The Triumph of Naturalism

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SOURCE: “The Triumph of Naturalism,” in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bernard W. Bell, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 178–183.

[In the following excerpt from a chapter entitled “Richard Wright and the Triumph of Naturalism” in his full-length study of the history of the African-American novel, Bell claims that Petry moves beyond the naturalism of Wright and Chester Himes to debunk myths about African-Americans and American culture.]

The setting and themes of Ann Petry's novels are a natural outgrowth of her intimacy with the black inner-city life of New York and the white small-town life of New England. Born in 1911 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Petry grew up in a predominantly white environment and, in the family tradition, graduated in 1934 with a degree in pharmacy from the University of Connecticut. After working in the family drugstores in Old Saybrook and the nearby town of Lyme, she married in 1938 and moved to New York to work and pursue her childhood interests in writing. From 1938 to 1944 she worked as a journalist for two Harlem newspapers: Amsterdam News and People's Voice. In 1943 her short stories began appearing in The Crisis and Phylon. The early chapters of The Street won her the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1945. In 1948 she returned to Connecticut to raise her family and continue writing. Her publications include four children's books, a collection of short stories, and three novels: The Street, Country Place, and The Narrows. The novels reveal her movement from a naturalistic vision of the big city to a demythologizing of black and white relations in small-town America.

The Street is a conventional novel of economic determinism in which the environment is the dominant force against which the characters must struggle to survive. The novel opens symbolically in November 1944 with the wind, cold, dirt, and filth of 116th Street overpowering the hurried Harlem pedestrians, including the apartment-hunting protagonist, Lutie Johnson. It closes with Lutie's leaving the city by train after killing the man who assaults her, the snow falling symbolically, “gently obscuring the grime and garbage and the ugliness” of the street. As the plot progresses episodically, we see that it was “streets like 116th Street or being colored, or a combination of both with all it implied” that drove the protagonist's father to drink, her mother to an early grave, and the neighbors to various forms of desperation and death.1 Lutie Johnson was determined that none of these things would happen to her, but her will to succeed is ineffectual against relentless economic, racist, and sexist forces that had walled her in an ever-narrowing space since birth. Far from being an accident, we learn through the narrator's probing into Lutie's mind, these forces “were the North's mob … the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place” (p. 200).

Unlike [Richard] Wright's and [Chester] Himes's male protagonists, Lutie Johnson is neither psychologically tormented nor driven by a fear of white people. Raised by her tale-telling, puritan-minded grandmother, she is a respectable, married woman, driven by hunger for a better life and a place to be somebody. She seeks to satisfy this hunger by naively subscribing to the Protestant ethic and the American Dream as expressed by the Chandlers, a wealthy white New England family for whom she worked for two years as a live-in maid, and as embodied in Benjamin Franklin, with whom she compares herself. Ignoring her own social reality—she is a working-class black woman with an eight-year-old son to support; separated from her unfaithful, unemployed husband; living in Harlem during World War II; struggling to maintain her moral principles and to share equally in the wealth of the nation—she fantasizes “that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she” (p. 44). In blind pursuit of the American Dream, Lutie loses her family and her hope for happiness, but not her self-respect. When she fails to get the singing job she had counted on to move off 116th Street and up the ladder of success, social reality begins to displace her dream world. “The trouble was with her,” she concludes. “She had built up a fantastic structure made from the soft, nebulous, cloudy stuff of dream. There hadn't been a solid, practical brick in it, not even a foundation. She had built it up of air and vapor and moved right in. So of course it had collapsed. It had never existed anywhere but in her mind” (p. 191). Ann Petry's naturalistic delineation of her protagonist and use of symbols of confinement, as well as contrasting images of the white world of Lyme, Connecticut, and the black world of Harlem thus demythologize both American culture and Afro-American character.

