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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
Domestic ideology, often associated with the middle classes of Victorian England, is commonly and vaguely associated with the maxim that locates the woman's place in the home, maintaining a clean, orderly, comfortable house for her family. (12) But this ideology's prescriptions encompass more than just middle-class women, and its prescriptive reach extends far beyond its originary era and locale, still exerting social force in present-day America. After all, the creation of a "home, sweet home" depends not only upon women playing a designated social role as nesters and nurturers, but also upon men and children behaving in accordance with their roles: men as loving but firm patriarchs and breadwinners, and children as dutiful, obedient little men- and women-in-training. When proponents of domestic ideology insist that these social roles are "natural," they overlook the way that numerous positive and negative incentives continually work to encourage conformance to these behavioral limitations (McClintock 35-36). For instance, girls who express distaste for housework may be warned that they will be seen as less desirable marriage partners, and the words "spinster" and "old maid" still threaten young women with the stigma associated with not marrying male partners. Not only are these familial roles naturalized (that is, made to seem biologically determined and inevitable--"human nature"), but they are also metaphorically transferred and imposed upon all kinds of social organizations--schools, clubs, even nations--with all their hierarchical baggage intact. Thus, for example, "Founding Fathers" are "naturally" the ones to make decisions about how a nation is to be governed, while women (as teachers, nurses, and homemakers, "naturally") serve as the "mothers of our country" by (re)producing and raising the next generation of its citizenry. (13)
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Moreover, those who stand to benefit from it would claim that the rhetorical logic underwriting the ideological narrative of "the happy home" is universally applicable; however, this "universality" unevenly masks the fact that domestic ideology's network of norms justifies the retention of power by the powerful and perpetuates the exclusion of the relatively disempowered from access to social, economic, and political resources. For instance, wealthier women are not able to manage large households and families without domestic "help"; the poor women--typically women of color and/or immigrants--who work as maids and cooks in wealthy households are, then, by definition unable to fulfill the normative role of wife and mother in their own households. (14) We see this scenario played out in Lutie's narrative: her New York home and her marriage disintegrate while she is working in Connecticut as a live-in maid for the well-to-do Chandler family. In another example, on the figurative level, "civilized" western nations, including England and the US, take the (parental/paternal) responsibility for "developing" the "primitive" countries of the global South and "raising" their "childlike" peoples (McClintock 357-58). People of color, poor people, women, "Third World" people, and members of other relatively disempowered groups must fulfill their naturalized, but far from ideal social roles for the current economic and political systems to be sustained--even as the members of these groups are nonetheless measured against the idealized norms of domestic ideology, to their disadvantage. (15) One example of this paradox, which Petry illustrates through Lutie's story, is that African American women have been denigrated as "unwomanly" for not being fulltime homemakers and child-rearers, even as they were deemed by middleclass white women to be "naturally" skilled at doing the (womanly) cooking, cleaning, and caretaking chores they were paid to perform in white homes.
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