She stepped inside the grocery store, thinking that her apartment would do for the time being, but the next step she should take would be to move into a better neighborhood. As she had been able to get this far without help from anyone, why, all she had to do was plan each step and she could get wherever she wanted to go. A wave of self-confidence swept over her and she thought, I'm young and strong, there isn't anything I can't do. (Petry 63)

In her novel The Street, Ann Petry challenges the ideology of American capitalism, asking how a poor, Black woman can possibly attain the social and economic fulfillment promised by a bourgeois value system. The text depicts the struggle of a Black heroine who uncritically accepts America's sacrificial work ethic, radical individualism and cult of womanhood in her pursuit of economic and personal success. By constraining plot and characters within the conventional capitalist paradigm, Petry's text exposes the limitations and inherent contradictions of the market-driven "American Dream."

The dream explored in Petry's text is the dream of surplus prosperity which accrues to those at the top of a capitalist system. But this system requires the exploitation of many for the prosperity of a few, dehumanizing all, as Marx and Engels posited in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie...has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless...freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade" (Marx 25). The Street does not simply hypothesize that capitalism is generally exploitative, however. It explores the particular role played by race and gender oppression in such a system.

Petry's heroine Lutie Johnson is not just a victim of the class hierarchy of capitalism but specifically of the racism that buttresses and rationalizes that hierarchy in twentieth-century America. The dream that promises social mobility through ambition and hard work depends upon the perpetual existence of a population for whom the dream is not viable. In order to maintain class ascendancy, white elites must ensure a supply of laborers and consumers whom they need not include in their dream of becoming "filthy rich" through ever available "new markets" that produce "more and more" money (Petry 43).

In America, race is a primary marker differentiating those for whom the dream can and cannot apply. For instance, in Women, Race and Class Angela Davis observes that wealthy whites hold a mental construction of Blacks as menial servants. Explaining that polling has shown a preference among upper class white people for Black domestic help, she notes that

Racism works in convoluted ways. The employers who [think] they [are] complimenting Black people by stating their preference for them over whites [are] arguing in reality, that menial servants--slaves, to be frank--[are] what Black people [are] destined to be. (Davis 94)

colored people have been shining shoes and washing clothes and scrubbing floors for years and years. White people seem to think that's the only kind of work they're fit to do. The hard work. The dirty work. The work that pays the least...I'm not going to let you begin at eight doing what white folks figure all eight-year-old colored boys ought to do. (Petry 70)

In addition to a racially differentiated work force, the American economic system also dreams a bourgeois ideal of motherhood. As a result Lutie Johnson must fight not only racist limitations to achieve the American dream for herself and her son but also cultural demands that hobble her as a woman. In her book The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin examines how myths of the ideal mother serve the interests of the "free" market. Benjamin explains that just as the capitalist American dream depends on an ethic of individual hard work and achievement, it assumes the unpaid labor of those who maintain the home. The cult of motherhood cooperates with the ideal of autonomous individualism by insisting that women create nurturing environments which supposedly foster the development of male individuals (Benjamin 201).

In order to raise her son, Bub, so that he succeeds within capitalist paradigms, Lutie believes she must provide this idealized environment of feminine nurture and protection from the world, as well as a measure of economic stability. However, as Benjamin explains:

the sentimental ideal of motherhood is the product of the historic separation of public and private spheres that gave gender polarity its present form as an institutionalized opposition between male rationality and maternal nurturance. (Benjamin 206)

Petry's text nevertheless drives an uncritical Lutie to pursue only those options endorsed by a white supremacist, capitalist system. In order to test the truth claims of this paradigm, The Street limits itself to a tightly constrained capitalist framework. The text uses Lutie to find out what will happen to a Black woman if she carefully follows the same program which claims to lead every earnest individual to success. As a result the text does not allow Lutie or other characters to imagine any course of action outside pure, traditional "free market" alternatives. For Lutie, bourgeois motherhood is the heart of a woman's success in this capitalist world.

Petry's text establishes the pursuit of ideal motherhood as the primary impetus of the plot by making it the point of origin of Lutie's tragic decline. When Lutie's husband Jim can't find work to support the family, desperation forces them to look beyond bourgeois wage-earning norms. Lutie's father recommends that the couple take in foster children for the state. The Johnson family can live on these children's state-provided expense money. The survival of the entire family will, therefore, depend on Lutie's surplus mothering of these foster children.

