surveillance and spectatorship in Ann Petry
(1) In the first decades after its publication, especially, The Street was routinely classified as a naturalist novel of the „Richard Wright school.“ Later waves of critics have resisted thinking of Petry’s novel in these terms, however, instead identifying „a more complex structure that expands the boundaries of the traditional naturalistic novel“ (McKay 127). These more recent critical accounts have focused on Petry’s feminist concerns, as well as specific thematic elements of the text, such as its recurrent allusions to Benjamin Franklin, conjuring, and the blues. Yet, now that Petry’s distinctive gifts have been acknowledged and her originality of thought and expression has been appropriately credited, I want to suggest that there is good to be gained by once more placing Petry’s first novel in relationship to the work of Wright and Ellison. (3) Indeed, I believe that even briefly turning to their fiction illuminates a central concern within The Street that has never been addressed: namely, the dynamics of spectatorship and surveillance that animate the racist social formation of Harlem.
In Wright’s Native Son, of course, vision and failures of vision serve as a central trope for the racial animosity that has spawned Bigger Thomas’s homicidal consciousness. In particular, Mrs. Dalton, the blind mother of Bigger’s first victim, serves as a figure for the blindness of both blacks and whites to the complexities of racism. Bigger spells out Mrs. Dalton’s symbolic function explicitly, reflecting that „a lot of people were like Mrs. Dalton, blind.“(107). At a critical moment of epiphany, Bigger suddenly understands the ideological apparatus that has shackled him in similar terms: „He felt that [his family] wanted and yearned to see life in a certain way; they needed a certain picture of the world; there was one way of living they preferred above all others; and they were blind to what did not fit. They did not want to see what others were doing if that doing did not fit their own desires“ (106). Again and again Wright returns to the idea that the blacks and whites in his text blunder forward, uns eeing, toward fates that have been predetermined by power dynamics that render their environment as invisibly lethal as a minefield. (4) Twelve years after the publication of Wright’s novel, Ralph Ellison would produce a brilliant meditation on racism in Invisible Man, and once again the experience of not being seen served as a central metaphor for the effects of American racism.
While it is clear that a metaphorics of vision is central to the projects of both Wright and Ellison, virtually no notice has been given to the similar centrality of the ocular to Petry’s own highly influential depiction of twentieth century race relations. Wright and Ellison figured the power dynamics of race as matters of blindness and invisibility, respectively; Petry, on the other hand, depicts the dynamics of 1940s‘ Harlem in terms of visibility and, more particularly, in terms of looking and watching. At a number of key moments in The Street, which is set in Harlem in the 1940s, her characters attempt to articulate their experience of what E. Ann Kaplan calls the „imperial gaze.“ (5) In a crucial early scene Lutie, The Street’s protagonist, for instance, struggles to explain to her eight year old son Bub „‚why . white people want colored people shining shoes'“ (71). Lutie’s reply suggests the centrality of the act of looking to the racism against which Petry’s characters must incessantly struggle:
She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled „colored“; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn’t know what it w as.
„I don’t know, Bub,“ she said finally. „But it’s for the same reason we can’t live anywhere else but in places like this“ she indicated the cracked ceiling, the worn top of the set tub, and the narrow window, with a wave of the paring knife in her hand. (71 72)
Petry establishes here the degree to which race must be regarded as a specular matter. At the heart of race is the „shock“ of looking and adidas maniaadidas outlet the complexities of embodiment that the superficiality of racial thinking resists. Yet, as it is presented in this early scene, the connection between race and the gaze is also a mystery, a riddle. Lutie cannot formulate the precise relation between vision and race in response to Bub’s question. Petry’s larger project can be understood in part as an attempt to capture the intricate mesh of vision, race, and hate that the answer to a child’s simple question could never encompass. (6)
As many critics have pointed out, however, race is only one part of the puzzle in The Street. Racial dynamics co mingle with economic imperatives and sexual impulses in the text, creating a chaotic struggle in which the power vested in acts of looking and watching seems the only constant. Indeed, in this essay I want to explore Petry’s distinctive variation on what bell hooks has termed „black looks,“ and what E. Ann Kaplan terms „looking relations.“ (7) I maintain that, in the acts of looking Petry foregrounds within the narrative, she produces a distinctive view of the relationship between a mode of watching driven by sexual desire and that propelled by a pervasive will to power between, that is, spectatorship and surveillance within the context of American constructions of racial identity. In portraying both the tension and complicity between these modes of watching, Petry presents a complex knot of oppression and resistance between whites and blacks, men and women in 1940s‘ Harlem.
