SOURCE: “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion,” in African-American Review, Vol. 26, Fall, 1992, pp. 495–505.

I

The “American Dream” has been a prominent subject in American literature, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Miller—all of these writers have depicted characters in search of the utopian dream, few of whom find it. Their African-American counterparts' variation on this mythic search has followed a similar pattern in that their characters have also sought psychological and material fulfillment—a fact making Ralph Ellison's declaration that “the values of my own people are neither ‘white’ nor ‘black,’ they are American” (Shadow and Act 270) particularly resonant. But unlike Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, men whose demons are internal, most black protagonists prior to the 1960s have faced “flesh-and-blood” demons. Black Bigger Thomas differs substantially from white Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, for the race and class of the black character preclude even marginal access to the Dream and its attendant creature comforts. At least prior to the Civil Rights Movement, then, “Lift yourself up by your bootstraps” rang as a specious aphorism, since typical black protagonists in protest fiction neither owned the bootstraps nor had access to the means of acquiring them.

While something of an anachronism in the 1990s, the African-American protest novel of the 1940s and 1950s maintained a symbiotic relationship with the mythic American Dream: It decried a history of American racism which made achieving the Dream a chimera for blacks. While Richard Wright is considered the “father” of the genre, and Native Son (1940) its quintessential document, Ann Petry emerged as another strident voice—a progenitor or native daughter. While her novel The Narrows (1953) deviated somewhat, it nevertheless continued the Wrightian tradition. Link Williams, the protagonist, differs superficially from Bigger in that he has attained a Dartmouth education and enjoys relative freedom from economic hardships; it would appear that he has the means to acquire the bootstraps over which Bigger can only ruminate. However, Link's “success” cannot shield him in an America which insists upon his inhumanity. When he breaks the taboos of class and race by having an affair with a white New England heiress, his violent murder becomes ritual—an inexorable response to a black stepping out of his “place.” While Petry's “New England” novel echoes Native Son thematically, more ostensibly it also foregrounds the black male as the victim of an America which denies African-Americans their very personhood. But in The Street (1946), Petry recasts the Herculean quest for the American Dream in an unequivocally female context. Indeed, the novel represents the “distaff” side of the African-American literary tradition, emerging as a groundbreaking work in its examination of the black woman's pursuit of happiness. Not only does Petry depict how women pursue the Dream in traditionally “American” terms, but, more deftly, she illustrates how black women subvert the quest for the American Dream and fulfill their own version of it.

II

Given the spurious nature of the American Dream, one would assume that the African-American writer would vigorously expose its shortcomings—for instance, the myopic measuring of “success” in monetary and material terms. But the tendency has not been so much to attack the Dream as to protest whites' insistence on treating blacks as outsiders and interlopers. Indeed, the hue and cry of the Biggers and the Walter Lee Youngers emanate from their staunch loyalty to the hallowed Constitution, which stipulates that “all men are created equal”; they cry only because they want their slice of the pie. As Richard Yarborough points out, “Despite severe disappointments, … Afro-Americans have generally been among the most fervent believers in the American Dream” (33).

Lutie Johnson, the protagonist in The Street, embodies the female version of the archetypal quest. Patterning her life after Benjamin Franklin's, Lutie embarks on an expedition she hopes will bestow the trappings of success upon herself and Bub, her eight-year-old son. However, Lutie's odyssey from Jamaica, New York, to Lyme, Connecticut, to Harlem bestows upon her little more than disillusionment. Ultimately, what Calvin Hernton calls the “three isms” (65)—racism, capitalism, and sexism—launch an implacable assault on Lutie, precipitating the novel's tragic conclusion.

While it would be tempting to view the novel as a treatise on how men, black and white, collude to destroy the All-American black girl, Petry's text discourages this sort of naturalistic preoccupation with character as subject and object. Instead, one might view this seminal examination of the black woman's search for the Dream as a mosaic—much like Alice Walker's tropological quilt—that includes other women, other stories, and other voices. In addition to presenting Lutie and her blind adherence to American values, Petry depicts two black female characters who circumvent the quest: Mrs. Hedges, who operates a bordello in the apartment building where Lutie lives and who also oversees the day-to-day events on “the street,” and Min, the downtrodden and subservient companion of William Jones, the building superintendent.