The story is told by a disembodied third-person omniscient narrator, but Petry allows Lutie's consciousness to dominate the narrative and generally avoids moralizing. The action and setting are subordinated to Lutie's impression of their impact on black women, who unrepresentatively have no contact with the black church. Except for the denouement, whose sensationalism some critics consider a serious weakness,2 the author-narrator explores the social evils of segregated communities, white and black, with restraint and objectivity. But it is clear that neither Petry nor her protagonist simplistically blames black men for the broken homes, poverty, and hopelessness that characterizes too many urban black communties. Although they share some of the responsibility, the root of these social problems is not black men like her alcoholic father and adulterous husband, nor black women like Mrs. Hedges, the whorehouse madam, but white people like Junto, the vice lord, and the Chandlers, whose power and privilege are based on the economic and racial exploitation of blacks. If it is impossible to escape the agony and desperation of the black inner city, it is equally impossible, as the Chandlers reveal, to escape the delusions and degeneracy of small white towns.

In Country Place Petry moves beyond economic and racial determinism to explore the realities beneath the myths of rural, small-town communities. In contrast to traditional stories and images of the beneficence, continuity, integrity, and homogeneity of values in small, rural communities, her narrative reveals the hypocrisy, violence, prejudice, and stagnation of Lennox, Connecticut, shortly after World War II. Country Place is a first-person, retrospective narrative with the town druggist as an on-the-scene chronicler of the “untoward events” in the lives of the Grambys and Roanes. Because the major characters are white, and because time and place are more important thematically than color and class, it is not as relevant, however, to our theory of a distinctive Afro-American narrative tradition as The Street and The Narrows, her third and best-wrought novel.

In The Narrows Petry moves even further beyond economic determinism as she continues to explore the impact of time and place on the shaping of character. This time the setting is the black community in Monmouth, Connecticut, another small, typically provincial, white New England town, during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt for Communists in the State Department. The red neon signs on Dumble Street tell the story of its change; we learn through septuagenarian Abigail Church's reverie that

it was now, despite its spurious early-morning beauty, a street so famous, or so infamous, that the people who lived in Monmouth rarely ever referred to it, or the streets near it, by name; it had become an area, a section, known variously as The Narrows, Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown—because Negroes had replaced those other earlier immigrants, the Irish, the Italians and the Poles.3

Petry's fine craftsmanship is immediately apparent in the compelling manner that the structure, style, and theme of the narrative fuse as Abbie reflects on what in addition to the color and class hatred in the world has brutalized her adopted son Lincoln “Link” Williams, the protagonist. “In Link's case—well, if they hadn't lived on Dumble Street, if the Major had lived longer, if Link had been their own child instead of an adopted child, if she hadn't forgotten about him when he was eight, simply forgotten his existence, if she hadn't had to figure so closely with the little money that she had … and eke it out with the small sums she earned by sewing, embroidering, making jelly. If” (pp. 13-14).

The theme, simply stated, is that our lives are shaped as much by contingency as they are by time and place. “On how peculiar, and accidental, a foundation rests all of one's attitudes toward a people. …” Abbie thinks. “Frances hears the word Irish and thinks of a cathedral and the quiet of it, the flickering light of the votive candles, the magnificence of the altar, and I see Irishwomen, strong in their faith, holding a family together. Accident? Coincidence? It all depended on what happened in the past. We carry it around with us. We're never rid of it” (pp. 253-56). This theme is developed in the main plot—the love affair between Link, a black orphan and Dartmouth graduate, and Camilio Williams, the internationally known heiress to the wealth and power of Monmouth's most prominent white family, the Treadways—and the several tributary subplots. The movement of the main plot is more psychological than chronological, for its pace is frequently interrupted by digressions and flashbacks to Link's childhood. The meeting of the couple in the Narrows, their falling in love, the discovery that she is rich and married, his rejection of her for betraying his trust and using him as a black stud, her revenge by claiming he attempted to rape her and thus appealing to traditional color and class prejudice—all are influenced by chance and the historical past. The weight of the contingency of their lives and the history of American racism and New England hypocrisy are too heavy a burden for Link and Camilio's love to survive. For breaking the American tribal taboo, Link is murdered by Camilio's mother and husband.

