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ABSTRACT
Ann Petry’s The Street, a bestseller when it appeared in 1946, has come to define her legacy as a novelist and public intellectual. Perceived as a disciple of Richard Wright, Petry has often been configured within the black protest tradition, which obscures her narrative experimentation and attention to rich, aesthetic detail. This essay places Petry in a more expansive and dynamic cultural context by examining The Narrows, her 1953 novel, as an exemplar of “hybrid modernism,” which combines social realism with aesthetic experimentation. In focusing on the subversively blowsy, bluesy Mamie Powther, the black woman simultaneously at the novel’s periphery and integral to its unfolding, this essay analyzes Petry’s investments not only in the blues and the African-American musical tradition, but in her incorporation of the cinematic conventions of film noir; particularly in the re-inscription of the figure of the femme fatale as (Hottentot) Venus. Rather than simply a passive recipient of the male gaze, Mamie can be interpreted as an active agent in her own right, a modern woman capable of sexual agency and erotic self-assertion as embodied in the active desire of her own hungry gaze and corporeal appetites.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Caroline A. Brown is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Montreal. She is the author of The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity (Routledge 2012) and the co-editor of Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). She has written numerous essays and book chapters.
Notes
1. Petry, At Home Inside, 1–3, 14, 188.
2. Quoted in Rabinowitz, “Pulping Ann Petry,” 62.
3. Griffin, “Hunting Communists and Negroes,” 137.
4. A voracious reader with a curious mind and widespread interests, Petry pursued an ambitious aesthetic agenda, reading and learning not only from such realists and naturalists as Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, but modernists like James Joyce and Ralph Ellison. No less significantly, she was an interdisciplinary reader of history, psychology, and the arts, who was also an avid consumer of popular culture – enjoying pulp fiction, film noir, jazz and the blues. Though educated as a pharmacist, she trained as a journalist when she left small-town Connecticut for Harlem, where she worked for the People’s Voice, a black, left-wing newspaper. As notable, while in Harlem, Petry immersed herself in a lively arts scene; she acted in theatrical productions, took visual arts courses at the Harlem Community Art Center, and enrolled in writing workshops at Columbia University with Mabel Louise Robinson, a legendary instructor.
5. While sympathetic to left-wing politics, it should be noted that Petry never became a member of the Communist party and was actually a life-long registered Republican, like many African-Americans of her milieu and generation. Petry, At Home Inside, 114, and Griffin, Harlem Nocturne, 90.
6. With this said, all four of them experienced relative success as published authors who were the recipients of prestigious awards and oftentimes glowing reviews.
7. Griffin, “Hunting Communists and Negroes,” 137.
8. McKay, Introduction to The Narrows, by Ann Petry, x.
9. Rabinowitz, “Pulping Ann Petry,” 55.
10. It should also be noted that they are also connected through Malcolm Powther, Mamie’s husband and Camilo’s employee, who works as the Treadway butler.
11. Petry, The Narrows, 126.
12. Both also exist as sly pastiches of Édouard Manet’s seminal oil painting, Olympia (1863), in which a naked white woman stares boldly at the viewer even as her black maid, Laura, holds her bouquet. As Sander Gilman underscores, tracing the European visual iconography in which the black servant is juxtaposed against the naked white mistress (and here, I would suggest that, rather than simply Mamie, the relationship is triangulated through Powther, who serves as the Treadway’s butler), it is the black who bears the burden of assumed hypersexuality and degeneracy, a process that points to Petry’s complex reconstruction and retelling of this fraught history of racial and sexual desire and denial.
13. It should be noted that Link had earlier proposed marriage to Camilo, who continually defers rather than admit the truth of her marital status. Petry, The Narrows, 275.
14. Nevertheless, both, in their separate constellations, are drawn to the dashing Link, who playfully lusts after the down-home Mamie but chafes as the “silver-collar boy” to Camilo, who is like “highborn ladies” of the eighteenth century court who “collected monkeys, peacocks, and little blackamoors for pets.” Even as Link resents Camilo’s insidious desire to control his life through her wealth, power, and prestige, he also realizes that she embodies the psychosexual fantasies he both resists and has internalized. Petry, The Narrows, 315.
15. Rabinowitz, “Pulping Ann Petry,” 64.
16. I would like to differentiate my use of hybrid modernism from Rabinowitz’s “pulp modernism,” which explores the intersection of pulp fiction, crime novels, film noir, and high modernism in the works of American writers. For Rabinowitz, Petry’s novels of pulp modernism are the retranslation of “cinematic trash – already a translation of literary pulp – into narrative form.” She further clarifies that they “dwell on murder, violence, adultery, and prostitution, the entire gamut of post-war anxieties about nuclear war, anti-colonialism, holocaust and racism deflected mechanistically onto the streets of American cities and from there retreating into the bedrooms of the American home.” Rabinowitz, “Pulping Ann Petry,” 64.