Far from being minor characters, Mrs. Hedges and Min embody what I see as a history of black women subverting the vacuous Dream myth through an almost innate ability to secure their own space despite the twin scourges of racism and sexism.¹ Existing in a milieu where the Dream's core assumptions belie their lived realities, these black women undermine the myth, altering it to ensure both economic survival and varying degrees of emotional stability. And because “traditional” principles have been the bane of black people since America's inception, questions involving the “morality” of how these women survive become ancillary ones given their predatory, hostile environment.

Superficially, Mrs. Hedges and Min adhere to the ideals of “hard work” and “ingenuity” in a country where “anything is possible.” However, these women more accuratley replicate techniques used by such archetypal African-American trickster figures as Charles Chesnutt's Uncle Julius or black folklore's Peetie Wheatstraw in (re)inventing lives independent of the white American Dream. While denied opulent lifestyles and material objects, Petry's “minor” women attain life's basic necessities, and, given their tenuous existences, they (re)construct their own “dream” by tapping into a tradition of what Peter Wheatstraw in Invisible Man calls “‘shit, grit and mother-wit’” (176). Thus, The Street transcends the boundaries of the “roman-à-thèse,” the thesis presumably being that white racism extinguishes all black hope.² The denizens of Petry's Harlem face a world more Darwinian than Franklinian, and they act according to their individual circumstances.

Clearly, Lutie Johnson's plight serves as the novel's primary concern, for Petry privileges her in terms of narrative space and point of view. A literary relative of black maids such as William Faulkner's Dilsey Gibson and Toni Morrison's Pauline Breedlove, both of whom worship their white employers, Lutie epitomizes mimetic desire: She deifies her white employers, the Chandlers, as living proof that, with a lot of hard work, the Dream can become reality. One of Susan Willis's observations is apropos here:

The situation for the black woman was somewhat different [from that of the black man]. Usually employed as a maid and therefore only marginally incorporated as a wage laborer, her alienation was the result of striving to achieve the white bourgeois social model (in which she worked but did not live) which is itself produced by the system of wage labor under capitalism.

(265)³

The converted Lutie buys into the Chandlers' “new philosophy” about being “filthy” rich and about America's being the “richest damn country in the world” (32). In Lutie's new “religion” she will become a disciple of the father of such declarations, Benjamin Franklin. But after several harrowing experiences, Lutie ultimately realizes, albeit too late, what the “Emersonian” Invisible Man must also face: Hackneyed beliefs based on a prescription of “hard work” and “self-reliance” are not panaceas for black folks. However, by allowing Mrs. Hedges and Min into Lutie's narrative space, Petry deftly depicts how black women (re)configure the mythic American quest for economic and emotional security.

Perhaps more indicative of the type of “pioneering” spirit that fails Lutie is Mrs. Hedges, who runs a brothel in the apartment building. Indeed, her history resembles a Horatio Alger “rags-to-riches” fable. Having undertaken what has become the black character's archetypal movement, from the South to the North, Mrs. Hedges overcomes a hand-to-mouth existence of scavenging for food in garbage cans. Most assuredly, she has encountered economic hardships more caustic than Lutie's.

Petry portrays Mrs. Hedges as relying on “ingenuity,” a basic ingredient in the American Dream formula—or what blacks might call mother wit. Upon encountering the white man Junto (who will eventually wield immense control over the lives of band leader Boots Smith and Lutie), Mrs. Hedges brings to their relationship an acumen for business and entrepreneurship. First, she encourages him to expand his “business”; he is a “pushcart” man, collecting bottles and other refuse to exchange for money: “It was she who suggested that he branch out, get other pushcarts and other men to work for him” (152). Mrs. Hedges's association with Junto eventually pays further dividends, as he gives her “the job of janitor and collector of rents” (traditionally male occupations) when he acquires some tenements in Harlem. Their collaborative efforts culminate in a thriving prostitution business, the brainchild of a woman who has mastered the rudiments of supply and demand.

