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"It Could Have Been Any Street": Ann Petry, Stephen Crane, and the Fate of Naturalism

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.2006.0014

2158-5806

Don Dingledine,

Themes in Literature Analysis

"IT COULD HAVE BEEN ANY STREET": ANN PETRY, STEPHEN CRANE, AND THE FATE OF NATURALISM Don Dingledine University of Wisconsin Oshkosh In the famous opening scene of his first novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893, Stephen Crane writes: A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him. His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths. "Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child. "Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."1 This is the reader's introduction to the streets of Crane's lower Manhattan and to the people who inhabit them, most notably Jimmie Johnson, Maggie's brother. We are not alone in witnessing the battle described: "From a window of an apartment house . . . there leaned a curious woman." Fifty-three years later, in 1946, Ann Petry includes a strikingly similar scene in her first novel, The Street. This street is in Harlem, and this "desperate battle" is waged not with rocks but with garbage: Kids were using bags of garbage from the cans lined up along the curb as ammunition. The bags had broken open, covering the sidewalk with litter, filling the air with a strong, rancid smell. Here, as in Maggie, a woman watches from a window. Mrs. Hedges, who runs a house ofprostitution from her apartment, "was leaning far out of her window." Whereas Crane's onlooker is silent, Mrs. Hedges speaks, "urging the contestants on." The name of the child to whom she calls out suggests that the echo of Crane's Maggie is more than coincidence: "That's right, Jimmie. . . . Hit him on the head." And then as 88Don Dingledine the bag went past its mark, "Aw, shucks, boy, what's the matterwith your aim?"2 This is a deliberate invocation of Crane, I believe, indicating a multifaceted , heretofore unnoticed dialogue between Ann Petry's The Street and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.3 The Street holds the distinction of being the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies. The novel's success brought Ann Petry widespread praise and immediate fame. Translations appeared around the globe—in France, Brazil, Israel, and Japan, for example—soon after its publication; in 1953, Raj Ratna Pictures of Bombay requested Petry's permission to adapt The Street into "an Indian-Hindi picture," "with slight modifications to suit the conditions in India."4 Today, critics often emphasize Petry's influence on later generations of black women writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Less frequently, Petry is studied in the context of black novelists, all men, who turned to naturalism in the 1940s, including Chester Himes, William Attaway, and Richard Wright. Less frequently still is this group ofAfrican American naturalists from the 1940s, with or without Petry, studied in the context of white naturalists—such as Theodore Dreiser, FrankNorris, andStephen Crane—whoprecededthem. The possibility that Ann Petry engages Stephen Crane in her writing has not been entertained.5 In her introduction to Son Canons, a collection of essays blurring the lines between "masculine and feminine, . . . black and white, straight and gay, [and] Western and Eastern" traditions, Karen Kilcup acknowledges the necessity of"explorfing] minoritizedwritingby itself," but she also suggests that "it may be more beneficial at this moment of cultural fragmentation in the United States to inquire into the conversationsbetween, and even the meshings of, 'traditions.'"6 One cannot help but notice a troubling irony in how ourtendency to segregate literary traditions along lines ofrace and gender, while essential and productive in many ways, can keep us from noticing a black woman's dialogue with one of America's best-known white male writers in a novel that is, at heart, a blistering critique ofthe color line. Maggie is an important early representation ofurban poverty and a logical influence for Petry's novel. But it is a troubled inheritance...