Seen as a naturalist novel, with its realistic prose, indifferent setting, and aesthetic web built around motifs, the narrative of Ann Petry's The Street feels like a mid-century novel black version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie: a woman (Carrie is single; Lutie Johnson is saddled with a child) and her relationships with a series of men (using them in Sister Carrie; being used by them in The Street ) push her up the social ladder (Dreiser) or knock the rungs beneath her (Petry). Petry's overt protest against the social restrictions placed on women, particularly black women, is underlined by a more subtle depiction of the ever-present claustrophobia that physically confines Lutie. The various cramped spaces he occupies in his unsuitable apartment, the crowded buses, the crowded sidewalks, the crowded Junto define his social immobility and bodily objectification. He searches for a spacious apartment that never arrives, so over the course of the novel he is content to find alternative ways to expand his spatial presence. However, the constant threat of violence and male sexual power, aided by the use of objects, reduces these expansions and imprisons Lutie, who is unwilling to capitalize on her only object of value: her own body. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The novel's titular antagonist is, of course, the greatest enemy Lutie faces, and, like Jones, Junto, and Boots, he treats her and everyone else as objects, amalgamating and deindividuating them: "It was any city where they drew a line and said the blacks are on this side and the whites are on this side, so that the blacks were crammed on top of each other, crammed, crammed and forced into as little space as possible" (206). The line here, segregation, recurs in The Street as that which spatially separates the safe from the dangerous, action from passivity, individuality from anonymity. The destruction of the lines removes the harmful effects of the crowd and makes it joyful, while the busy streets of Harlem are a sudden relief from the clogged subway: "She escaped the openly evaluative gazes of the white men whose eyes seemed to scan her clothes for her long brown legs" (57). White men are also objectified; while their "open" gazes may defy the constricting space around them, they are reduced to "eyes," just as Lutie is defined by her legs and her clothes, her only object of defense, become useless. However, sight, as we will see later, is the most powerful sense in The Street; it opens space for males, often as an illusion, while women are cornered, like Lutie here. Interestingly, in a novel where every action is directed at the acquisition of private space, Petry often sings the praises of crowds, as long as they provide individual movement within the anonymous block. The streets of Harlem are a welcome change from the subway, and while racial homogeneity may seemingly further compromise individuality, the opposite is true, as pedestrians ironically accrue differences when placed in an environment of presumed similarity: “Up here they are no longer creatures simply labeled 'colored' and therefore all the same. He noticed that once the crowd ran the length of the platform and began climbing the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size" (57). It is this metamorphosis "The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform , suddenly they became so big that they could barely climb the stairs together to the street" (58) which challenges theobjectified labels and competition for street space is based on personal greatness rather than the contraction of the public sphere. Metamorphosis occurs through immersion in the new, larger space, but for women it is clearly a dependent reaction. They need the help of space and cannot create greatness on their own: young women returning homeWork dirty, tired, depressed looked forward to the moment when they would change their clothes and head towards the gracious spaciousness of the Junto. They dressed hastily in their small bedrooms in the dark hallway, so eager for the soft lights, music, and fun that awaited them that they floundered in their haste. (144) The "graceful spaciousness" of the Junto is not simply an opportunity to rhyme, although the space itself suggests a harmonious environment, but emphasizes the Junto itself as the rendezvous of women; they prepare for a night out as if they are trying to impress a man whose stature augments theirs. These "little bedrooms with dark hallways" are everywhere, and while women might not like them, for Jones they represent the feminine spaces she isn't capable of. invade while he toils in his little dark space, the cellar. The compartmentalization of apartments is related to letterboxes, since a building contains many apartments and the postman's master key opens all the mailboxes at once: "The postman opened all the letterboxes at once, using a key that he had hanging on a long, strong chain. The sagging leather bag on his shoulder was bulging with mail. He stuffed the letters into the open boxes, used the key again to close them, and disappeared" (290-1). Petry writes it as an episode of virtual intercourse; the postman's key (a traditional phallic signifier for his ability to penetrate a lock; cf. "Rape of the Lock" which, while keyless, puns on this through its castration themes), on a "chain long and