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Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street
African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley
Indeed, Petry's deployment of the gothic trope of live burial reminds us that Lutie is her haunting double, in that it not only serves to register the horror enveloping Lutie, but also points toward another similarity--and instructive difference--between Petry and Lutie. The live burial trope, with its long associations with sexual repression, evokes the realm of sexuality without requiring explicit mention of the subject; that is, it enables Petry to signify the depth of Lutie's dilemma without having to refer to her overtly as a young woman with sexual desires.
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In 1946, it would likely have been important for Petry to be able to achieve this almost paradoxical effect. Kimberly Drake, among other scholars, has noted that, prior to the middle of the twentieth century, African American women writers rarely portrayed their black heroines as having an active sexuality (65). Such writers, in response to the very ideological constraints that plague Lutie in the novel, constructed their characters as "largely asexual" in order "to fight the Jezebel stereotype and to prove that black women could and did adhere to middle-class values" (Drake 65). (25) Thus Petry, as author, arguably confronted limitations upon her identity and self-expression deriving from the operation of domestic ideology's norms upon black women--limitations, in other words, with their source in the same assumptions against which Lutie must fight for her own complex sexual identity. As Drake observes: "Petry seems to want to challenge the literary repression of black female sexuality, yet she cannot explicitly celebrate [a] transgressive sexuality without offending bourgeois black readers and confirming stereotypes in the minds of white readers" (68). Significantly, however, Petry is able to negotiate her confrontation successfully, in that the gothic convention of live burial offers her a means of implicating Lutie's sexuality indirectly. Lutie, by contrast, can neither overcome her desire nor get around the boundary sealing off her sexuality (for it remains alive and buried). Her ultimate confrontation with this ideological dilemma results in her bludgeoning to death her sometime suitor and would-be rapist, the musician Boots Smith.
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