Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Ann Petry’s literary work The Street explores the reality of subjugation in the
early 20th century towards the workingwoman, the African American community, and the
American dream
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Immediately upon entering the Harlem street, a fog of hopelessness clouds the
possibilities of a new lifestyle
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Petry’s personification of the wind leaves it with the ability to think for itself: it
“discourages… grabs… pries… (2)” all the beings of the street and amplifies its humanlike characteristics that turn nature into an antagonist force
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While she enters the street to
discover a sort of freedom from her past circumstances, she becomes aware of her
stagnant social status because “if you were black and you lived in New York and you
could only pay so much rent, why, you had to live in a house like this one
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Lutie chooses to adapt to such a deliberate, negative force dominating the urban
setting
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Throughout her life, her male counterparts objectify her
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As a
woman she is objectified because of her beauty: white women label her as a whore who

threatens their marriage while men spend their time “estimating her, summing her up,
wandering up her (Petry 13)
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Throughout the constant objectifying tone of Petry, from the
atmosphere of the street to the daily hurdles Lutie must surpass, she as a protagonist must
find the motivations to overcome the surface struggles that are analogous with the
worldly economic, social, and emotional situation of the time
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While the white work force has drawn up this achievable and prosperous idea of what a
future appears to be, the black community is left to “shining shoes and washing clothes
and scrubbing floor for years and years (70)
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” This realistic denunciation of a reachable and
picturesque lifestyle leaves it to be only a facile dream by the end of the novel
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