Most urgently, as I will demonstrate below, the dynamics Petry conjures between these modes of watching emphasize the continuity between sexual and racial oppression. The Super begins as Lutie’s sexual oppressor, yet by the conclusion of the text, as a consequence of his sexual obsession with her, he has learned to marshal the powers of a white government against his victim, becoming complicit with its racist ideology. Likewise, while Mrs. Hedges initially functions as the primary figure of surveillance in the text, we are ultimately made to understand that her complicity with the powerful white man Junto springs from a history of sexual marginalization. Meanwhile, Lu tie is chronically watched by Junto himself, who, despite his ostensible racial equanimity, comes to gaze upon her as a whore because of a racist ideology that defines all black women that way. The way her characters look at one another, that is, serves as Petry’s chief means of dramatizing the degree to which sexist ideology inspires racist pra ctice, and vice versa. Petry’s preoccupation with spectatorship and surveillance becomes her primary means of expressing not merely the burden a black woman faces as the object of both racism and sexism, but also the degree to which these forms of hatred can treacherously morph into one another. Finally, however, ocular acts are not presented exclusively as expressions of these deeply imbricated forms of hatred. Instead, near the conclusion of the text, she imagines a moment in which both racial and sexual hatred are shed through the act of looking itself and, in so doing, identifies potential in both modes of seeing to create solidarity and mutual understanding between the embattled blacks she portrays.
To better understand Petry’s meditation on the „scopic regime“ of 1940s‘ Harlem, I believe it is useful to turn to British art historian Griselda Pollock’s remarkable essay „Feminism/Foucault Surveillance/Sexuality.“ (8) I choose Pollock’s work because, unlike a number of scholars who have addressed the interface between psychoanalytic theories of the gaze and Foucault’s discussions of surveillance as a modern practice, Pollock insists on not only a profound interconnection between the two, but also important differences that prove crucial in Petry’s work. (9) Specifically, Pollock interrogates „the conditions under which working[ ]class women became the object of fascinated looking and of a disciplinary investigation in the nineteenth century“ by investigating the ways female coal miners were regarded by the middle class men who debated the decency of their choice to wear trousers in their mining work. In the course of her discussion, Pollock establishes a key distinction between „fascinated looking“ and „d isciplinary investigation.“ Connecting the former with „the mechanism and processes associated with the unconscious,“ she claims that these unconscious drives, in their „unpredictable and destabilizing plays of fascination, curiosity, dread, desire, and horror,“ complicate or, to use her term, „furrow“ „the will to know and the resultant relations of power“ (9).
Having posited this distinction between „sexuality and surveillance,“ Pollock proceeds to demonstrate the ways that these modes of perception „mutually constructed each other in the interests of bourgeois men“ (10). Within the historical context she studies, sexualized „fascinated looking“ occurs simultaneously with the disciplinary gaze while being distinct from it: „Sexual difference is a constant problem. Its deviations and instabilities must be monitored, explored, and tracked down by those with the competence to examine, assess, investigate, that is to subject these other populations to a surveying and disciplining gaze“ (32). In short, the fascinated desire to watch sexualized bodies both impels and is impelled by the „exploitation [of the body] as an object of knowledge and an element in relations of power“ (33). Ultimately, she claims, „sexuality both collaborates with and disrupts the technologies and discourses of disciplinary surveillance“ (38).
While Pollock’s discussion focuses on inter class looking among whites, her formulations serve as a useful lens through which to understand the complex relations between blacks and between whites and blacks in Petry’s vision of Harlem. Specifically, I want to demonstrate that Petry’s novel constructs a picture of social relations in Harlem in which two distinct, but interdependent, modes of looking are in operation. As in the case of Pollock’s discussion, they may be understood as spectatorship and surveillance, and they likewise exist in a relation of both tension and reciprocity.
There are two characters who most completely embody the looking relations that concern Petry „The Super,“ the superintendent of the building into which Lutie reluctantly moves at the beginning of the novel, and Mrs. Hedges, the whorehouse madame who throughout the narrative remains stationed at a prominent window watching the eponymous 116th Street. Near the outset of the text, Lutie distinguishes between their specular modes, attempting to gauge which is more menacing: „Somehow the man’s eyes,“ she muses, „were worse than the eyes of the woman sitting in the window“ (9). As I will discuss below, it is far from clear that the text depicts one of their modes of looking as more dangerous than the other. Yet I believe that it is appropriate to take the cue Petry provides here and examine how she constructs their respective modes of watching as distinct from one another.
In his ceaseless ogling of women, the Super seems an exemplary case of the sort of „fascinated looking“ Pollock associates with sexual desire and that psychoanalytic theory broadly treats as the „male gaze.“ In scene after scene in the novel, the Super stands on the street, „looking at the women who went past, estimating them, wanting them“ (87). His gaze reduces them to objectified parts; they disintegrate, in his eyes, into „well shaped hips“ (85) or „well shaped legs that quivered where the flesh curved to form the calf“ (288).
