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

Petry's recourse to the gothic should not surprise readers of her autobiography who note this remembrance: "I was eleven years old when I read Wilkie Collins's Moonstone--that intricately plotted story about the theft of an enormous yellow diamond ... from the head of an idol known as the moon-god.... The Moonstone served as my introduction to the world of books written for adults and it turned me into an omnivorous reader" (Petry, "Ann Petry" 254). The prolific Collins's sensational, gothic novels place him among the foremost 19m-century English writers in the genre. Her ongoing appreciation of this style in Collins's work suggests the likelihood that, by the time she began writing fiction seriously, Petry was steeped in works that, like much of her adult fiction, borrowed heavily from the conventions of the gothic and other genres of melodrama and excess. Her first published story, "Marie of the Cabin Club," shows the clear influence of such fantastic texts as The Moonstone upon Petry's writing: in addition to publishing under an assumed name (a tactic not uncommon to gothic writers), she included a near-stabbing, international espionage, a kidnapping, and a romance troubled by an unspeakable secret, all within less than five long newspaper columns (Petry, "Marie" 248-49). (5) Petry's autobiography and interviews also reveal that she generally used autobiographical detail in constructing her characters and plots--one example being the way she "endowed" the protagonist of The Narrows, a later novel with her experience of seeing a movie for the first time (Petry, "Ann Petry" 266-67; Petry, "Visit" 83). Taken together, such biographical evidence invites a reading of Petry's relationship to the heroine she created through the gothic convention of the doppelganger. The next few paragraphs enact such a reading and begin to outline its payoff.

Ann Petry grew up during the early twentieth century as a member of virtually the only African American family in the quiet, little town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Though even this place constituted a racially "hostile environment," through determined collective effort, Petry's family was largely able to shelter her youth from the brutal racism that has defined the collective experience of African Americans in this nation (Petry, "Ann Petry" 257; Petry, "Visit" 79; Holladay 9). Sexism, too, was unfamiliar to the young Petry in some of its most stifling forms; her mother and aunts were educated businesswomen who, whether married or not, "refused to be traditional housewives" (Petry, "Interview" 100). Her parents imbued her and her sister with a belief in New England's traditional Puritan values of "efficiency, thrift, and utility" and taught them that the "early to bed, early to rise" discipline of Benjamin Franklin would work for them as well as for any other person (Holladay 7; Petry, "Ann Petry" 262). Petry put these values into practice. She had earned her degree from the Connecticut College of Pharmacy, become a licensed pharmacist (following the examples of her father and aunt), and worked in the family's drugstores for seven years before she married and moved with her husband to New York. It was then that she was confronted with Harlem and learned, "with mixed feelings of hope and horror," what race and gender more typically meant for African Americans (Holladay 9). The inescapable poverty; the attendant limitations on employment, educational, and residential opportunities; the degradation of interpersonal relationships; the temptations to crime and the fear of it: these characteristic conditions under which too many African Americans were living in the urban north came as a shock to Petry, calling into question much of what she had been taught about herself and her place in the world. (6)