Introduction
In the US, the concept of blackness is the key idea that defines the social, political, and cultural position of African-Americans, both in past and present periods of history. The Street is a novel that depicts the life of Lutie Johnson, a single mother with an 8-year old son, who lives in Harlem on 116th street. The life of the main character is full of challenges that include relationships with African-American men, financial issues, and hard work.
While the history and cognition of African-American women were subjected to race and gender oppression, the literary works were created to represent their struggles and address the barriers that limited their lives. This essay aims to discover the black identity of African-American women living in the 1940s based on the image of Lutie as well as the methods used by the author, including personification, naturalism, and setting.
Exploring Blackness in the Novel
The negation of humanity of African-Americans leads to various difficulties that ruin their relationships and lives. In The Street, Lutie, an ordinary woman, was married to her beloved man, but the financial issues caused by a low-paid job as well as other hardships affected negatively their interaction. When her husband cheated, the main character preferred to leave and raise her son independently. At the same time, she remains committed to the idea of the American Dream proposed by one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin. He stated that everyone who works hard can achieve success, yet the story by Petry shows that African-Americans have many barriers on their paths.
The author of the novel uses the method of personification to represent the feelings and emotions of her characters. While The Street is narrated via the voices of different persons, the one of Lutie is dominant. Accordingly, it seems to be appropriate to choose her image to associate with personification points. For example, the wind is depicted as a human being: “the wind grabbed their hats, pried their scarves from around their necks, stuck its fingers inside their coat collars, blew their coats away from their bodies” (3).
The fingers of the wind that touch people are related to the connection with negative emotions since some discomfort is evident. More to the point, Petry states that the wind “discourages the people walking along the street”, which helps the readers to assimilate with Lutie and her experience. The method of personification reflects everyday American discourse, reproducing and rooting racial ideology since it inevitably materializes both public and individual consciousness.
Along with the family issues, Luthier faces racism and sexism, which stem from not only White but predominantly African-American men. Jones, a navy veteran, becomes obsessed with Lutie, while he also has a girlfriend, min, whom he rejects believing that she not physically attractive. Smith, the bandleader of Junto, is also interested in sexual contact with the main character, promising false advantages. This sexual competition increases the novel’s tension.
Personification allows the author to show that her street could be any street in the city: “the snow … sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, and quiet” (182). In this case, personification does not break away from the real denotation but adds an essential characteristic, preserving all its real properties. The core meaning contextually expands due to the emergence of a new reality, which contradicts all other signs and is preserved only within this context.
The discussion of naturalism in this novel serves as the guide to understanding social reality. The Street demonstrates that the ideas about social reality are largely unconscious and built on the basis of inherited cultural stereotypes of a particular social group. The centuries of slavery inflicted a cultural trauma on African-Americans, depriving them of their human status and dignity. African-Americans had to rethink their past in order to reconstruct collective identity. Petry summarizes the complex ways of building black identities that are closely related to the consequences of racism in the US (292). In this novel, the author employs naturalism to effectively present the catastrophic and destroying reality of African-American women.
The ideological and stylistic tendencies generated by the cultural practices and the artistic method opposing realism are expressed in reproducing the phenomena of life outside their ideological socio-philosophical understanding. One of the trends in the theory and practice of the naturalistic trend was the replacement of social typing and social assessment of life phenomena with an impartial depiction of facts and events.
For instance, Petry describes small urine-strained rooms: “the hallways dank with the smell of urine” (). The term naturalism can also be associated with an addiction to an exaggeratedly detailed depiction of gloomy, shadowy phenomena of reality, especially scenes of cruelty, violence, and repulsive details of sexual life. Describing the reaction of Jones, the author notes that “the hate an danger that still burned inside him was so great that he could not even smile” (295). Not only places and events but also people’s behaviors that are given in a naturalistic style add to the deeply-rooted oppression towards African-American females.
The epoch of Jim Craw laws with its unequal approach to people whose skin color was other than white characterizes the setting of The Street. It is noteworthy to state that this literary work begins and ends with the description of 116th street in Harlem. Most importantly, the street is presented as one of the key characters of the novel, in which the author masterfully combines personification and setting methods of creating images. The following statement reveals the attitudes of Lutir towards her street: “the street did more than that. It became both mother and father and trained your kid for you, and it was an evil father and a vicious mother” (Petry 283).
During that time, African-American women lived in a highly oppressed society, although they were emancipated according to the law. Nevertheless, the American institutional practices made it impossible to exercise human rights for the mentioned population.
The inferiority of African-American women with regard to African-American men is another theme of the given novel. In terms of the patriarchal society, men were seen as the dominant human beings, who should have more rights and freedoms compared to females. These assumptions are reflected via the setting of The Street, where the author discusses the struggles of women and the tension placed by men. For instance, it is perceived by the novel male characters as a norm to incline women to sex by sung abusive methods.
The thoughts about the lower ability of women to create and consider were also made publicly: “‘you know a good-looking girl like you shouldn’t have to worry about money, he said softly” (Petry 334). In fact, this aspect of the concept of blackness seems to be much more complicated since many challenges are intertwined, and women had to resolve them, relying only on themselves.
The presentation of the environment of Harlem allows the readers to associate with it and better understand the lives of African-American females of that time. The setting helps the author to build the links between the people involved in the story and Luthier in a way that clarifies their intentions and feelings. At the same time, these connections are not used in a direct form, yet they focus on the environment. The words “dirt” and “dust” are often included in the novel, which makes the setting unpleasant and unappealing to the readers.
The actions of the wind, for example, point to the cold and harsh weather, which indicates the violent assaults of men who want to have sex with Luthier. On the contrary, the introduction of the main character is accompanied by such words as “warm” and “soft”. This confusing environment reflects different sides of blackness in females of the period of Jim Craw laws.
Conclusion
To conclude, The Street by Ann Petry is a powerful novel that sheds light on the essence of blackness, focusing on the fate of females who lived in the 1940s and 1950s in the US. The very state of racism that was inherent to all African-Americans previously was much more complicated and severe for women who faced discrimination from African-American men. One can undoubtedly state that The Street is a significant cornerstone in understanding the concept of blackness and further improvement of the position of women in the US.
Work Cited
Petry, Ann. The Street. Library of America, 2019.