Post-Renaissance Harlem: Ann Petry's The Street

By the 1940s, the once bustling metropolis of African American creative energy that had been Harlem had been harshly impacted by a series of events that followed its cultural heyday. A second wave of the Great Migration brought migrants from other areas of the United States and the Caribbean, which led to overcrowding and racial tension among Harlemites; and the economic depression rendered Harlem largely a ghettoized area that rife with crime and racial injustice. The Harlem Race Riot of 1943 increased the growing tension in Harlem. The event signaled a growing assertiveness among blacks in Harlem to challenge white authority and to interrogate the systems of white power structures.

Described as "graceful and articulate" Ann Petry was born in October 1911 and raised in Old Saybrook, Connecticut (1). She attended Pharmacy school there, perhaps following the example of her father, who owned a drugstore. In the 1930s she traveled to Harlem where she was an apprentice writer for two of the city's major newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The People's Voice. Her role as a young journalist forcibly thrust her into the seedier aspects of Harlem life. Her confrontation with the bleakness of Harlem's poverty and destitution strongly influenced Petry's fiction, giving her work its "compelling edge" (Gates, et al. 1496). Her short narrative, "Like a Winding Street" was published in 1945, gaining Petry considerable critical attention and success, including a Houghton Mifflin Literary Award (2). However it was the novel that eventuated from this first success, The Street, that elevated Petry to national attention and earning her distinction for becoming the first African American woman author to sell over one million copies of her novel (Gates).

Richard Wright, Urban Realism, and Racial-Sexual Politics

Our text points out that Petry's narrative in The Street can be read against Wright's Native Son as a woman's exploration of the individual set against and profoundly changed by the urban environment in which she is situated. Wright's realism in Native Son explores how the white power structures and urban violence against the black male shape his emerging masculinity. Although, Ann Petry's The Street also examines the relationship between the individual and external forces that shape Lutie Johnson, the editors of our text caution that "exaggerating the links between Wright and Petry obscures perhaps the most salient and critical distinction between them: the sexual politics of race and the racial politics of gender" (1497). Petry's narrative casts an interrogative light on the positioning of the black female set against male-dominated spaces in which she is configured as an object of the male gaze. Gates continues, saying that "Petry closely documents the effects of the ghetto on a black woman and shows a critical sensitivity ot woman as spectacle, as a body to be looked at and made the object of male sexual desire and exploitation" (1497). Particularly in regard to her role as mother, and as lone tenant of a predatory male landlord, Petry enlarges the condition of the African American female's vulnerability as sexual object in The Street.

Critics have frequently documented Petry's engagement of urban realism that she extends from Richard Wright's work. However, Petry utilizes the elements of modernism most noticeably in terms of her treatment of space. Keeping in mind Gates's comments concerning Petry's portrayal of the black woman in post-Renaissance Harlem, how does Petry represent space--both physical and metaphorical--to convey Lutie's experience of being on her own?