"

African American Review, Volume 40, Number 3

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gates "the paradoxical existence of Street my aim is to show how simply

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