With Lutie as the main provider for the family, trouble is not far away. In a text constrained by capitalism's bourgeois demands on women, Jim's inability to provide the family income is a threat to Lutie's role as mother. As Benjamin points out, in a bourgeois value system the breakdown of family is attributed "to the demise of the independent male wage earner...[For] bringing women into the public world is the main obstacle to restoring familial and social stability" (Benjamin 199). Though Lutie is not quite in the public world, her care of the state children brings this world into her home. This situation and Jim's joblessness transgress the ideal of an "independent male wage earner" and a cloistered homemaker. Given the parameters of the text, Lutie's family faces danger because of its deviation from American capitalism's approved gender roles.

Yet to Lutie, the solution seems perfect. She can earn money for the family without leaving the traditional female sphere of the home, and Jim can continue searching for a job. When the foster children arrive Lutie is convinced that her outstanding mothering will save her home and her family. The sheer labor involved in caring for six children combined with guilt at the thought that "two grown people and another child should be living on the money that was supposed to be used for the state children" (Petry 170) nearly exhaust her. Yet, she is proud of her domestic ability to nurture, clean and budget frugally for household expenses. When the state investigator compliments her housekeeping and care of the children she nearly bursts with pride: "she had to bite her lips to keep from saying that that wasn't half the story. She knew she was doing a fine job. She was feeding eight people on the money for five and squeezing out what amounted to rent money in the bargain" (Petry 171).

When, through no real fault of her own, the children are taken out of her home, Lutie blames herself. However, if anything, it is an excess of maternal concern that brings about the problem. Lutie's care for her father compels her to take him into her home. Refusing him would fall short of the motherhood ideal which demands that women prioritize familial obligations and provide nurturing environments and protective spaces for men. Ironically it is that same paradigm which requires Pop to make some kind of living while systematically denying him, a Black man, a legal means to do so. Lacking other means, he survives by selling bathtub gin. Pop's wild bootleg parties in Lutie's home eventually cause neighborhood complaints and the state children are removed. Rather than providing a protected home environment, Lutie's adherence to, and Pop's entrapment in, a market-driven system have forced the contradictory values of the pure home and cut-throat pursuit of capital into conflict.

Lutie does not see herself as a victim of the contradictory character of the system in which she struggles. Instead, just as the system tends to blame its problems on bad mothers, Lutie blames herself in a litany she repeats throughout the text, "It was her fault, really, that they lost their one source of income" (Petry 30). This initial loss propels Lutie to make up for her failure and try again to save her family, this time by hard, honest work and saving. Taking a domestic job at the affluent, white Chandler household, Lutie again follows the dictates of the American dream. Believing her good faith efforts will eventually pay off, she embraces her fantasy of bourgeois success by becoming "the perfect maid."

At the Chandlers' the text tests another of American capitalism's promises, that lawful, hard work and frugal habits pay off economically and socially. The Street now places Lutie at the very center of the American Dream. She represents the eager, honest newcomer to the system. The affluent Chandlers represent the rewards of the labor that Lutie will perform and the good habits she will perfect in their service.

Though Lutie does her best to live up to the dictates of a capitalist program for success, she is trapped in a tangle of contradictions from the start. The first of these is that her race predetermines that she cannot have a part of the success bourgeois capitalism reserves for non blacks alone. Secondly, living with the Chandlers, hours from her own home, makes it impossible for her to be an ideal wife-mother for Jim and Bub. This is really the only role the system allows her to have, if she is to claim the success it promises. The third contradiction is that the Chandlers, who seem to represent the epitome of the success Lutie seeks, are not really the sort of people Lutie aspires for herself and her family to be like.

Instead of being able to desert her dreams for an alternative to them, Lutie is trapped within the tight parameters of Petry's experiment. In response to the first contradiction above, the text simply keeps Lutie naive as to the subtler implications of racism, even as she experiences and recognizes it at the Chandlers'. Lutie tries to compensate for the second contradiction--her distance from Bub--by mothering Little Henry Chandler. In response to the third, Lutie finds traditional excuses for the Chandlers' unhappiness. Thus Petry's text dodges the potential impact of these contradictions by controlling them all within a capitalist framework of rationalization.

The contradiction of racism in a system that claims to provide equal opportunity for all is simply erased by a text which keeps Lutie ignorant of the full implications of the racial discrimination against her. She feels hurt by racist assumptions about her morality and the racial barriers Mrs. Chandler erects between herself and her maid. Yet, Lutie never realizes the extent to which it is impossible for a Black woman ever to be a Mrs. Chandler in the American capitalist paradigm. The racism of this juncture in the text also serves to keep Mrs. Chandler and Lutie apart. Though they often have friendly conversations, and though Mrs. Chandler gives Lutie gifts, racism prevents real solidarity between the two women. Such solidarity would necessarily threaten the agenda of the text to critique a capitalist framework that denies all but nuclear family solidarity between people.

