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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

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White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

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 evidence 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.

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(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 representation of issues of gender and sexuality in relation to race and class--have rehearsed the connection between Petry and Wright to challenge or complicate it. See, e.g., Holladay's literary biography (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 critical 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 PMLA's "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 "offer[ing] 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 conventions of one such genre of popular fiction: the gothic (Botting 49).

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

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

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