Link, as his name suggests, is the major connection between the past and the present, the white world and the black, the rich and the poor; and it is his consciousness that dominates the third-person omniscient point of view that shifts from character to character. Adopted when he was eight by Abbie and Major Crunch, and having grown up in Monmouth, Link, at twenty-six, has lost faith in himself, other people, and his control over life. Most of the plot unfolds in his and Abbie's minds. His interior monologues, reveries, and flashbacks and those of the other characters weave a gossamer, impressionistic pattern of events that illuminate his double-consciousness and suggest why he is content to be a bartender at the Last Chance although he was a star athlete and Phi Beta Kappa student at Dartmouth, where he majored in history. Kidnapped at the end of the novel by Camilio's mother and husband, Link remembers the sensational front-page pictures of a drunk Camilio and an escaped black convict in the Narrows under headlines that inflamed historical color and class hatred by luridly portraying the black community as the breeding ground for crime and criminals: “So it was Jubine Lautrec's Harlot and The Convict by Anonymous that got me in this black Packard. That is one-quarter of the explanation. The other three-quarters reaches back to that Dutch man of Warre that landed in Jamestown in 1619” (p. 399).

The frequency, length, and occasional remoteness to the events at hand of the digressions and flashbacks give complexity to the characters but annoyingly impede the progress of the plot, and emotionally and psychologically distance the reader from the tragedy of the central character. This is most apparent in the denouement when Link is kidnapped and murdered. Equally passive but more strikingly individualized are Abbie and some of the minor characters. Abbie, a black New England puritan, is an old widow who is driven by an ambivalence about black people and an obsession with aristocratic values. Major, her dead husband, was a robust, sensitive mountain of a man who used to tell stories about the legendary members of his family, whom he affectionately called “swamp niggers.” Jubine, the “recording angel” of Monmouth, is a man with a deep compassion for “the poor peons” like himself, a man “who spent a lifetime photographing a river, and thus recorded the life of man in the twentieth century. For the first time” (pp. 43-44). Malcolm Powther, a black Judas, is a pompous, worshipful servant to rich white people, whose values he embraces, and to his sensual, promiscuous wife, whom he fears will leave him for another man. And Peter Bullock, the unprincipled owner and publisher of the Monmouth Chronicle, which has been transformed over the years from an antislavery newspaper into an antiblack tool of the white ruling class, is a slave to custom, to a house, to a car, to ulcers, and to the major advertisers in his paper, especially the Treadwell family. Petry's use of symbolic characters like Cesar the Writing Man, the wandering poet who scribbles biblical verses on the sidewalk of Monmouth, is also dramatically effective. Early in the novel Cesar gives philosophical resonance to the characters, plot, and theme when he writes the following passage from Eccles. 1:10 in front of the cafe where Camilio and Link rendezvous: “Is there anything where of it may be said, See this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us” (p. 91).

Petry, like Himes and Wright, is adept at character delineation, but her protagonists are cut from a different cloth than those of her major contemporaries. In contrast to the pathology of a Bigger Thomas or Bob Jones or Lee Gordon, Lutie Johnson and Link Williams are intelligent, commonplace, middle-class aspiring blacks, who, despite the socialized ambivalence resulting from racism and economic exploitation, are not consumed by fear, hatred, and rage. Petry's vision of black personality is not only different from that of Himes and Wright, it is also more faithful to the complexities and varieties of black women, whether they are big city characters like Mrs. Hedges in The Street or small-town characters like Abbie Crunch in The Narrows. Ann Petry thus moves beyond the naturalistic vision of Himes and Wright to a demythologizing of American culture and Afro-American character. This is her most invaluable achievement in the tradition of the Afro-American novel.

Notes

  1. Ann Petry, The Street (1946; rpt. New York: Pyramid, 1961), p. 40. Subsequent references to this novel will be in the text.

  2. See Schraufnagel, From Apology to Protest, p. 42; and Bone, Negro Novel, p. 185.

  3. Ann Petry, The Narrows (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 5. Subsequent references to this novel will be in the text.

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