On the surface, Petry's depiction of Mrs. Hedges might represent the author's disdain for a society that would reward “vice.” If this were the case, Petry would be echoing sociologist Horace R. Cayton's excoriation of the Dream:

We have embraced and are the victims of a configuration of shoddy values, the “get-rich-quick” compulsion, and our surrender to the bitch goddess of material success. Our emphasis is on sex for gratification rather than deep organic emotional expression, experience and communication … and [we are] unable to rid ourselves of an archaic economic system that defies all laws of logic, humanity and downright common sense. [Yet] this is the most bountiful country in the world; a country birthed in principles both noble and bold, familiarized to us all as the American Dream.

(41)

In this context Mrs. Hedges would symbolize capitalism gone awry. However, that Mrs. Hedges immediately exploits her “chance” meeting with Junto demonstrates that she recognizes the locus of power—the white male. Because she has experienced racism and sexism and their attendant hardships firsthand, Mrs. Hedges's actions become laudable, a prime example of what Booker T. Washington would call casting down one's bucket. She understands the patriarchal system and thus subverts it by accepting her place as the “brains” behind Junto's conglomerate, performing her own updated form of “masking.”

I believe Addison Gayle accurately assesses Mrs. Hedges's talents: “Given Mrs. Hedges's entrepreneurial skills, energy, ability, and a white skin, she might have created a capitalistic enterprise, might have become, like the Chandlers, a purveyor of stock market receipts and dividends” (194). However, it is precisely because Mrs. Hedges cannot become like the Chandlers that she resorts to procurement, a “black-market” activity. She successfully parlays her “entrepreneurial” skills in the best tradition of the American Dream. Presented with a set of circumstances which do not merely limit but deny her access to wealth and power, she creates a viable alternative: She erects a “capitalistic enterprise.” Her mother wit allows her to survive, her endeavors being logical and acceptable ones. Just as Chesnutt's Uncle Julius cunningly weaves a design to “fool ole massa” into guaranteeing economic security, so too does Petry's Mrs. Hedges subscribe to a higher “moral imperative”—self-preservation.

Having the acuity to align herself with the powerful white male hegemony, Mrs. Hedges effectively adopts a “masculine” persona to maintain the place she carves out for herself. The text buttresses the notion that the American Dream not only is the domain of white men, but it also involves the subordination and objectification of women. White Mrs. Chandler owes her opulent lifestyle to her good looks and her capitulation to white men; and in a billboard advertising kitchen sinks, Lutie notices the white woman's “incredible blond hair” (23).

Given the limitations placed on white women, one can surely surmise the black woman's cramped choices—to become either a whore or a mammy. While Petry painstakingly focuses the reader on Lutie's physical beauty and how it works detrimentally, she simultaneously alerts us to Mrs. Hedges's grotesqueness. She dons a “red bandanna tied in hard, ugly knots around her head” (173) because a fire in Junto's apartment building has left her bald. Petry also describes her as a “mountain of a woman” (148). Her physical “deformities” have also prevented her from finding work:

When she walked in [employment agencies], there was an uncontrollable revulsion in the faces of the white people who looked at her. They stared amazed at her enormous size, at the blackness of her skin. They glanced at each other, tried in vain to control their faces or didn't bother to try at all, simply let her see what a monstrosity they thought she was.

(151)

The inability to support oneself through no intrinsic fault might have sealed the fate of most women, but Mrs. Hedges continues to display an acute understanding of America's “work ethic” and the value of perseverance.