17. Washington, Invented Lives, 300–1.
18. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 75.
19. Ibid., 78.
20. Davis, Blues Legacies, 4.
21. Mamie Gardener Smith became the first recorded woman blues singer with her “Crazy Blues,” thereby launching the era of the Classic Blues. See Levine, Black Culture, 225, and Harrison, Black Pearls, 45–8, for discussions of her importance in the development of the blues as popular culture.
22. See Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences,” 543–64.
23. See Hughes’s “The Negro Artist,” 91–5.
24. Harrison, Black Pearls, 56.
25. Garvey, “That Old Black Magic?” 137–42.
26. Drake, “Women on the Go,” 73.
27. Washington, Invented Lives, 303.
28. Petry, The Narrows, 22.
29. Ibid., 124.
30. Ibid., 182.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 212.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Carby, “It Jus Be’s,” 20.
36. Ibid.
37. Davis, Blues Legacies, 44.
38. In Black Pearls, Daphne Duval Harrison writes: “The essence of blues poetry, whether sung by women or men, is life itself – its ache, pains, grievances, pleasures, and brief moments of glory. Life for working-class black women in the United States has been especially difficult because of their bottom-rung status due to racism and sexism … .Black women’s quest for independence is constrained by racial and sexual barriers and sometimes leads to types of behavior that appear to be arrogant, promiscuous, or violent, but are in fact manifestations of a large repertoire of defense mechanisms employed to gain or defend respect in a hostile environment.” Harrison, Black Pearls, 6.
39. Petry, The Narrows, 22, 23–4, 124, 193–94, 209, 349.
40. See Garvey, “That Old Black Magic?” 141–2, and Drake, “Women on the Go,” 82, for their interpretations of Mamie’s blues singing and the meanings of her lyrics.
41. Petry, The Narrows, 292.
42. Ibid., 333–4.
43. Naremore, More Than Night, 40. Of American genre films, Naremore specifies the horror film at Universal, gangster movies at Warner, and classic detective pictures at Fox.
44. Naremore, More Than Night, 224, 12.
45. Ibid., 224.
46. As an aside, Petry was brought on to write the screenplay for That Hill Girl, which was supposed to star Kim Novak. However, the film was never made. See Petry, At Home Inside, 107, and Griffin, Harlem Nocturne, 104.
47. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 39–40.
48. Petry, The Narrows, 127.
49. Naremore, More than Night, 43.
50. Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, x.
51. Petry, The Narrows, 181.
52. Ibid., 179.
53. For an alternative reading of Malcolm Powther as a dandy, and potentially repressed homosexual, see Clark, The Radical Fiction, 51–54. Even in this interpretation, Clark underscores Powther’s investment in class and racial hierarchies.
54. Petry, The Narrows, 23.
55. Ibid., 24–25.
56. Ibid., 99.
57. Ibid., 99–100.
58. Of Abbie’s first vision of Mamie, Petry writes: “There was a woman standing on the steps. A stranger. Or at least her face was unfamiliar. She’d seen the type before though: young, but too much fat around the waist, a soft, fleshy, quite prominent bosom, too much lipstick, a pink beflowered hat, set on top of straightened hair; her hair worn in what they called a pageboy bob, hanging loose, almost to the shoulders … .Under one arm she carried a big loosely wrapped package which was … .carelessly tied.” Ibid., 17.
59. Hobson, Venus in the Dark, 7.
60. Brownie, Acts of Undressing, 43.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Petry, The Narrows, 189.
64. I would like to point out the discrepancy of the pronouns Mamie uses to reference herself, perhaps underscoring Mary Helen Washington’s earlier points about the tensions in Petry’s representation of the character.
65. Petry, The Narrows, 296–7.
66. Ibid., 297.
67. Ibid., 215.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid. This image also reproduces a variation on Mamie’s perception of Link’s “sparkling” eyes.
70. Significantly, Powther consciously chooses not to live at Treadway Hall because of his fear that Mamie will have affairs with his colleagues. As he admits: “But Mamie wouldn’t have fitted in with the life there. It was bad enough to come home and find Bill Hod in his house, it would have been unbearable to have found Rogers, the gardener, Al, the chauffeur, the French chef, the men he worked with every day on intimate terms with Mamie.” Petry, The Narrows, 208. Or as he earlier admitted to himself when first bringing Mamie to Connecticut from Baltimore: “Though he was certain Mamie would have gentlemen callers, he did not intend to have the Treadway chauffeur, cook, gardener included in their number. It would make for an impossible situation, all of them being white.” Ibid., 186.
