"Same Train be Back Tomorrer": Ann Petry's The Narrows and the Repetition of History
1 In interviews and writings from the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Petry frequently laments the decline in the current state of life in urban ghettos, remarking that it is worse than it was when she wrote The Street, a 1946 bestseller. "The sad truth about The Street is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto," she writes in a 1988 autobiographical essay (Contemporary Authors 265). In 1992 she told the Washington Post something similar: where ghetto life and race relations in the United States are concerned, "everything is worse" than it has ever been (Streitfeld E2). Petry's writing, especially Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), is preoccupied with this question--is the world getting any better? Surely this is a universal human concern, especially as she asks this question not only of ghetto life, but also of American society and of civilization in general. But the question carries with it some obvious variations and corollaries: "For whom is the world getting better?" and "In whose terms shall we define `better'?" The inquiry into the possibility of moral progress in society maps out, roughly, as a variation on the momentous and familiar question that African American writers have long been asked to address: whether or not to take a stand on matters of politics and sociology. The "yes" side --commitment to politically contentious fiction--implies the possibility of progress, remediation, and transition, while the "no" side--an apolitical aesthetic--implies in its resistance to historicism a belief in fallen human nature, mired in repetition. So the very question of history's progress or stasis occupies the shifting middle ground between what has been labeled sociology and what has been labeled art. In the years shortly following their publication, critics commended Country Place and The Narrows because these novels transcended racial themes. In the past two decades, critics often ignore them for what I suspect is the same reason--there is no clear message about group affiliations, either race or gender.(1) While some critics continue to think political messages preclude artistry, there has come to be considerable disagreement on aesthetic matters. Cheryl Wall charts the slightly more preponderant viewpoint of today when she points out that African American writers, in contrast to writers in the white mainstream of American fiction, are supposed to be political in their intentions (286). Petry's concern in her later novels with historical progress or its lack is perhaps evidence of the alleged non-group-specificity of her themes. In The Narrows, the novel to which I will devote most of my discussion, suffering is often inescapable, an equal opportunity assailant. But the hope of easing racial oppression by decrying it competes with this sense of inevitability, and one significant sign of the world's improvement would be the improvement in the status of oppressed groups. Even allowing for early praise accorded to The Narrows for its universal themes, most of the scholarly work done on Petry has been devoted to her first novel, The Street, an attempt at realistic depiction of Harlem life during the depression. For advocates of a Black Aesthetic that collapses the distinction between politics and art, The Street offers a focused, unrelenting downward spiral that communicates an important sociological message about the hollowness of the American Dream; meanwhile, black feminist criticism is attracted to it for its image of multiple oppression, among the most successful early attempts at such images in black American women's fiction, particularly as its protagonist is a dark-skinned black (see, for example, Gloria Wade-Gayles and Barbara Christian). The Street goes beyond interrogating the categories of race, class, and gender, and in fact shows that when one is a member of several oppressed groups, the condition cannot be accounted for simply by adding or multiplying. …
1. ‘‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’’. Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives
In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God the elderly ex-slave Nanny explains to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under slavery. She emphasizes the necessary, corrective force of sexual repression within nascent free-black communities. Nanny wants Janie to understand why the benefits of Janie's financially stable, virtually asexual marriage to a man three times her age outweigh the prospects of a romantic union and sexual gratification with a man Janie likes. Nanny tells Janie that "us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways" (16). What Nanny's pronouncement reveals is that slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic familial relationships. Not only did the institution deny slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds, insidiously it also assaulted their sexuality, robbing them of the basic rights of bodily autonomy and sexual choice. (1) Through Nanny, Hurston describes this violating, soul-shattering feature of slavery and its cumulative generational effects on black identity formation even after slavery's formal abolition is "queer." This essay reads literary renderings of black enslavement as founding articulations of a plausible connection between the institutionalization of sexual violence and racial subordination in slavery and modern theories of sexual difference. Tracing certain modern epistemologies of sexuality to the era before the late nineteenth century--their acknowledged moment of formal entrance into the ideological order--I suggest that representations of sexual perversity under conditions of enslavement have contributed to notions of sexual alterity and to the ideologies by which aberrant sexual practices were named, domesticated, and policed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many scholars, including Lisa Duggan, Siobhan Somerville, and Sander Gilman, note that the development of discrete sexual categories in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discursive and legislative deployment of racial theories to support coercive regimes of race-based social stratification between black and white citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. (2) Discourses of racial and sexual pathology contributed significantly to juridical measures (like legal segregation) and acts of racial terrorism (like lynching) that prevented black Americans from accessing the full entitlements of citizenship after slavery's formal end. Here I show that the era, institution, and literary representation of slavery helped to shape emergent models of sexual difference. The entwinement of violent racial separatism, sexual regulation, and the discursive production of bodily difference that characterizes the late nineteenth century may be usefully traced back to the institutional patterns of slavery and to the theories of black inferiority promulgated by its proponents and practitioners. This paper reads Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to analyze the interrelation of sexuality, race, identity, and social order in the middle of the nineteenth century. As canonical exemplars of the slave narrative form, Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents not only evidence the material history of slavery but also manifest the power of literature to shape the cultural construction of identity, fantasy, and ideology. That the written testimonies of Douglass and Jacobs grapple at all with the relation of nonheteronormative sexual practices to (sexual and racial) identity formation suggests that we may productively extend modern theorizations of sexual identity to an earlier historical moment and locate them, at least partially, in the sexual deviance and sexual violence of the slave plantation. (3) This paper contends, then, that the brutal enslavement of black people, their legal definition as three-fifths human, and the social economic, and legislative practices of slavery helped to institute not only whiteness but the very notions of the person, the citizen, the normal and the heterosexual as well. …
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":