By ardently resisting “feminization”—Mrs. Hedges's unwillingness to exploit her own body in the sex-money nexus—she retains her hard-fought place in the white-male power structure. Petry elucidates this idea further when Junto gives Mrs. Hedges a wig in an attempt to “beautify” her. By staunchly refusing his “gift,” Mrs. Hedges maintains her leverage and power in the street's economic hierarchy. Indeed, not only is she an integral part of the omnipotent Junto-police axis, but she exerts a control over black men that women seldom have—the power to determine the availability and price of sex. Along with the economic benefits, Mrs. Hedges's defeminization brings positive results: She thwarts the Super's attempted rape of Lutie and keeps his parasitic sexuality in check; in her role as “procurer,” she enables young, hopeless black women to work off of a street that would probably devour them; and she acts as a guardian for other female tenants (in addition to Lutie). Certainly, Mrs. Hedges has at least a reciprocal relationship with the community, if not a purely quid pro quo one. In an environment which commodifies and objectifies ad infinitum, Mrs. Hedges operates deftly on the outskirts of the American Dream—a marginal domain where scores of black women and men have made a way out of no way.

The emphasis on sex as commodity and the concentration on physical beauty place the black woman in an untenable position. As Horace Cayton has observed, “American culture places high value on appearances, and beauty—by all means one must be beautiful—must conform to stereotyped norms of so-called Anglo-Saxon beauty and appearance” (41). While Petry portrays Mrs. Hedges almost paradoxically—her physical unattractiveness and her “success” being directly proportional—the incongruity emphasizes the importance of “tricksterism” and living by one's wits.

Another of Petry's female characters displays ingenuity, given her restricted possibilities. Min, Mrs. Hedges's neighbor and the Super's live-in companion, endures a particularly brutal life not unlike Celie's in The Color Purple. Petry portrays her as a ne'er-do-well whose initial objective is to save enough money to purchase some false teeth. Petry's Min fits a classic “abused-woman” paradigm: Conditioned by her society to see herself as worthless, she tolerates and rationalizes a life of violence—physical, sexual, and economic. Her possibilities slim, Min enters the economic arena as a maid and incurs hardships similar to Lutie's. Unlike Mrs. Hedges in that the most important men in her life are black, Min must still face an American society which privileges men—even miscreants like Jones, who, as the Super, holds a limited amount of power. Jones treats Min slightly better than he does his dog, tormenting her physically and psychologically. The abuse escalates when Lutie moves into the building and evokes the Super's lascivious sexual desires. In terms of America's patriarchal system, Min's perpetual dependence on the “kindness” of men—perhaps a basis for her name—mirrors the experiences of countless black women in America. Indeed, Min's plight recalls Janie Starks's grandmother's folk metaphor: “‘De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see’” (Hurston 29).

Petry's complex depiction of black women is a testimony to her years as a reporter, where she witnessed firsthand the harrowing circumstances many Harlemites faced. Against the backdrop of Lutie's monomaniacal pursuit of the American Dream, it would appear that Petry uses Min contrapuntally to illustrate what happens when the desire for “security” takes a pathological turn. But closer examination elucidates how she grants Min the same type of improvisational talents that sustain Mrs. Hedges—the ability to ensure survival in a crumbling, life-abnegating America. It is precisely because Lutie has become so enslaved to the American Dream and the “white” means of attaining it that she lacks the ability to modify and act accordingly.

Mrs. Hedges plays a crucial role in Min's life: She passes along the name of a “root doctor” (which Mrs. Hedges, in turn, has gotten from one of “her girls”), although she says she does not “‘hold with 'em myself, because I always figured that as far as my own business is concerned I was well able to do anything any root doctor could do’” (79). Unlike Lutie, Min does not engage in the type of sententious “moralizing” that estranges Lutie from other black women in the community. By refusing to judge Mrs. Hedges by a white code of “ethics”—as “pimp” and therefore out-of-bounds—Min avails herself of one of the community's greatest sources of information and power. I would disagree with Barbara Christian's assertion that “The Street is different from most novels by Afro-American women in that its female characters are so cut off by everyone and everything” (64). Although not a flourishing one, a black female community—some sort of network that attempts to sustain its members—does exist. Mrs. Hedges (along with “her girls”) thus becomes a crucial conduit in Min's search for economic stability.

