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

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

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.

In this light, Lutie's fixation on obtaining a normative home for Bub and herself crystallizes as both logical and futile. And it is at this paradoxical juncture, where some of the contradictions inherent to domestic ideology are made frighteningly manifest, that Lutie becomes susceptible to the dis-ease that I call "gothic homelessness." (16) "Home" is a word deeply invested with ideological meaning; unlike "house," "apartment,.... residence," or other such terms, "home" signifies not simply lodgings, but also safety, belonging, comfort. The term signifies similarly at both the local, literal level and larger, figurative levels (especially, for the purposes of this essay, at the national level). A "home" is a "haven" from the world, precisely because its boundaries ostensibly separate the "family"--those who belong inside--from outsiders, strangers, foreigners. These boundaries are highly desirable to those they include because they offer the illusion of fixity and impenetrability. To those they exclude, these boundaries seem impenetrable because of their lack of fixity, their shiftiness. For instance, America is thought of as the national "home" of its citizens, who are protected within its boundaries from the dangers of the world. The response of many Americans to the events of September 11, 2001, is evidence of how widely and strongly held was/is this belief in the invulnerability of the nation's "domestic" boundaries. But the subsequent experiences of Arab and/or Muslim Americans have demonstrated that US citizenship is insufficient to guarantee that the boundaries of the national "home" will include them. These Americans have not been "safe" or "protected" within the national borders; indeed, they have seen these borders shift so that they may be treated like "outsiders" in their own "home." (17) The "national" borders no longer appear contiguous with citizenship, but are exposed as signifying not nationality so much as a range of other possible identities, including religion, geopolitical origin, and "racial" phenotype. Lutie's experience of being made to feel unsafe in or foreign to her own "home"--of being figuratively "homeless"--is analogous.