The Narrows: A Black New England Novel

Abstract

THE NARROWS: A BLACK NEW ENGLAND NOVEL Sybil WeirWhen Ann Petry published The Narrows in 1953, the novel was reviewed in the leading newspapers and magazines. Since then, however, critics have neglected it, preferring to focus on Petry's achievement in The Street (1946) and in short fiction such as "In Darkness and Confusion." This neglect of The Narrows is undeserved because the novel reveals the maturing of Petry's literary vision beyond the limited sociological determinism of The Street. The rich and complex rendering of black and white relationships in a small Connecticut city continues to compel readers. Of particular interest is Petry's use of both Anglo-American and Afro-American literary motifs. As Arna Bontemps wrote in his review in The Saturday Review of Literature, a novel about Negroes by a Negro novelist and concerned, in the last analysis, with racial conflict, The Narrows somehow resists classification as a "Negro Novel," as contradictory as that may sound. In this respect Ann Petry has achieved something as rare as it is commendable. Her book reads like a New England novel, and an unusually gripping one.' Arna Bontemps was right. To overlook the ways in which The Narrows is shaped by Petry's New England heritage is to miss part of its complexity , yet, aside from Bontemps, almost every critic who has analyzed Petry 's work has done so solely in relation to other Afro-American fiction. This context has been necessary and valuable for recovering the contours of the Afro-American literary tradition. Nevertheless, it is time to take seriously Sherley Williams' proposal that the most fruitful approach to American literature is a comparative one.2 Such an approach reveals that, in The Narrows, Petry is indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as to Richard Wright, that The Narrows belongs to the tradition of domestic feminism and realism created primarily by New England women writers as well as to the experience Petry had in Harlem in the 1940s. The New England tradition is most clearly exemplified in Abbie Crunch, the seventy-year-old black matron in The Narrows. While it is important to note that Abbie Crunch is only one of the novel's three major characters from whose perspectives the novel is narrated, Petry's * Sybil Weir is a Professor of English and American Studies at San Jose State University . She has previously published on Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Atherton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, on whom she is currently writing a biography. 82Sybil Weir characterization of her is convincing, complex, and realistic.3 Petry shows the emotional and psychic reality of a black mother who has embraced the values of New England culture at the expense of her own racial heritage. Petry's treatment of the theme of the psychic costs of racism , a theme central to much of Afro-American fiction before and since The Narrows, is particularly moving and convincing. The Narrows is set in Monmouth, Connecticut. The title refers to Monmouth's black ghetto, Dumble Street, variously known as "The Narrows , Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown —because Negroes had replaced those other earlier immigrants, the Irish, the Italians and the Poles."4 To emphasize the universality of her vision, Petry went to Shakespeare for the names of her town and river, using a speech from King Henry V as her inscription: ... I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the OrId, 1 warrant you sail find, in the comparisons between Macedón and Monmouth , that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedón; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; . . . but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both (Act IV, vii). In New England as in old Britain and Macedón, the river flows on, indifferent to the dramas of human aspirations and passions played out on its bank. The river is indifferent to human betrayal—Alexander killing his best friend in Macedón, Henry V shunning Falstaff, the black butler betraying the black bartender in Monmouth, Connecticut...