71. Hine, “Rape,” 912–20.
72. Hammonds, “Black (W)holes,” 309.
73. In fact, Mamie admits to Powther her ambivalence about whites: “Powther, there is things about white people that I never will understand. And to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t intend to try. I am a hell of a lot more comfortable, and it gives me a lot more honest-to-God pleasure just to write ‘em all down as bastards and leave ‘em strictly alone. Live and let live is what I say. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me, so we get along fine. If they say the same about me, it’s perfectly all right. That means we’re even Steven.” Petry, The Narrows, 208–9.
74. Ibid., 301.
75. It could be argued that Petry was quite ahead of her time if one compares Mamie to Toni Morrison’s Sula, a character created decades later.
76. And here, I want to double back to an earlier scene between Al and Powther, when Al admits to Powther his resentment of the new butler because of Al’s own internalized racism and the threat of economic competition with a black man. In this scene, Petry exposes the seamy underside of interracial socioeconomic competition. Despite Al’s sincerity and forthright attempt at friendship, that racialized hostility later erupts in his condemnation of Camilo when her affair with Link is exposed. Yet this same Al crudely lusts after a black woman – Mamie – that he simultaneously sexually harasses and treats with contempt. Even as Al’s pornographic gaze is revealed uncouth and hypocritical, it connects Mamie to a longer history of the black woman in Western history and culture, signifying, through both Malcolm and Mamie Powther, the tangled position of black people in the American socioeconomic landscape and within our extended modernity.
77. Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar, 64.
78. While Abbie Crunch invests in white supremacist thinking, she nevertheless is a firm believer that whites and blacks should maintain clear social distance – in part because of her ambivalent (and class-inflected) black pride. Note her rage when she finds the naked Camilo sleeping with Link in his bed. Petry, The Narrows, 249–56. On the other hand, Bill, Weak Knees, and Old Man John the Barber all respond with scorn and resentment to the anonymous Camilo who “pollutes” The Last Chance and refuses to leave Link alone. As John the Barber growls: “Tell her to go do her huntin’ in her own part of town, Bill. Tell her to stop stinkin’ up the place with perfume. Tell her to stop haulin’ her long hot lookin’ legs in and outta that car out in front of here. Who’s she think she is?” Ibid., 304. John the Barber’s pique appears as much a matter of class and racial resentment as his own sexism and suppressed desire.
79. Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar, 63.
80. However, I do want to limit my claims: Mamie is not presented as a prostitute, erotic performer, or sex worker and I am not suggesting this by incorporating Miller-Young’s trenchant insights into my analysis of Petry’s novel.
81. Washington, Invented Lives, 301–2.
82. The converse of this is the status of black women, who are all too often not portrayed as glamorous sexual objects or celebrities, but as repulsively and/or comically hypersexual or asexual and invisible.
83. In fact, Camilo functions as the novel’s femme noire, the (anti)heroine who threatens the sexual order through her border crossings into spaces of racial/class otherness. Rabinowitz, Black and White and Noir, 63–4.
84. Petry, The Narrows, 302.
85. Ibid., 303.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., 303–4.
88. Ibid., 300.
89. Naremore, More Than Night, 22.
90. Ibid., 40.
91. See, for instance, Richard Wright’s Native Son, with his mother, his sister, whom Bigger terrorizes with the dead rat, and his girlfriend, Bessie, whom he rapes and murders in order to conceal his killing of Mary Dalton; Chester Himes’s Bob Jones of If He Hollers Let Him Go, whose upper-crust, light-skinned girlfriend, Alice, is brittle and castrating; and, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with the supportive African-American landlady, Mary, a maternal/mammy figure the anonymous narrator leaves behind without a second thought in his quest for greatness. In all three of these seminal novels, it can be argued that though black women are present, it is the white woman – sexually charged object of desire and animus – who propels the hero into what will be his ultimate fate. Black women are often constructed as a convenience – or an inconvenience. Conversely, the heroines of Petry’s black, female peers are often fair-skinned, including those of Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Dorothy West.
92. In doing so, Abbie tries to save Camilo from Bill Hod’s murderous vengeance, despite the irony and injustice of Camilo having precipitated Link’s death.
93. Petry, The Narrows, 427. While Mamie’s actions are once again narrated, as pointed out earlier by Washington, it is not Powther who provides it. Rather, the narrative perspective shifts to JC, who recounts the behavior of both of his parents, Powther as well as Mamie.