Inexplicably, Lutie discounts similar sources of oral, “folk” wisdom which might have helped her. The memory of her grandmother (“Granny”) haunts Lutie's life long after the old woman has passed on, and she thus represents a potential mentor. Whether it be through practical wisdom about how butchers in black neighborhoods adulterate tainted meat or how Lutie might deal with men like the lecherous Boots Smith, the sagacious Granny looms as a tangible presence throughout the novel—a veritable “mother” figure much like the perspicacious “ghost father” who guides Pilate Dead in Morrison's Song of Solomon.

Even in economic matters, Granny could teach Lutie some lessons. On the one hand Granny disapproves of the bootlegging business run by “Pops” (her son and Lutie's father). Granny reveals to Lutie that “‘men like him don't get nowhere. … Think folks owe 'em a livin'. And mebbe they do, but not nowhere near the way he thinks’” (55). But despite her outward distaste for Pops's “business,” Granny, perhaps internally, realizes that blacks have often had to engage in “immoral” activities given their financial exigencies; thus, she refrains from castigating her son.

Lutie, on the other hand, reacts violently when Bub attempts to aid his Dream-crazed mother by shining shoes in front of their apartment building. Upon learning of his venture, she slaps him “sharply across the face. His look of utter astonishment made her strike him again—this time more violently, and she hated herself for doing it, even as she lifted her hand for another blow” (46). Lutie's preoccupation with stereotypes about black boys shining shoes blinds her to the grim reality she and Bub face. Neither Granny's guidance nor the reasons behind Bub's ingenuity can penetrate the funk in which Franklin's and the Chandlers' dogma has left Lutie.⁴ Thus, Petry portrays Lutie as maniacally enslaved to a dysfunctional ideology, a woman who has swallowed whole the spurious rhetoric of the American Dream.

Juxtaposing Lutie and Min in terms of their ideological “role models” illuminates a fundamental difference between Euro-American and African-American cultures. In a lengthy essay, “Black Poetry, Blues, and Folklore,” Berndt Ostendorf makes a perceptive distinction between “oral” and “literate” culture:

Oral cultures are dramatic, literate cultures epistemic in their focus of attention, the first develops the resources of spontaneity, style, affective performance, and catharsis, the second scrutiny, contemplation, or what Romantic art called “recollection in tranquility.” Oral folklore openly reveals its social genesis and function, whereas the relative “autonomy” of literary texts has been postulated on the basis of the constitutional self-reflexiveness of literary products. Literacy engenders historical norms for the production and reception of culture; the resultant lag between past and present forms or habits of reception has to be made functional (i.e., usable for the present) through constant hermeneutical effort. … Literacy also puts a brake on semantic freedom and development; semantic ratification and adoption into usage are slow and laborious processes. Innovations, adaptations, and neologisms are treated as intruders, and subcultural improprieties run into a wall of purists.

(224; emphases added)

Ostendorf's meticulous delineations illuminate the core differences between Lutie and the novel's other black characters. Mrs. Hedges, Granny, and Min (and, to some degree, Boots Smith) are grounded in an African-American ethos which has served blacks well historically; concomitantly, this more demonstrative and practical culture facilitates the development of improvisational techniques, such as the “subversive” acts of Mrs. Hedges, Pops, Boots, and Min. Antithetically, Lutie is mired in a fruitless “hermeneutic” process: She spends the entire novel trying to decipher Franklin's encoded, phallocentric text—a “white” book blacks were never meant to read in the first place.

In terms of white versus black role models, David the Prophet assumes an even greater significance in the text. Ostensibly, he “cures” Min of her economic ills, passing along the “roots” that will prevent Jones from banishing her. Crucially, David's “text” is neither indecipherable nor cryptic. Min does not have to “interpret” him, and he listens to her story attentively, witnessing and validating her life: “The satisfaction she felt was from the quiet way he had listened to her, giving her all of his attention. No one had ever done that before” (88). Thus, Petry affirms the power of orality for blacks in both tropological and practical contexts.

