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[A]ll through the darkest period of the colored woman's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming that often ended in a to maintain and protect that which woman holds dearer than life. painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish material for epics.--Anna Julia Cooper, The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation 202 ********** black woman's embattled defense of her body and her right to sexual self-determination constitutes a recurring theme in African American women's literary tradition. Addressing the World's Congress of Representative Women held in Chicago in 1893, Anna Julia Cooper, like numbers of other black women intellectuals, activists, and writers in the last century and a hall emphasizes the vulnerability of black women to the sexual predations of white men (during and after slavery) and the stereotype of black female lasciviousness and licentiousness that has enabled and excused white men's rape--and the general sexual exploitation--of black women. (1) Cooper's description of these tribulations might register for some as excessive in tone; it is nonetheless an accurate marker of the intensity of black women's desire to own their own images, to define their own sexualities, to have the right to determine when, how, why, and with whom they will be sexual. If white women have been far from immune to sexual exploitation, characterization as whores, and even rape, white women of the middle and upper classes have at minimum been able to take some shelter in the rhetoric of idealized femininity (the Madonna side of the feminine dichotomy). African American women, regardless of class or conduct, have been excluded from this sorority of true womanhood and its protections. emotionally charged language of Cooper's speech--fearful ... odds, horrible death, and despairing fight--encourages her audience to participate affectively in African American women's experience of defenselessness. Cooper's construction of their struggle as frightening foreshadows Ann Petry's employment of the terminology of terror, over 50 years later, in her first novel. Published in 1946, Street is a fictional depiction of an African American woman's resolute, ultimately violent efforts at sexual self-determination. In this essay, I propose a reconsideration of Street that reckons with the extent to which social terror is constructed as a way of life for the mostly poor, African American residents of Harlem--but especially for the heroine, in her fight for control of her own sexuality. I locate the roots of Petry's language of fear in the literary conventions of the gothic genre, a fantastic, sensational tradition popularized in English by Ann Radcliffe's late-18th-century romances. (2) I juxtapose Petry's recourse to these gothic conventions with her novel's implicit analysis of the intersecting operations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and suggest the relationship of both to the tyrannical impact of domestic ideology upon the lives of African American women like Petry's heroine and even Petry herself. I highlight the novel's investment in the gothic, not to distinguish it within the African American literary tradition, but rather to gesture towards the extent to which Street is typical of African American literature, whose deeply woven threads of gothic and other fantastic elements go largely overlooked. (3) Recognizing the centrality of Petry's engagement with gothic conventions in Street extends and enriches our understanding of her work. For many years, the definitive reading of Street placed it squarely within the naturalist tradition, connecting Petry's work famously (and often disparagingly) with Richard Wright's Native Son. …
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