The second contradiction of Lutie's isolation from her family is more difficult for the text to handle. When Lutie first discovers the advertisement for a maid, she notes that "it [is] a job for an unusual young woman, because it [is] in the country and most help [won't] stay" (Petry 30). Due to this weighty detail Lutie must leave her own husband and son to take the job. This is a severe violation of the ideal of motherhood and will disable Lutie's ability to fulfill the ideal. But Lutie believes the financial contribution she will be able to make will compensate for her abdication of domestic responsibility to her family. After all, it is this job that will literally save the home by allowing Jim to make mortgage payments.

Lutie also compensates for leaving her family by displacing her own anxieties about failure to nurture on her employer, Mrs. Chandler. Though Mrs. Chandler is safely ensconced in the domestic sphere through the financial support of Mr. Chandler, she passes many of her feminine "duties" on to Lutie. Not only does Mrs. Chandler abandon menial homemaking tasks, she also abdicates her role as mother. She provides no nurturance for her son, Little Henry, as Lutie notices:

Mrs. Chandler was [not] overfond of Little Henry; she never held him on her lap or picked him up and cuddled him the way mothers do their children. She was always pushing him away from her. (Petry 39)

In addition to her failure to mother Little Henry, Mrs. Chandler fails to be faithful to her husband. Lutie can thus displace her anxiety about missing Jim onto concerns about her employer's infidelity. When the Chandler's friends repeatedly and ironically imply that Lutie is sexually loose she doesn't understand why: "Queer how that was always cropping up. Here she was highly respectable, mother of a small boy..." (Petry 45). Lutie sees herself as an example of the bourgeois motherhood ideal. She is committed and faithful to her family. But the Chandlers' friends don't see her family relationship. They only see Lutie as a Black servant, someone absolutely outside the possibility of bourgeois constructs of respectability. This "respectable" status is ironically ascribed instead to Mrs. Chandler, also the mother of a small boy, but neither committed nor faithful to him or her husband. Whatever the Chandlers' friends say, through Lutie's intimate gaze, Mrs. Chandler is not-respectable as well as not-mother. Lutie can define herself as a good wife in spite of her distance from Jim by a comparison with Mrs. Chandler. Through doing so, Lutie also shields herself from the racial and sexual double-standards of her capitalist ideal.

Through her nurturance of the Chandlers, and especially of Little Henry, Lutie can still construe herself as an ideal wife-mother over and against Mrs. Chandler. In addition, Mrs. Chandler's failure to play a proper feminine role by maintaining a private sphere for her family serves as an excuse for the third contradiction, the Chandler family's unhappiness. Thus the text blames the failure of the Chandlers to achieve happiness in spite of their economic success on a missing ingredient in the bourgeois recipe: idealized motherhood.

By strategically explaining away the contradictions she encounters at the Chandlers', Lutie can maintain her loyalty to the American dream's prescription for success. Rather than learning the flaws of that system and working around them subversively, Lutie continues to believe she can achieve bourgeois success. She remains blind to the requirement that people like her, who are Black, female, and working-class, are not allowed to move up within the paradigm, and she continues her futile attempts to act out the role of ideal wife-mother, as a servant.

But while Lutie does an admirable job of caring for the Chandler family, it isn't her family. Just as the text would not allow Mrs. Chandler to be happy by paying someone else to nurture her family, the text does not allow Lutie to succeed by nurturing someone else's family. Though she has remained within the domestic sphere, Lutie has in fact made a severe transgression of the principles of ideal motherhood by deserting her own home to earn money elsewhere. In the ideological experiment of The Street Lutie must be punished for this violation of American capitalist principles.

Because she is not home providing nurturance for her husband and son, her husband finds another woman to provide him with nurturance (i.e. sex):

There [Lutie] had been sending practically all her wages, month after month, keeping only a little for herself; skimping on her visits because of the carfare...Month after month that black bitch had been eating the food she bought, sleeping in her bed, making love to Jim. (Petry 54)

Benjamin describes this sort of capitalist gender perspective as a commodification of women and their labor for the consumption and benefit of males in the society:

The...assumption is that women, by upholding the private sphere and creating a nurturing environment, create the framework for the autonomous individuality of men...Thus, while men can have a career and 'more,' subsidized by the care and labor of the wife mother, women should realize that this offer is not open for them. Their role is to produce autonomous individuals (boys) who can balance their public and private lives, not to be such individuals. (Benjamin 201)