In aiding Min in her subversive actions, the Prophet David epitomizes the power of “conjure” in eradicating evil and effecting change in an unjust, amoral society. Just as Chesnutt demonstrated how the animistic folk “remedies” of the “Conjure Woman” served as a corrective force in the dehumanizing antebellum South, so too does Petry show how similar folk beliefs benefit blacks in the postbellum urban North. Ultimately, David's stimulation of Min and the resurgence that results mark the height of subversion (as well as paralleling the Hedges-Junto relationship)—she by rejecting a black “Christianity” that mimics the ineffectual white one; he by giving her a cross, a key piece of white Christian iconography, to place over her bed in warding off evil. Thus, they subvert a sacrosanct but hypocritical institution which most Americans profess to worship, exploiting it for their own ends. Vis-à-vis Min's activism, Lutie's comment “‘What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?’” (270) becomes particularly resonant and ironic. Precisely because she bases her life on a white, “literary” model, she loses sight of the invaluable “black book of life”—a hallowed, Afrocentric text that instructs blacks to “read” what is not written, to draw from their own cultural guideposts.

III

What Petry's women attain is not emblematic of what the American Dream should produce in its most sanguine form. But Mrs. Hedges and Min do “get over,” and their actions and choices appear free of the author's judgment. Given Petry's position in her relation to the text, I wish to spend the last section of this essay discussing the novelist's own act of subversion in constructing The Street and the assumptions that go into treating Petry as an American “naturalist”—a purveyor of social “protest” and Richard Wright's native daughter.

On the surface, the view that The Street fits snugly into the “social criticism” school of Dreiser—and even more cozily into the “protest” tradition of Wright—seems plausible enough. W. Lawrence Hogue examines why critics in the 1940s welcomed Petry and Wright into the bosom of the American literary “tradition,” while responding tepidly to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which appeared contemporaneously:

During the first half of the twentieth century, the naturalist movement was one mode of writing that dominated the American literary scene. It became a kind of literature that was judged “fine.” Naturalism's literary themes and motifs—determinism, survival, violence, and taboo—became the standards by which the worth of a literary text was assessed and judged. These themes were a part of the definitions of reality that belonged to the ruling ideological apparatus.

(29)

Hogue concludes that, “in examining the favorable reception during the 1940s of Wright's Native Son and Petry's The Street and the unfavorable reception of Hurston's novel, the reader can see how normative criticism functions: as an active and ongoing part of literary tastes and theories of literature” (31). Clearly, one could read The Street as a commentary on why America fails the black woman (and man). Petry's discourse—that of “social criticism”—is one that the writer herself embraces.⁵ Writing in the vein of the male “naturalists,” she therefore assumed a place denied Hurston, whose bucolic “folk portraits” were simply not in vogue.⁶

But if we look at Petry's depiction of Lutie in terms of the options available to other women in the book, the pervasive critical stance that views Lutie as a perpetual victim becomes somewhat troublesome. I would not go so far as to say that she should not be perceived as acting heroically. I do question, however, the degree to which we can see Lutie as a “tragic heroine,” notwithstanding the author's claims to the contrary.⁷ To understand more fully what Petry achieves in portraying Lutie as she does, I think we must recall the black female characters' primary resource—the ability to subvert.

