Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry’s The Street

She stood there thinking that it was really a pity they couldn't somehow manage to rent the halls, too. Single beds. No. Old army cots would do. It would bring in so much more money. If she were a landlord, she'd rent out the hallways. It would make it so much more entertaining for the tenants. Mr. Jones and wife could have cots number one and two; Jackson and girl friend could occupy number three. And Rinaldi, who drove a cab nights, could sublet the one occupied by Jackson and girl friend. She would fill up all the cots--row after row of them. And when the tenants who had apartments came in late at night, they would have the added pleasure of checking up on the occupants. Jackson not home yet but girl friend lying in the cot alone--all curled up. A second look, because the lack of light wouldn't show all the details, would reveal--ye gods, why, what's Rinaldi doing home at night! Doggone if he ain't tucked up cozily in Jackson's cot with Jackson's girl friend. No wonder she looked contented. And the tenants who had apartments would sit on the stairs just as though the hall were a theater and the performance about to start--they'd sit there waiting until Jackson came home to see what he'd do when he found Rinaldi tucked into the cot with his girl friend. (7-8) In this early passage from Ann Petry's novel, The Street, protagonist Lutie Johnson muses with both irony and indignation on the violations of privacy that segregation and its attendant overcrowding engender in 1940s Harlem. Because in this scene Lutie is confronting both severe financial difficulties and the grim prospect of renting an apartment in the tenement that she is scrutinizing, one might interpret her arch fantasy of beds in the halls as nothing more than a bitter indictment of slumlordship and the social ills it breeds. Students of literary realism, however, will recognize in this passage a familiar self-reflexive gesture toward the complex scopic politics of that genre. As Mark Seltzer has demonstrated, writers from Charles Dickens to sensationalist social commentator George R. Sims have figured their representations of urban spaces in such "theatrical" terms, characterizing their very act of describing life in the modern city as a "taking down of the fourth wall" (33). In this case, Lutie's cynical vision of exposing beds and their occupants' indiscretions can be read as a moment of self-scrutiny by Petry herself. Petry seems to ask whether, in her attempt to dramatize the traumas of racism and segregation, she is actually exploiting those she wishes to champion, turning the intimate dramas of their lives into a public spectacle for her own gain. Is she, in short, a slumlord of the imagination, creating through literature a space that exposes the lives of African Americans to public scrutiny in a way few slumlords in the material world would dare? In his meditation on the novels of Henry James, Seltzer argues that the realist and naturalist project of enjoining readers to a position of spectatorship is fully implicated in another mode of seeing, that of "surveillance and policing" (45). The passage from The Street I have quoted above certainly shows traces of such a collaboration, traces of the "twin operations of vision and supervision, of spectatorship and incrimination" that Seltzer locates in realist and naturalist novels (34). For Lutie not only imagines a scene in which the lives of Harlem denizens become theater; she also characterizes the arrangement as one in which the tenants "check up" on one another. Such surveillance, Petry implies, would be motivated by a sense that wrongs are going to be committed, that a norm or standard of conduct, which Foucault suggests always underwrites acts of supervision, will be violated and that that violation must be somehow registered (Discipline and Punish 177-84). If we accept the correspondence that I sketched above between the scene this passage depicts and Petry's own project of exposing the complexities of Harlem life to public scrutiny, then here we can imagine that Petry is acknowledging the degree to which her book not only sells the spectacle of Harlem, but polices it as well. …