Desperate to make up for this second failure at ideal motherhood, Lutie turns to her father. Leaving Bub in his care, Lutie can work and go to night school to prepare herself for a better job. At first glance, Pop and his girlfriend Lil seem to be an acceptable alternative to the nuclear family ideal. But the traditional nuclear family unit with two heterosexual parents is the only option for "family" that the text's ideological experiment allows. Since the text is entirely closed to any but strict market dictates, alternatives to these dictates will necessarily fail. As Benjamin has established, within a capitalist paradigm, the nuclear family is the context of the dualistic separation of masculine and feminine spheres that allows development of the autonomous individual. Conforming itself to this paradigm alone, the text cannot allow an extended family made up of a grandfather and his live-in girlfriend to be an alternative to full-time bourgeois mothering.

Just as Jim could not get a job that could support his family neither can Pop. In order to maintain the permanent underclass it needs, white supremacist capitalism must deny good jobs to Black men. Pop is viscerally aware of this problem, "Can't get no job," he says, "White folks got 'em all" (Petry 80). He is forced to make a living illegally since there is no "honest" work available to him.

Pop's business of selling bathtub gin is a way to pay the rent but also corrupts the domestic sphere of family required for success in the American economic system. Whereas Lutie tried to take her domestic labor outside her own home sphere, Pop tries to earn a living for his family within his home. In addition, the illegal nature of Pop's work is another compromise of the wage-earning ideal. None of these compromises is acceptable to the harsh experiment of the Street. Its test of capitalist promises requires a strict adherence to the demands of bourgeois ideology. Within the parameters of these demands, The Street cannot imagine alternatives like extended families. Pop's home cannot be a nurturing place for Bub, neither can Pop be a nurturer.

Because Pop's business requires that his circle of acquaintance be almost exclusively composed of dysfunctional people, Pop's girlfriend, Lil, must be such a person rather than a potential nurturer. She, like most of Pop's friends, is a victim of the system that won't let her succeed according to its own definitions. She cannot be filled with warmth and nurturance because she lives with constant defeat. Instead of creating a healthy environment for raising a child, she is trapped in the spiral of her own despair. Alcohol is her medication against this despair, and its abuse destroys the possibility of a nurturing context of safety and assurance that Benjamin describes as the free market's ideal home environment.

Here, as elsewhere, the text denies any solidarity between women. Rather than working cooperatively with Lil to care for Bub, Lutie recognizes Lil as the antithesis of her own goal of ideal motherhood. All her energy goes into escaping from Lil's influence over Bub. Lutie must work hard to obtain a job that will pay enough for her and Bub to move out on their own and create an ideal nuclear family, forcing herself into another contradiction. Though she does not have the required independent wage-earning husband, Lutie is convinced she can attain the nuclear family ideal on her own. Intending to play both the role of ideal mother and breadwinning provider, she takes Bub out of Pop's apartment and rents one of her own.

Again, the constraints of the text make achievement of these goals impossible. The Street will not allow Lutie to conflate the dual spheres of home and public life successfully. To do so is outside the capitalist program for success. Lutie must work even harder, now that her apartment itself is at stake. She must be even more cautious with her money in order to assure that she and Bub won't be evicted. Though she works tirelessly to provide a living, it is impossible for her to be home with Bub to create the "all-giving, self-contained haven" (Benjamin 211) that Benjamin describes as the capitalist demand for the growth of a successful autonomous individual. The only way Lutie sees out of this predicament is more work and more frugal living. She tries to work and save her way into a better neighborhood with more security and nurturance for Bub.

The text does not allow even this well-intentioned pursuit of security because it is outside of the one available feminine role of full-time mothering. Lutie is constantly nagged by her inability to do the impossible, to earn the family income and be home for Bub after school. She tries in vain to come up with some alternative to his being alone on the street until she gets home from work, thinking, "There must be something he could do after school, some place he could go where he would have fun and be safe too" (Petry 78). Though it is impossible for her to provide this fun and safety as well as economic stability, Lutie nonetheless berates herself for falling short of the motherhood ideal: "She would have to move into a street where there wasn't a playground or a park for blocks!" (Petry 78).

It is at this juncture that hope almost surfaces in Petry's text. Mrs. Hedges, who lives on the ground floor, is aware of most of what goes on in the neighborhood. She already serves as part time guardian of some of the building's children. She has taken a number of young women into her home and she takes an interest in Lutie immediately. At first glance, Mrs. Hedges looks like a possible ally for Lutie and Bub.

