Content provided in partnership with
Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street
African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley
Petry's augmentation of the traditional psychological association between "live burial" and repressed sexuality demands a socially and historically contextualized reading of the trope. Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, a cultural study of the ideological battles faced by African American women at the turn into the twentieth century, facilitates this contextualization. Carby notes that "the cult of true womanhood" demanded that even married women "repress all overt sexuality," because "'purity denied that [white] women had natural sex drives' "; by contrast, "overt sexuality ... emerged in images of the black woman" (26-27). That such relational, racialized constructions of femininity continued to hold sway throughout the twentieth century has been documented by race and gender theorists. (11) Thus, Lutie's aspiration to a normative home life depends upon her ability to remain conventionally asexual--in accordance with the standards for a (white) "lady"--in a society that constructs her "black" female body as inherently sexually deviant and excessive. Such contradictions, marked by the appearance of gothic tropes, can be understood as the terrifying collision of competing ideological norms at the intersection of Lutie's race, gender, class, national and sexual identities. By reading The Street in light of these gothic conventions, we can appreciate how Petry makes an aesthetic choice inform on a cultural phenomenon. That is, by reading Lutie Johnson's experiences as a tale of "gothic homelessness," we can better appreciate Petry's critique of the sinister manner in which the norms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality are manipulated by the powerful to maintain the status quo. This reading of Lutie's consistent condition of "live burial" teaches us that life within the ideological (and material) confines of her social position is as much a prison as the one she risks entering when she finally commits murder in defense of her chosen sexual identity.
- More Articles of Interest
- Rethinking realism in Ann Petry's The Street - Critical Essay
- White family values in Ann Petry's Country Place
- Jeff Abernathy. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel
- New women and new negroes: archetypal womanhood in The Living Is Easy
- Slavery, labor reform, and intertextuality in antebellum print culture: the...
The Street opens with Lutie's search for a home where she and eight-year-old Bub can live safely and peacefully alone. We soon learn that the apartment they now share with her father, his girlfriend, and a number of roomers is unacceptable because her son is too much exposed to vice: her father's girlfriend, in particular, gives him beer, puffs of her cigarettes, and glimpses of her ample bosom through the always unbuttoned opening of her housecoat. We learn in subsequent chapters that Lutie lost the little house where she had once lived in a conventional nuclear unit with her son and husband when her husband's adultery precipitated a permanent separation (in lieu of a prohibitively expensive divorce). Lutie's (American) dream of the good life centers around the Eden of a single-family home "filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe" (155), the kind of residence that domestic ideology constructs as the proof and reward of virtue.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »