Creative Prejudice in Ann Petry's Miss Muriel
[In the following essay, Holladay suggests that the social prejudices seen in the suitors in “Miss Muriel” may actually act as creative forces in a world in which various forms of prejudice create people's social milieu.]
In Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971), Ann Petry reveals her continuing fascination with the way people are shaped by the company they keep. Although these stories were originally published over a long period of time (from the 1940s to 1971) they cohere geographically and thematically.1 All of the works take place in New York or New England, and, while taking up a multiplicity of perspectives, they share a preoccupation with race, gender, and class, among other characteristics that often incite prejudice. But Petry's stories, like her novels (The Street, 1946; Country Place, 1947; and The Narrows, 1953), refuse to settle for easy truths. They do not moralize, and they do not avoid showing minority characters who inflict pain as well as suffer from it. For Petry, prejudice in all its permutations is finally a creative as well as destructive force. In Miss Muriel, individuals, their relationships with others, and their communities are clearly formed by human bias, not just harmed by it.
Three of the collection's 13 stories are set in and around a drugstore in the fictional village of Wheeling, New York. The Wheeling drugstore stories—“Miss Muriel,” “The New Mirror,” and “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?”—draw on Petry's experience as an African American growing up in the small resort town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut.2 There is a great deal of realistic description of Wheeling's shops, streets, and geographic location, and the family that appears in these stories has much in common with Petry's own. The stories, like the town they portray, are multifaceted and defy easy categorization.
The 57-page title story is the collection's longest, and it introduces the volume's wide-angle focus on prejudice. First published in 1963, “Miss Muriel” concerns prejudice in a small community, but it is not limited to one particular strand of human bias. Instead, the story illustrates how numerous prejudices—of race, gender, sexual orientation, and age, to name a few—coexist and paradoxically create the very community that they threaten to destroy.
For the narrator of this complicated tale, Petry makes a seemingly ingenuous selection: a 12-year-old girl. Like Petry (born in 1908), the narrator grows up in the early twentieth century, the daughter of middle-class African American parents who run the local pharmacy. There, the girl overhears conversations that fuel her imagination and influence her notions of adulthood. Also like Petry, whose novels make frequent use of multiple perspectives, this character is acutely aware of people's shifting attitudes toward each other. Petry does more than draw on her own background and personality, however. Through the persona of a 12-year-old, she succeeds in defamiliarizing adult biases and assumptions. In “Miss Muriel,” the grownups appear enigmatic, comical, evasive, defensive, and flawed. We begin to see that their (or, more precisely, our) assumptions about each other do not have fixed boundaries; prejudice is rarely a clear-cut matter of sexism, racism, or any other “ism.”
Although “Miss Muriel” is never explicitly identified as a diary, the story takes that form in its loosely episodic, ostensibly artless progression. Like a diarist, the narrator records events shortly after they happen. This format creates a compelling immediacy and accommodates the speaker's struggle to understand the nuances of her own story. When her young, beautiful aunt, who lives with the family, becomes the object of male attention, the narrator can neither forestall nor fully comprehend the conflicts at work within her community, her family, and herself. She can almost (but not quite) see the convoluted interactions among her family members and acquaintances as a forewarning of what her own future holds.
On the verge of adolescence, the narrator is understandably fascinated by her aunt's love life. She takes an active interest in Sophronia's three suitors, Mr. Bemish, Chink Johnson, and Dottle Smith. Her detailed descriptions reveal that each man believes that he has the right to invade the family's pharmacy/home and pursue Sophronia on her home turf. Although the three are very different from each other, they share the assumption that Sophronia is a pretty object rather than a person in her own right. Their rivalry shows how courtship can devolve into a conflict in which the pursued woman has little voice or power.
The suitors are themselves objects of prejudice, however. We learn from the narrator that the white shoemaker, Mr. Bemish, has at least two obvious strikes against him: his age and his race. His glass eye makes her feel “squeamish” (2), and the rhyme with Bemish sets the stage for an unsettling portrait of a distinctly undignified old man.3 The second suitor, Chink Johnson, is a tall, swaggering black man whose raffish appearance and undocumented past call his integrity into question. The opposite of the simpering Bemish, Chink is a blues pianist who has recently found work at the Wheeling Inn. The name “Chink” sounds hard and tough (far from the soft, yielding sound of “Bemish”), reflecting his aggressive demeanor. The name “Chink” is also an ethnic slur, possibly an indication that Chink Johnson is considered an outsider even among fellow blacks. Although the name is never explained, it is one more suggestion, among many in the story, that prejudice simultaneously creates and obfuscates individual identity. Sophronia's third suitor, Dottle Smith, appears to be parodying the other men's behavior rather than truly courting Sophronia. With his gender-neutral name, Dottle has characteristics stereotypically associated with gay men: He is an effusive, highly dramatic man with a penchant for reciting poetry, and his buttocks sway from side to side when he walks. More to the point, he has brought along young male companions on past visits, and the narrator knows that her father considers him unacceptably effeminate.
The narrator pays close attention to her father's reactions to all three men. Rather than merely report his objections to the suitors, she struggles to understand his views and to distinguish them from her own feelings. She knows that her father is prejudiced against Bemish's race and age, Chink's sexually suggestive music and lower-class status, and Dottle's mannerisms. The range and vehemence of his objections imply that he might well censure anyone interested in his sister-in-law. Although Sophronia is an adult capable of making her own choices, he is extremely protective of her. The narrator overhears an outburst he makes after chasing Bemish off the property:
“I can't leave this store for five minutes that I don't find one of these no-goods hangin' around when I come back. Not one of'em worth the powder and shot to blow 'em to hell and back. That piano player pawin' the ground and this old white man jumpin' up in the air, and that friend of Johno's, that poet or whatever he is, all he needs are some starched petticoats and a bonnet and he'd make a woman—he's practically one now—and he's tee-heein' around, and if they were all put together in one piece, it still wouldn't be a whole man.” My father shook his fist in the air and glared at Aunt Sophronia.
(47)
Angry and frustrated, he assumes that he has the right to pass judgment on his sister-in-law's suitors. Even his attempt to make amends with Sophronia spirals off into sordid fantasy:
“It's just that we're the only black people living in this little bit of town and there aren't any fine young black men around, only this tramp piano player, and every time I look at him I can hear him playing some rags and see a whole line of big-bosomed women done up in sequined dresses standin' over him, moanin' about wantin' somebody to turn their dampers down, and I can see poker games and crap games and—”
(48)
Significantly, it is the narrator's mother who, upon entering the room, finally squelches his tirade. She will not let her husband co-opt her sister's life, even if Sophronia herself is too timid to defend herself. But the mother cannot monitor the household at all times. That task seems to be left to the narrator, who writes, “I wonder what my mother would say if she knew how my father chased little Mr. Bemish out of his store” (48). With the privileged perspective of an eavesdropper, the narrator knows that her father is doing more than just talking about the suitors; he is playing an active role in the domestic drama.
Like the suitors, the father believes that he has the right to control Sophronia's destiny. He in effect enters into the rivalry with them. Moreover, his patriarchal interest in Sophronia's love life casts his sister-in-law in the role of a child, not much different from the narrator. Sophronia herself does not assert her right to run her own life. Although she does not reject the suitors outright merely because her brother-in-law wants her to, she does not tell her would-be protector to mind his own business, either. The object of everybody's scrutiny, she is a poignantly passive figure whose private liaisons become the stuff of public spectacle.
As the chronicler of Sophronia's courtship, the narrator is no less subjective than her father is. Her father's angry reactions and her own emerging prejudices inevitably influence her views of Bemish, Chink, and Dottle. Even as she proclaims her affection for them, her contact with the three men reveals strong feelings of ambivalence. In regard to Mr. Bemish, for example, she must confront both her own and his prejudices about age. Convinced that he is condescending to her because she is a child, she chastises the old man for calling her “girlie” instead of addressing her by name (3). Then, when Bemish claims he is too old to remember all the neighborhood children's names, she responds, deadpan: “Does the past seem more real to you than the present” (3). Although she is many years his junior, the narrator treats Mr. Bemish as her equal or sometimes even as her inferior. She is too young to know—or perhaps too self-confident to care—that her behavior is impudent.
Bemish's behavior, however, does not exactly inspire respect from anyone. His undignified pursuit of Sophronia contains a distinct element of slapstick. In one doomed attempt to impress his beloved, he shows up at the pharmacy in formal attire and clicks his heels three times in the air. The narrator looks on in bemused fascination. When Mr. Bemish rashly proposes marriage to Sophronia, he addresses her as “girlie” just as he had earlier addressed the narrator (45). The brusque endearment suggests that Bemish, for all of his devotion, views Sophronia as a child. His misguided behavior prevents the narrator from completely sympathizing with him. Even at the end of the story, when she realizes that he desperately needs an ally—and she tells Chink and Dottle, “He's just a little old man and he's my friend and I'm going to help him” (55)—her attitude toward him evinces a mixture of pity, superiority, and cool-headed curiosity. Although she tries to reassure him that Chink and Dottle will not “sew” him up with his own thread, as they have threatened to do, she also pumps him for more information and wonders, “Sew up? Sew up what—eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, rectum?” (56). Her concern for the eccentric man reflects inquisitiveness as well as dismay. In losing Bemish, she will lose a source of endless fascination. She will also lose a crucial contact beyond the walls of the family pharmacy. His departure will diminish, if only by one person, her contact with the community of Wheeling.
The narrator's relationship with Chink is equally complex. His presence is far more powerful than Bemish's, so she cannot pull rank on him. Her relationship with him raises the issues of sexuality and male dominance. Chink's strong sexual presence is as intimidating as it is intriguing. At 12, the narrator cannot ignore either his virility or his disturbingly sensual music. His overt masculinity provides a bracing contrast to Bemish's asexual foolishness and Dottle Smith's effeminate mannerisms. The narrator seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in Chink's increasingly successful courtship of Sophronia:
Almost every afternoon he goes for a walk with Aunt Sophronia. I watch them when they leave the store. He walks so close to her that he seems to surround her, and he has his head bent so that his face is close to hers. Once I met them strolling up Petticoat Lane, his dark face so close to hers that his goat's beard was touching her smooth brown cheek.
(37-38)
Interestingly, this passage follows the narrator's own close encounter with Chink. Having failed to win the upper hand in conversation with him, the narrator suffers an angry rebuke from Chink and bursts into tears. He responds by kissing her cheek and explaining his anger. Rather than dwelling on her humiliation, the narrator notes that Chink “smelled like the pine woods, and I could see pine needles in his hair and in his beard, and I wondered if he and Aunt Sophronia had been in the woods” (37). No longer just a spectator, the narrator intuitively connects her experience with her aunt's. Like Sophronia, she seems to consider Chink the most viable of the three suitors.
Yet the narrator does not trust Chink. She decides that he “is not a gentleman” (27), and Chink's behavior seems to bear out this class distinction. As she and Sophronia watch in dismay one afternoon, Chink drives a wagon full of giddy young women into the woods, with one woman perched flirtatiously on his lap. To make matters worse, he is “singing a ribald song” (43). The virility that has beguiled both aunt and niece evidently has just as powerful an effect on other women, and Chink plays it for all it is worth. Although his race and class may have prevented him from achieving a high social status, his sex enables him to wield power over others. He does not hesitate to assert that power, regardless of how his behavior may be interpreted by Sophronia, the main object of his desire.
The narrator's view of Dottle Smith is influenced by her conviction that he is not romantically interested in her aunt. She considers his behavior a charade, a matter of going “through the motions” (40). In his self-appointed role as comically attentive beau, Dottle mocks both Chink and Mr. Bemish. Although the narrator does not come to such an explicit conclusion, she is able to distance herself sufficiently from Dottle to describe his maneuvers in detail:
He always calls her Miss Sophronia. If we are outdoors and she comes out to sit in the yard, he leaps to his feet, and bows and says, “Wait, wait. Befo' you sit on that bench, let me wipe it off,” and he pulls out an enormous linen handkerchief and wipes off the bench. He is always bowing and kissing her hand. (40-41)
Dottle's attentions to Sophronia seem too lavish, too theatrical, to be genuine. He may be making fun of the other men, but in doing so, he is also making fun of Sophronia. She is a pawn in his game, a means by which he parodies the courtship ritual.
Dottle's racial militance creates a further complication. The narrator observes that Dottle and her Uncle Johno are “what my father calls race-conscious” (31). Although both Dottle and Johno are light enough to pass as whites, they adamantly insist on their minority racial status. Dottle's stories and jokes reveal his preoccupation with race, and the narrator, struggling to understand her objections to Mr. Bemish's color, admits, “I believe that my attitude towards Mr. Bemish stems from Dottle Smith” (31). She is not convinced, however, that race alone is a sound basis for determining allies and enemies. The story's opening scene, in which she cheerfully describes her best friend, a white girl with whom she has much in common, indicates her relative freedom from racial prejudice. But from her observations of Dottle and Chink, she learns that race is of vast importance to adults—and that race relations are hopelessly entangled with relations between the sexes.
The narrator's own race consciousness receives a jolt when she gets caught in the middle of the adults' ever-smoldering, if never fully articulated, dialogue about race and sexuality. The trouble starts when she parrots one of Dottle's race-related jokes to Chink. Chink is not amused by the narrator's temerity or the joke's punch line-a white clerk insisting that a black customer ask for “Miss” Muriel cigars. Refusing to accept humor at a black man's expense, Chink brusquely tells the narrator, “It ought to be the other way around. A black man should be tellin' a white man, ‘White man, you see this picture of this beautiful black woman? White man, you say Miss Muriel!’” (37). Regardless of the race of the man delivering the inane put-down, the joke has a sexually charged subtext. “Muriel” is portrayed as an object, not a person, whose ownership will be decided by men. The bickering over courtesy titles—the crux of the joke—alludes to large issues of race relations and sexual politics. These are public issues that nevertheless determine the quality of personal relationships.
The dispute over the cardboard “Muriel” is analogous to Sophronia's situation. Pointedly addressed as “Miss” by Dottle, Sophronia is routinely treated as an object by all of her suitors. Though much observed, she is the story's least expressive character, and her boyfriends pay scant attention to her as they battle among themselves. Like “Muriel,” she is a possession whose ownership is up for grabs. Such a life may be fascinating for the young narrator to behold, but it also suggests that the narrator's own future may be proscribed by her relationships with men.
At the story's conclusion, Sophronia's suitors are put to a small but significant test of character. When a flock of bats suddenly enters the pharmacy, Dottle Smith flees the room, Chink Johnson strikes out at the bats violently but ineffectually, and Mr. Bemish embraces Sophronia and publicly declares his love for her. The arrival of the narrator's father, who “very sensibly held the door open” (51), ends the battle but not the war. Bemish's apparent success with Sophronia, who clutches him during the invasion of bats, subsequently causes Chink and Dottle to join forces against the frail old man and drive him away from town. Different as the two black men are, they are allied in their opposition to Bemish. Sophronia is a black woman, and they will not let a member of the “enemy” race consort with her any longer. For Dottle, expelling Bemish is primarily a matter of racial prejudice, while, for Chink, it is one of both racial and sexual dominance.
Chink and Dottle essentially act out the “Miss Muriel” joke as Chink prefers it: They deny a white man access to a black woman, whom they claim as their own property. The story ends abruptly with the narrator's angry reaction to their vigilante justice: “You both stink. You stink like dead bats. You and your goddamn Miss Muriel—” (57). She is no longer a child on the sidelines but a disillusioned young adult witnessing prejudice, both racial and sexual, in action. Her use of invective suggests not only her anger and frustration but also her emancipation from childhood. By passing judgment on Chink and Dottle, however, she implicates herself: Now she, too, is caught up in the confusing, prejudiced morass of adult relationships.
Bemish's expulsion means one less rival for Sophronia's hand, but his departure hardly solves the social problems deeply embedded in this small community and, by extension, the whole society. Prejudices based on race, gender, sexual preference, and age will continue to flourish in Wheeling, since all of the remaining characters seem to have at least one damning strike against them. There is no guarantee of social acceptance for anyone, not even the narrator, who seems so confident at the story's beginning. They are all at risk, all potential objects of expulsion like Mr. Bemish.
But “Miss Muriel” does not condemn Wheeling for the narrow-minded views its residents have of each other. Instead, the story shows that one form of prejudice rarely exists in isolation from other forms. As “The New Mirror” and “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” also suggest in their portrayals of the town, the community's identity stems from its complex mix of prejudices rather than the citizens' stand on a single issue of race, gender, sexuality, or age. The very tensions that polarize the community also paradoxically keep the townspeople engaged in an endless debate with each other. “Miss Muriel” illustrates the ways in which prejudice, though often seen as a purely destructive force, also creates the social environment in which people live and die.
Notes
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Isaacs and Washington provide useful introductions to Petry's short fiction.
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For an overview of Petry's life and work, see Mobley. For biographical insights into the drugstore stories, see Petry's own essay, “Ann Petry.”
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Parenthetical page numbers refer to Miss Muriel and Other Stories.
Works Cited
Isaacs, Diane Scharfeld. Ann Petry's Life and Art: Piercing Stereotypes. Unpublished dissertation. Columbia University Teachers College, 1982.
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “Ann Petry.” African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Scribner's. 347-59.
Petry, Ann. “Ann Petry.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Ed. Adele Sarkissian. 6. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 253-69.
———. Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Boston: Beacon, 1989.
Washington, Gladys. “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry's Short Fiction.” CLA Journal. 30.1 (September 1986): 14-29.
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