The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

4. “OPPOSITIONAL GOTHIC”: The Street and Ann Petry’s Place in the Literature of Terror

93 4 “oppositional gothic” The Street and Ann Petry’s Place in the Literature of Terror Insofar as Gordon Pym is finally a social document as well as a fantasy, its subject is slavery; and its scene, however disguised, is the section of America which was to destroy itself defending that institution. It is, indeed, to be expected that our first eminent Southern author discover that the proper subject for American gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged. —Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel The Gothic is used as an answer to this patriarchal paradigm. It seems that whenever women reach back to find a literary form to convey protest, or rage, or terror, or even humor, they find the Gothic. It seems that the Gothic form allows us—as readers and as writers—to express the conflict for which patriarchy has had no name. —Juliann Fleenor, introduction to The Female Gothic Viewed collectively, the titles of canonical and lesser-known African American texts project a long-standing—if unintentional—concern with the nexus between blackness, fear, and terror. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There; “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare”; Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self; Invisible Man; Shadow and Act; The Spook Who Sat by the Door; A Visitation of Spirits; Let the Dead Bury Their Dead—these titles’ common bloodline is that they pulsate with gothic traits: the split or divided self, a theme which has epidermal, psychological, spatial, and national implications; the preternatural concern with blackness as the unconscious horror haunting the personal and collective white American psyche; the omnipresence of blackness as a befouling but ineradicable presence in the American psychic landscape; and the irrepressible materiality of those things designated alien and grotesque—the black, the female, the homosexual, the the radical fiction of ann petry 94 nationally dispossessed, all of which constitute an abject morass sullying America’s mythic sense of innocence, equality, and opportunity. If the “unspeakable” is “one of the most distinctive of Gothic tropes” (Sedgwick, Between Men 94)—not “unspeakable” simply in the Morrisonian sense of enslavement and its interminably malignant physical and psychological legacy—then the gothic is and has been securely implanted in the black literary imagination, from Phillis Wheatley’s eighteenth-century entreaties on behalf of her “benighted” race in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” to Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, a contemporary exhumation of the black gay experience from the canonical burial ground in which forebear James Baldwin’s homocentric narratives are too often interred. Incontrovertibly, “certain aspects of the American experience may be understood as inherently Gothic: religious intensities, frontier immensities , isolation, and violence; above all, perhaps, the shadows cast by slavery and racial attitudes” (Lloyd-Smith 25). The central irony, of course, is that the gothic in America has been traditionally viewed as the purview of canonical white male authors, as Fiedler’s fulsome claim attests. While Poe may have “colonized” the form for literary descendants Twain, James, Faulkner, et al., Gordon Pym preceded the most gothic of American autobiographies, Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, by a mere seven years. Unacknowledged in Fiedler’s somewhat myopic comment is, then, that the generative genre of African American literature, the slave narrative, is suffused in gothic imagery and tropes. And since the crucible of the African American novel is the slave narrative, it follows that writers as diverse and as temporally vast as Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, and Gloria Naylor, whether they acknowledge it or not, find the black gothic an apposite and effective mode of discourse for articulating the dis-ease of different forms of dispossession and alienation in the Anglo-American historical and cultural consciousness. “I Am a Conjure Woman”: Toward a Theory of Petry’s Hybridized Gothic The historical atrocities visited upon black bodies render gothic a fertile discursive landscape for the African American literary imagination.1 95 “oppositional gothic” Given the scores of African American texts that could be placed under the gothic rubric, the terror inflicted on African Americans provides the mise-en-scène for the black literary imagination: Though it is a contestable point, one could nonetheless make the case that, at least through the 1960s, the preponderance of black literature might...