One explanation for seeing Lutie as an “anti-heroine” lies in her obtuseness and gullibility. In this respect, Petry's depiction of Lutie resembles Jonathan Swift's presentation of Gulliver: The satirist ridicules his protagonist for his own ideological and rhetorical purposes. Harlem becomes Lutie's Brobdingnag and, like her “dwarf” predecessor, she is almost parasite-like in a voracious world. Indeed, Lutie's “travels” intersperse the comic and the absurd: In one episode, “She pushed [Bub] away and unlocked the door and the can of peas slipped out from under her arm to roll clumsily along the hall in its brown-paper wrapping. While Bub scrambled after it, she opened the door” (48); and in another she is duped into believing that a lawyer can free Bub from the detention home. In this context, then, Gayle's suggestion that “The Street takes on the dimensions of a mock-heroic epic” (193) is quite salient. By having her protagonist refuse to read the black “book of life” in lieu of Franklin's unintelligible, quixotic autobiography, Petry forces the reader to take an incredulous stance. Lutie's choices strain our sense of acceptable behavior, given such implacable circumstances. Ostensibly, Lutie's plight differs little from that of a character like Stephen Crane's Maggie, whose sordid environment eventually drives her to suicide. But because Lutie is so naïve, so anesthetized by the nectar of the mythic American Dream, one cannot help but wonder whether Petry was—albeit obliquely—criticizing not only Lutie's choices but also naturalistic conventions, where an individual bears such immense suffering and squalor that his or her tragedy borders on the banal and the clichéd.

Lutie's superciliousness and naïveté combine to render her less the apogee of the “tragic victim” who populates the naturalist's landscape and more the black-faced “gullible Gulliver,” the object of the satirist's derision. Petry thus achieves something rather paradoxical: She pledges allegiance to the godhead of American naturalism while depicting a hopelessly naïve black American woman through whom the author appears to challenge the validity of such abstractions as “determinism” and “victimization.”

Looked at from a different perspective, then, The Street transcends the limitations of “thesis literature” and naturalism, which concentrate microscopically on a single victim and the violence that society inflicts upon him or her. As I mentioned at the outset, Petry presents Lutie's story as the central one, but it also functions organically, spawning others' as well. By effectively shifting narrative focus away from Lutie in the novel, Petry's lens becomes more panoramic; other stories encroach upon Lutie's mise-en-scène and take on a tension and drama all their own.

Using multiple viewpoints as a structural device deviates from the naturalist's narrow eye, placing Petry closer to a tradition of African-American writers who view the black community in its totality, harboring several stories. Like Mrs. Hedges and Min, Petry has mastered the skill of “improvisation,” which defined the democratic “free jazz” of iconoclasts such as Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler in the 1950s. She gives each of the text's characters her own “solo.” By deemphasizing character and instead accentuating community, Petry moves away from the exalted American naturalism which privileges men (Dreiser and Wright), and anticipates African-Americanists James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor—writers who see the blackness of blackness, a layered universe and not a single stratum.

Masking, signifying, disguise/concealment—black characters have exploited these techniques in order to survive in a country bent on their annihilation. Linda Brent, Uncle Julius, and Janie Crawford invent lives far different from those of Alger, Franklin, and Greeley. In her groundbreaking, gynocentric novel, Petry reaffirms the value of tactics that have enabled blacks to endure a lifetime of physical and psychological slavery. While her “main” protagonist, Lutie Johnson, murders and flees, other black women carve out existences, although somewhat meager and unglamorous. Min and Mrs. Hedges also prefigure women like Frances Jackson, the successful mortician in The Narrows. Subversion as a prominent skill—on the part of author and characters alike—catapults black women from the confines of a patriarchal, dehumanizing America to another country, where they can operate businesses, keep a roof over their heads, and move beyond restrictive and male-dominated literary configurations.

