Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

[A]ll through the darkest period of the colored woman's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming odds, that often ended in a horrible death, to maintain and protect that which woman holds dearer than life. The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the despairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish material for epics.--Anna Julia Cooper, "The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation" 202

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The black woman's embattled defense of her body and her right to sexual self-determination constitutes a recurring theme in African American women's literary tradition. Addressing the World's Congress of Representative Women held in Chicago in 1893, Anna Julia Cooper, like numbers of other black women intellectuals, activists, and writers in the last century and a hall 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 sexual 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 minimum 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 foreshadows 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 sexuality. I locate the roots of Petry's language of fear in the literary conventions of the gothic genre, a fantastic, sensational tradition popularized in English by Ann Radcliffe's late-18th-century romances. (2) I juxtapose Petry's recourse to these gothic conventions with her novel's implicit analysis of the intersecting operations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and suggest the relationship of both to the tyrannical impact of domestic ideology upon the lives of African American women like Petry's heroine and even Petry herself. I highlight the novel's investment in the gothic, not to distinguish it within the African American literary tradition, but rather to gesture towards the extent to which The Street is typical of African American literature, whose deeply woven threads of gothic and other fantastic elements go largely overlooked. (3)

Recognizing the centrality of Petry's engagement with gothic conventions in The Street extends and enriches our understanding of her work. For many years, the definitive reading of The Street placed it squarely within the naturalist tradition, connecting Petry's work famously (and often disparagingly) with Richard Wright's Native Son. (4) Because of the consequent emphasis on Petry's "gritty, realistic" prose (Holladay 12), the decidedly "unreal" aspect of her aesthetics has been woefully overlooked. As I will demonstrate, the novel draws some of its most structurally significant tropes from among the conventions of the gothic tradition. Not only does the gothic inform my meta-level reading of the production of the text, in which the heroine of The Street and Petry herself stand as doppelgangers, or "gothic doubles," of one another. Additionally, the novel teems with metaphorical figures of vampires, monsters, and ghosts--creatures whose status as the "living dead" reinforces the novel's central gothic convention: the trope of "live burial." This trope, as I explain below, configures and connects two key elements of the novel's thematic structure: Lutie's quest for a normative home and her defense of her sexual integrity in the face of relentless challenges. I begin by fleshing out my argument that the doppelganger trope provides us with insight into Petry's relationship with her novel's protagonist; later in the essay, I will examine how this figure of the double arguably haunts the novel's progression and leads inevitably to its horrifying conclusion. Primarily, I focus on the ways that the trope of "live burial" and other related gothic conventions mark moments of terror in the novel that illuminate the powerful force of domestic ideology upon the meaning and performance of identity--particularly black women's sexuality, in terms of Lutie's experiences. While I do not dispute the value of a naturalist reading of the novel, I hope to illuminate some of what is missed when that reading dominates to the exclusion of all others. A gothic reading of the novel highlights the fact that Lutie is constantly negotiating her identity in the context of a set of norms--for gender, sexuality, race, and class--that are basically Victorian and, for a woman with Lutie's type of identity, fundamentally punitive.