Again, such female solidarity is suppressed. The text will not allow this form of exchange. The economy to which it restricts itself will not permit Mrs. Hedges to be motivated by benevolence alone. In the free market, Mrs. Hedges must also be able to support herself. The bourgeois paradigm provides marriage as the only legitimate means to do so. However, the same system that requires this denies it at the same time.

Marriage in The Street is, like everything else, an exchange of goods. In this system beauty and sexuality are almost the only commodities women can possess. In Mrs. Hedges' case, these assets have been liquidated through the story of a disfiguring fire. Thus, without sexual capital of her own, Mrs. Hedges ironically learns to exploit the beauty and sexuality of others through running a prostitution business.

Her illegal means of living is a disfigured version of capitalist success, but it is her only viable option for survival. Her need to make a living in a world Marx claimed turned "personal worth into exchange value" requires that Mrs. Hedges' interest in Lutie be only partly friendly, mostly self-serving. She wants to help Lutie but principally sees her through greedy eyes as a potential commodity. Thus even when she heroically defends Lutie from rape by the building super, she does so mainly in order to preserve the exchange value Lutie represents in the hopes Lutie will come to work for her.

Mrs. Hedges' ambivalent friendship is obviously not an option for Lutie, who is determined to establish an ideal environment for Bub. She must reject the kind of alternative Mrs. Hedges represents just as she had to reject those represented by Lil and Pop. In shutting out all but ideal alternatives Lutie leaves herself with exactly none. She is entirely alone on a street full of people with problems just like hers. The Street will allow no windows of solidarity to open between these people. Like Lutie, the others are trapped in an economic paradigm of autonomy that damns them to lonely failure or, at best, a life of marginal legitimacy.

Petry's text which has forced Lutie to follow an impossible ideal of bourgeois motherhood, now leaves her no options. She is constrained by a dualistic system that pits public against private, male against female, legal against illegal. Having failed to be an ideal mother, Lutie becomes a terrible mother. Her pent-up frustration and desperation for money send her into a murderous rage, ending her chances to ever see Bub again, let alone raise him in the bosom of a bourgeois home.

Petry's novel is a tragic story but it offers no catharsis. The capitalist fates that rule Lutie's destiny don't let her story end. Lutie realizes too late that the American Dream traps women like her in a spiral of failure:

Perhaps it was better to take things as they were and not try to change them. But who wouldn't want to live in a better house than this one and who wouldn't struggle to get out of it?...it was a circle, and she could keep on going around it forever and keep on ending up in the same place, 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. (Petry 407).

In spite of her honest and dogged attempts to follow its dictates, Lutie has failed to achieve the American dream. The conclusion drawn from the experiment, therefore, must be that there is no place in such a system for a Black woman like Lutie. Though it claims to harbor equal opportunity for all, American capitalism, in fact, requires that some people have carefully restricted opportunities.

In exposing the contradictions of America's cherished program for success, Petry's novel also exposes the many attendant myths of such a program. Lutie's flight from Pop's apartment to create a nuclear family for her son had actually produced a grotesque inversion of family: "...the street...played nursemaid to your kid. The street did more than that. It became both father and mother and trained your kid for you, and it was an evil father and a vicious mother" (Petry 407). Lutie's desire to play the role of bourgeois mother concludes in the corruption of children, as implied in Bub's trouble with the police. Lutie herself wonders about this irony, "Pop had never got anywhere in life and certainly Lil hadn't ever achieved anything, but neither of them had ever been in jail" (Petry 406). Lutie's attempts to "achieve" the motherhood ideal for Bub, on the other hand, had gotten him a police record at the age of eight. Likewise, in the end, Lutie finds that her pursuit of idealized motherhood has actually made it necessary for her to leave Bub altogether. Her own idealism has forced her from the extreme of her motherhood ideal to the extreme of child desertion.

Though Petry's artistry suggests an endless downward spiral within the text, beyond the last page of The Street, there seems to lie a suggestion of hope. Petry's novel is not "social realism." It is a controlled test of a one part of reality. Rather than hopelessly portraying "the way things are," the text isolates one possibility, systematically proving it to fail. In demonstrating the utter failure of the capitalist system to provide a place for women like Lutie, the text exposes it as an unacceptable possibility. But in the real world beyond the text lie an infinite number of "what ifs," creating unarticulated spaces where Lutie might happily raise her son and find fulfillment for herself. By exposing the capitalist system as a non-possibility, Petry invites the reader to imagine better alternatives.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Davis, Angela Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx. "The Communist Manifesto." The Marxist Reader: Works That Changed the World. Ed. Emile Burns. New York: Avenel Books, 1982. 21 - 59.

Petry, Ann. The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

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