Notes

1. Hernton's reading of the novel might be termed “feminist” in that he isolates and examines the complicity of men, both black and white, (and to some degree Mrs. Hedges, whom he calls a “vampire” [70]) in Lutie's demise. However, I believe that privileging Lutie as the sole, almost infallible, victim becomes somewhat problematic: Albeit obliquely, it perpetuates myths about helpless, prostrate women who are incapable of acting on their own behalf. Marjorie Pryse offers an especially insightful exegesis of the text, primarily because she does not limit her examination to Lutie's “victimization.” Pryse focuses on how American history informs the characterization and plot of the novel. Specifically, she links what she calls “deistic forces” in the novel to their historical antecedents: “The apparently invisible and naturalistic forces behind the street, then, become closely linked with the political attitudes of the white people who founded, then proceeded to run, the country” (122). Pryse goes on to adduce that Granny, Mrs. Hedges, and David the Prophet represent viable “alternative forces” to Lutie's white ones. However, while she sees them as women who adapt better than Lutie does, Pryse holds a rather pejorative view of Min and Mrs. Hedges, particularly the latter. While Min possesses traits which might have benefited Lutie, she is not the “perfect foil for Lutie” (127). Mrs. Hedges functions as a “false madonna” and an “inverted goddess” who is ultimately complicit in Lutie's demise: “The deity/goddess who seems so much a part of the landscape of the street has failed to mother” (128). I would counter that Mrs. Hedges functions much more affirmatively, as seen by her ability to “mother” Min. That Lutie fails as miserably as she does says less about Mrs. Hedges and more about Lutie's own inability or unwillingness to subvert American institutions which have been the bane of blacks for centuries.

2. See Bone and Davis, who both perform—to varying degrees—a “reduction” of Petry's novel, Bone labeling it a roman-à-thèse (180). He goes on to criticize Petry in terms of Wrightian protest for her insufficient political analysis: “Here the ideological limitations of Wright's disciples become evident: they attack the slum without understanding the social system which produced it. Their novels fall between the stools of racial and social protest, lacking the historical sweep with which Wright synthesized the two” (159).

3. Historically, black women who entered the work force as maids have been particularly vulnerable to a sort of “white disease,” perhaps the natural result of living in the “big house.” Discussing Lutie specifically as a maid, Trudier Harris elaborates on how she has been “seduced” by the American Dream and her “belief that dedication to getting money will solve all problems” (92).

4. See Bell, who speaks to the futility of the Franklinian Dream which Lutie assiduously pursues: “While, for example, myths of the Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin, who is the colonial paradigm of the successful self-made man, are available to all Americans, black Americans rarely refer to them” (106).

5. In “The Novel as Social Criticism,” Petry elaborates on the symbiotic connection between “art” and “life”: “The novel, like all other forms of art, will always reflect the political, economic, and social structure of the period in which it was created. … The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not” (33; emphases added).

6. Lamentably, if understandably, critical response to Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, which appeared a year after Their Eyes Were Watching God, reflects the tendentious nature of the “liberal” literary establishment. In its eyes the works of self-professed “angry young men” such as Wright, Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka are acceptable means of protest; the flagellation is welcomed, albeit in a patronizing way. Regrettably, critics ignored Hurston's work and lavishly praised Wright's—despite some basic similarities between the two texts. Wright himself attacked Hurston's book in a now-infamous “review.”

7. See “Ann Petry Talks about First Novel” (Crisis 53 [Jan. 1946]: 48-49). This brief essay/interview is the source of Petry's often-quoted “paean” to naturalism: “In The Street my aim is to show how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person's life. For this purpose I have made Lindy Johnson [sic] an intelligent, ambitious, attractive woman with a fair degree of education” (49).

Works Cited

Bell, Bernard. “Ann Petry's Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character.” Pryse and Spillers 105-15.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.

Cayton, Horace R. “Ideological Forces in the Work of Negro Writers.” Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States. Ed. Herbert Hill. New York: Harper, 1966. 37-50.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport: Greenwood, 1980.

Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington: Howard UP, 1974.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1990.

———. Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964.

Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City: Doubleday, 1975.

Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982.

Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

Hogue, W. Lawrence. Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text. Durham: Duke UP, 1986.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1978.

Ostendorf, Berndt. “Black Poetry, Blues, and Folklore.” Amerikastudien-American Studies 20 (1975): 209-59.

Petry, Ann. “The Novel as Social Criticism.” The Writer's Book. Ed. Helen Hull. New York: Harper, 1950. 32-39.

———. The Street. 1946. New York: Pyramid, 1961.

Pryse, Marjorie. “‘Pattern against the Sky’: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street.” Pryse and Spillers 116-31.

Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. 263-83.

Yarborough, Richard. “The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man.” MELUS 8 (1981): 33-59.