A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion

Bibliographic Data

ID4546541
AuthorsKeith Clark (0009-0008-1046-1368, corresponding author)
Year1992
Volume26
Issue3
Pages495
Publication date1992-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican American Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1062-4783 • E-ISSN: 1945-6182
PublisherPenn State Press (Project Muse) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3041921
OpenAlexW2442776752
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited5

he has been a prominent subject in literature, especially during first half of twentieth century. Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Miller-all of these writers have depicted characters in search of utopian dream, few of whom find it. Their African-American counterparts' variation on this mythic search has followed a similar pattern in that their characters have also sought psychological and material fulfillment-a fact making Ralph Ellison's declaration that the values of my own people are neither 'white' nor 'black,' they are American (Shadow and Act 270) particularly resonant. But unlike Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, men whose demons are internal, most black protagonists prior to 1960s have faced flesh-and-blood demons. Black Bigger Thomas differs substantially from white Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, for race and class of black character preclude even marginal access to Dream and its attendant creature comforts. At least prior to Civil Rights Movement, then, Lift yourself up by your rang as a specious aphorism, since typical black protagonists in protest fiction neither owned bootstraps nor had access to means of acquiring them. While something of an anachronism in 1990s, AfricanAmerican protest novel of 1940s and 1950s maintained a symbiotic relationship with mythic Dream: It decried a history of racism which made achieving Dream a chimera for blacks. While Richard Wright is considered father of genre, and Native Son (1940) its quintessential document, Ann Petry emerged as another strident voice-a progenitor or native daughter. While her novel The Narrows (1953) deviated somewhat, it nevertheless continued Wrightian tradition. Link Williams, protagonist, differs superficially from Bigger in that he has attained a Dartmouth education and enjoys relative freedom from economic hardships; it would appear that he has means to acquire bootstraps over which Bigger can only ruminate. However, Link's success' cannot shield him in an America which insists upon his inhumanity. When he breaks taboos of class and race by having an affair with a white heiress, his violent murder becomes ritual-an inexorable response to a black stepping out of his place. While Petry's New England novel echoes Native Son thematically, more ostensibly it also foregrounds black male as victim of an America which denies African-Americans their very personhood. But in The Street (1946), Petry recasts Herculean quest for Dream in an unequivocally female context. Indeed, novel represents

Art · Art history · Dream · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Subversion · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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