Yet it is the Super’s dogged pursuit of Lutie that becomes truly emblematic of a voyeuristic gaze. In their opening encounter, Lutie immediately experiences the Super’s regard as an affront: „For after his first quick furtive glance, his eyes had filled with a hunger so urgent that she was instantly afraid of him and afraid to show her fear“ (10). The degree to which the Super’s aggressive watching of Lutie in this scene is a controlling, patriarchal act is symbolically conveyed by his possession of a „long black flashlight“ (11). Overtly represented as the phallus („The flashlight was a shiny black smooth and gleaming faintly as the light lay along its length. Whereas the hand that held it was flesh dull, scarred, worn flesh no smoothness there“ [12]), the flashlight symbolically equates the Super’s ability to see with an ability to rape. (10) The power he commands is underscored in the scene, when, as he points the flashlight downward, it „turn[s] him into a figure of never ending tallness“ (14). In a scene that does justice to Petry’s naturalist forebears, Petry telegraphs the degree to which sexual coercion and the act of looking will be conflated in the figure of the Super. (11)
Importantly, however, in this initial confrontation, Lutie is also armed with a flashlight, and although she is desperately afraid that she will drop the light („she gripped the flashlight so tightly that the long beam of light from it started wavering and dancing over the walls so that the shadows moved . shifting, moving back and forth“ [17]), she manages to retain her own command of the light and, hence, the gaze. A long hard look, malignant, steady, continued. Lutie’s choice to retaliate against the Super’s oppressive attention by beaming at him a look of her own foregrounds the level at which Petry is methodically interrogating the stakes of looking in her narrative.
Yet Lutie is only momentarily successful if at all in resisting the Super’s oppressive gaze. Eventually, the Super’s obsession compels him to enter Lutie’s apartment when only her son is home. Once again, Petry stages the scene in terms that foreground the Super’s compulsive need to look and see. „He would see how the place looked,“ she writes. „He would see her bedroom“ (101). Once again the scene culminates with an extraordinary presentation of phallic imagery. After investigating all of the rooms, the Super fixes on a lipstick that Lutie has left on her table:
Jones was staring at a lipstick that was on the table top. It had been lying close to the bowl of flowers so that he hadn’t noticed it. The case was ivory colored and there was a thin line of scarlet that went all the way around the bottom of it. He kept staring at the lipstick and almost involuntarily he reached out without moving his chair and picked it up. He pulled the top off and looked at the red stick inside. It was rounded from use and the smoothness of the red had a grainy look from being rubbed over her mouth.
He wanted to put it against his lips. That’s the way her mouth would smell and it would feel like this stuff, only warm. (105)
Laura Mulvey has famously posited that, when gazing at women on the screen, male spectators escape their fear of lack of the phallus their fear of castration by either voyeurism or „the substitution of a fetish object“ (438). (12) Here the Super clearly disavows castration by associating Lutie with the „red stick,“ and this projection becomes even more apparent when Bub, sensing the impropriety of the Super’s apparent fixation on the object, snatches it from him „in a swift, instinctive, protective gesture“ (105). The Super laments his loss:
There ought to be some way of getting that lipstick away from him. It would be good to hold it in his hands at night before he went to sleep so that the sweet smell would saturate his nostrils. He could carry it in his pocket where he could touch it during the day and take it out and fondle it down in the furnace room.
When he stood outside on the street, he wouldn’t have to touch it, but he would know it was there lying deep in his pocket. He could almost feel it there now warm against him. (106)
Possessing the lipstick would allow the Super to conquer his sense of lack: adidas zx flux The proof of the phallus would be there, „lying deep in his pocket“ (106).
This passage, like the flashlight episode, makes Petry’s debt to the work of Freud unmistakable. (13) What is more striking, however, is the degree to which Petry’s work anticipates that of Laura Mulvey and other feminist film theorists. The moment in which Bub intercepts the lipstick becomes one of a series in which Petry depicts Bub and the Super as characters who understand one another who are, in fact, versions of the same man at different stages of experience. For my reading, Bub’s function in these terms is crucial because Bub is also relentlessly constructed as a spectator especially of film.
Bub’s own still latent potential to become the sort of compulsive scopophiliac that we must understand the Super to be is framed in the broadest sense by the loneliness that he shares with the Super. We are told in our first extended glimpse of the Super’s conduct as an ogler of women that his behavior is motivated by „the deadly loneliness that ate into him day and night. It was a loneliness born of years of living in basements and sleeping on mattresses in boiler rooms“ (85). This loneliness, which figures as lack, likewise informs the actions of Bub. Lutie discovers early in the text that Bub, to endure the tedious hours when she is at work, has developed a game:
He walked over to the window and stood there looking out, his chin resting on his hands.
„What are you looking at?“ she asked.
„The dogs down there,“ he said, pointing. „I call one of ‚em Mother Dog and the other Father Dog. There are some children dogs over yonder.“
She looked down in the direction in which he was pointing. Shattered fences divided the space in back of the houses into what had once been back yards. But as she looked, she thought it had become one yard, for the rusted tin cans, the piles of ashes, the pieces of metal from discarded automobiles, had disregarded the fences. The rubbish had crept through the broken places in the fences until all of it mingled in a disorderly pattern that looked from their top floor window like a huge junkpile instead of a series of small back yards. She leaned farther out the window to see the dogs Bub had mentioned. They were sleeping in curled up positions, and it was only by the occasional twitching of an ear or the infrequent moving of a tail that she could tell they were alive.