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Article Excerpt
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.
--W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (94)
Although discussion of Ann Perry's The Street (1946) has moved beyond its initial circumscription within a narrow definition of naturalistic protest fiction--often by reference to Richard Wright's Native Son, a comparison that has not generally worked in Perry's favor--interpreters continue to concentrate on issues associated with that literary mode. Central terms for interpreting The Street remain determinism, environment, and protest. Critics have concluded that "Petry evicts hope entirely" from The Street and that the novel expresses "unqualified despair" as well as "horror" at the stagnation of life (Wurst 2; Yarborough 46; Barrett 106). (1) Such conclusions mesh with the standard definition: we expect a deterministic protest novel not only to present a negative picture but also to function as a negative act. Simply put, protest always speaks out against something.
The novel's bleak ending provides ample rationale for such a reading. After Lutie Johnson murders Boots Smith, she flees Harlem for Chicago, leaving behind her son Bub whom she has tried throughout the novel to protect. Bub's recent implication in mail fraud will assuredly land him in reform school, signaling the absolute failure of his mother's efforts. As if this denouement were not bleak enough, the novel concludes with Lutie doubting her humanity, wondering what good could ever come from teaching a person such as herself to read. Insofar as reading is a central trope of personhood in African American literature from the slave narrative onward, Lutie's doubting her humanity sounds an especially dismal note. (2)
Most critics look to the environment to explain the pervasive sense of demoralization, In a much-cited interview published in The Crisis the same year as The Street, Petry describes her first novel as "show[ing] how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person's fife" (Ivy 49). (3) While increasingly Petry's protest is understood as against not only the socioeconomic but also the ideological environment--especially the ideology of the American Dream as personified in the novel's allusions to Benjamin Franklin most commentators emphasize how the environment deforms individual subjectivity. (4) Noel Schraufnagel concludes that The Street "question[s] ... whether a Negro can maintain his humanity in a place like Harlem" (42). Barbara Christian likewise finds the novel focusing on "situation, setting, and environment." According to Christian, Lutie is less a "particular person, with a particular makeup" than a representative figure whose "plight ... can only lead to crime and tragedy" (12). Lindon Barrett similarly defines the novel as exploring "what it means to have a strict assault on one's identity be a routine feature of self-formation in U. S. culture" (95). Curiously, the environmental determinism thesis has not kept commentators from criticizing--at times even blaming--Lutie for the direction her life takes. For instance, in Marjorie Pryse's influential reading, Lutie's "wrong choices" become clear in contrast with those of other characters (123). As William Scott sums up the consensus, The Street "is typically interpreted as signaling Lutie's inadequacies as an African American female subject" (89).
I think we should resist the proposition of Lutie's--or any other character's--"inadequacies" as a human being, and indeed The Street cautions against such a reading. In the Crisis interview cited above, Petty remarks on another impetus for her novel: "I hope that I have created characters who are real, believable, alive.... I wanted to show [Negroes] as people with the same capacity for love and hate, for tears and laughter, and the same instincts for survival possessed by all men" (Ivy 49). The Street accomplishes this end by counterbalancing naturalistic protest with affirmations of the humanity of Lutie and also, and more significantly, of numerous secondary characters. The narrative repeatedly deviates from the main story to explore the personal histories of characters who strike Lutie as insignificant, inimical, or even lacking humanity. These individual histories create sympathy, revealing to the reader (and sometimes also to Lutie) that what appeared to be an abject being is, rather, a person. These interludes function stylistically to gesture The Street toward modernism's fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and interest in private psychological states. Thematically these personal stories affirm a point radical in its vision and breathtaking in its simplicity: that every individual, no matter how distasteful or unfortunate his or her life appears, is a human being. (5) The Street thus captures a perspective that, as W. E. B. Du Bois explains, readily eludes us: "It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul" (94).
Perry's forays into the "throbbing human souls" of secondary characters function in the way that historian Thomas W. Laqueur describes as characteristic of the humanitarian narrative. By using "unprecedented quantities of fact ... about people who had before been beneath notice," these narratives generate sympathy, recognition of the humanity shared by reader and subject, and the will to work for social change (177). (6) The sympathy generated by the humanitarian narrative is no idle or armchair emotion but implies a politics and impels action. While sympathy has long been both celebrated and reviled as central to nineteenth-century American literature, I propose to show how the proliferation of personal histories in The Street creates a politics of sympathy that is broadly humanitarian; this politics enables and vivifies the novel's much-remarked protest. (7) My point is not to deny the importance of protest in The Street, but to show that what the novel stands for--sympathetic affirmation of the humanity of every person--is as important as what it stands against.
Two recent studies of The Street, both focusing on Lutie, urge that the traditional emphasis on exterior, material conditions needs to be balanced with analysis of interior, psychological states. Scott calls for emphasizing "subjective experience" (89) and Meg Wesling for examining "Lutie's ability to know" (117). Although I will focus on secondary characters, Lutie's perspective remains important to my argument. Both in how Lutie is seen and in how she sees others, Perry demonstrates the obstacles to sympathetically apprehending another's humanity. Two episodes that frame the novel, one spotlighting the utter failure of wealthy whites to know Lutie, the second her limited knowledge of her own son, capture the social and psychological barriers to sympathy.
The first occurs in the often-cited scene when Lutie is working as a maid for the wealthy white Chandlers and overhears her employer's mother chastising her daughter: "Now I wonder if you're being wise, dear. That girl is unusually attractive and men are weak. Besides, she's colored and you know how they are--" (45). The stereotype of black wenches eager to have sex with white men occludes not only the facts (Lutie has no interest in any white men) but more importantly her subjectivity. Lutie finds herself dehumanized by this stark demonstration of how the Chandlers and their friends see her after "one look"--or rather, how they fail to see her: "the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be like; they were so confident about what she must be like they didn't need to know her personally in order to verify their estimate" (45, 46).
The Street works against this pseudo-knowledge of racial and gender stereotyping and strives instead to know people "personally." The humanitarian observer must confront a tangle of conflicting traits, not summon a one-dimensional caricature. This humanitarian ideal--and Petry's understanding of the difficulties in achieving it--resonates with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, whose protagonist also finds his subjectivity invisible to whites because of suppositions projected onto him. (8) Petty unmasks the self-serving nature of such white projection when, one paragraph before the older woman's rude comment, Mr. Chandler walks in on his wife kissing another man. Mr. Chandler's lack of response suggests that adultery is unremarkable in, even if not officially recognized for, affluent whites in suburban Connecticut.
A second scene toward the novel's end establishes the difficulties of knowing even a beloved family member. Shortly before her departure for Chicago, Lutie reflects on how little she understands Bub's viewpoint on something as familiar as the street on which they live:
She tried to see the street with his [Bub's] eyes and couldn't because the crap game in progress in the middle of the block, the scraps of obscene talk she heard as she passed the poolroom, the tough young boys with their caps on backward who swaggered by, were...
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