sturdy", is able to open all the boxes simultaneously, the male fantasy of sexual omnipotence and omnipresence "stands out" his missives inside, and is able to lock them away from anyone else's touch before exit the scene. Cellar dweller Jones can only dream of such a spatial achievement, the ability to control similar bedrooms from a single command post. His assault on Lutie, "dragging her towards the cellar door" (235), is an attempt to impede her mobility, as is the closing of the mailboxes: she has grabbed the banister. His fingers freed her hands. She twisted and writhed in his arms, bracing her feet, clawing at his face with her nails. He ignored her frantic attempt to get away from him and dragged her closer and closer to the cellar door. She kicked him and her long skirt twisted around her legs so she stumbled closer to him. He tried to scream, and when he opened his mouth no sound came out; and he thought it was worse than any nightmare, because there was no sound in it. There was only his face next to hers, a scary, twisted face, his eyes shining, his mouth open, and his tense, sweaty body that kept forcing her closer and closer to the half-open cellar door. (236) The subjects, grammatically or in the reader's eyes, of discontinuous sentences are usually body parts: his fingers, his arms, his feet, his nails, and the final demonic image of Jones's face both as attacker who as victim are objectified again, as in the subway. Yet Jones still has the upper hand as the environment betrays Lutie. The balustrade offers no protection and his clothing is revealed once againuseless in defense. His silent scream is reminiscent of Edvard Munch's “The Scream” in which the overflowing lines suggest the subject's immersion in a hostile environment that the observer of the silent painting cannot understand. Likewise, Jones's open mouth is paired with the wide open cellar door, the approaching threat of rape, and Lutie's silence that makes the reader as helpless as she is. Yet Lutie finds her voice, and this is the only instrument that seems to offer a way out of the street and out of the cellar: "She would scream until she could hear her own voice screaming wildly up the stairs, stopping on the landings, turning the corners, going down the corridors, gaining in volume as he resumed climbing the stairs" (236). His voice, as a part of himself that emanates outward in waves and echoes, can expand beyond his personal space. The feminine musicality of the voice acts as an agent throughout the novel; Mrs. Hedges foils two different assaults, that of Jones and that of a pack of boys on Bub. He tells Lutie to "'Shut up? Do you want the whole place to wake up?'" (237) and Petry describes the growing power of her voice: "His rich, pleasant voice filled the hall, and at the sound of it the dog he slunk away, with his tail between his legs" (237). His "rich, pleasant voice," which here performs a kind of castration on the dog, returns twice during Bub's assault: "'You heard me, you little bastards,' he said in his rich, pleasant voice. ' Keep going. Block, Charlie Moore.' Mrs. Hedges's rich, pleasant voice was carried far beyond the pavement" (347-8). Of course, Lutie hopes that her pleasant voice literally translates into wealth. Her singing temporarily obscures her social and spatial position: "The music swelled behind her and she began to sing, faintly at first and then her voice became louder, clearer, because she gradually forgot the men in the orchestra, forgot even that she was there at the Casino and why she was there" (222). The repeated word "there" is crucial; the phrase does not require the first instance, but her superfluous voice makes presence and its temporary erasure the focus of Lutie's singing, just as when Lutie sings a note so low and sustained that "it was impossible to tell where it left off" ( 148 ), rather than when it was interrupted. The note is defined in spatial, not tonal, terms. Lutie's musical escape is temporary due to the absence of objects to manipulate; she, not a physical instrument, is the manipulated object, the "lute". Her attempts to earn money by singing are constantly thwarted by men who use the objects to their advantage and try to take advantage of Lutie as an object. He waits in the "little waiting room" of a singing school (318) and enters a room whose inventory runs continuously for nine lines (319). Like Junto, the portly Mr. Crosse, the owner of the school, dominates the room not only through his obesity but by making himself visible without objectifying himself to the social gaze: "She was close enough to the desk before she could see what the man sitting behind it looked like, because her feet blocked her sight" (319). Junto is much more powerful as he amplifies his presence with an inversion of the traditional cliché of the male gaze; Lutie always stares at him through reflected mirrors, rather than the other way around, but transcends objectification: "She looked at him again and again, because his reflection in the mirror fascinated her. Somehow, even at this distance, his stocky figure managed to dominate the whole room" (146). The mirrors, which make "the Junto a huge room" (146), create an illusion of expanded space that Boots then capitalizes on in her bedroom: "there were too many mirrors for her to see it reflected on each of the walls – the his legs stretched out, with.