Hot venus, cool modern: voice, body, and the hungry gaze as sites of black feminist re-inscription in Ann Petry’s The Narrows

Abstract

ABSTRACTAnn Petry’s The Street, a bestseller when it appeared in 1946, has come to define her legacy as a novelist and public intellectual. Perceived as a disciple of Richard Wright, Petry has often been configured within the black protest tradition, which obscures her narrative experimentation and attention to rich, aesthetic detail. This essay places Petry in a more expansive and dynamic cultural context by examining The Narrows, her 1953 novel, as an exemplar of “hybrid modernism,” which combines social realism with aesthetic experimentation. In focusing on the subversively blowsy, bluesy Mamie Powther, the black woman simultaneously at the novel’s periphery and integral to its unfolding, this essay analyzes Petry’s investments not only in the blues and the African-American musical tradition, but in her incorporation of the cinematic conventions of film noir; particularly in the re-inscription of the figure of the femme fatale as (Hottentot) Venus. Rather than simply a passive recipient of the male gaze, Mamie can be interpreted as an active agent in her own right, a modern woman capable of sexual agency and erotic self-assertion as embodied in the active desire of her own hungry gaze and corporeal appetites.