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

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

The next paragraph of the novel brings all these elements into an even tighter juxtaposition: "When she put the coat on, it was with the thought that wearing it would give her the feeling that she was on her way to a place where she could forget for a little while about the gas bill and the rent bill and the light bill. It would be a place where there was a lot of room and the walls didn't continually walk at you--crowding you" (83; italics added). Petry uses the trope of live burial to convey to her readers another aspect of the horror of Lutie's position. After a few short years of sharing an ideologically "proper" sex life with her husband Jim, this warm, beautiful young woman is gradually forced into an asexual existence: first intermittently, when her job as the Chandlers' "help" requires her to live several hours away from Jim, except during one-week visits every two months; then continually, after he proves unwilling to sacrifice his sexuality for the sake of their mortgage and they separate. (21) As a married woman, Lutie's desire to perform "true womanhood" precludes her from having sex with anyone besides her husband, despite his no longer filling that role in any but the most nominal sense.

This ideological prohibition on extramarital sex is magnified in its importance because of the ways Lutie's gender and race have historically been constructed in US society. Carby notes that post-Reconstruction-era black women "had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood which excluded them from the definition 'woman' " (6). As mentioned earlier herein, the "cult of true womanhood" had defined the white woman's performance of middle-class, largely asexual femininity as the ideal, using black women--and their alleged proclivity for sexual excess and promiscuity, among other detriments--to visibly mark the boundaries encircling the privileged gender and class identities (Carby 30). (22) Lutie is very aware of the continued viability of these constructions of black women, based upon her treatment by the women in her former employer's family and circle. She observes: "Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people--if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it just stood reason she had to be a prostitute" (Petry, The Street 45). (23) For Lutie to be seen as a "woman," ideologically speaking, she must overcome the racist presumption that she is subject to an "unfeminine" (and immoral) sexual appetite. In other words, to perform the privileged, domestic gender role to which she aspires, she must prove her "femininity" by refraining from extramarital sex (indeed, from expressing sexual desire at all)--which, given her financial inability to obtain a divorce, condemns her to an entirely asexual young adulthood and, at the same time, precludes her from taking advantage of one available means of bettering her material condition quickly (that is, by having a man help sup(24) port her and Bub). Lutie is determined to prove herself capable of performing "femininity" and thus "worthy" of an identity as "woman." Yet the horror of having to bury her sexuality alive drives Lutie, on this evening, from her entombing apartment and into a social setting where she can be affirmed, if only for a few hours, in her sense of herself as a (potentially) sexual being.