Essay On Violence In Ann Petry's The Street, A Summary

In the fiction novel, The Street, by Ann Petry, the main character, Lutie, moves into 116th Street in Harlem. Thinking that this will be better than living with her drunken father and his cast of roomers, Lutie and her 8-year-old son, Bub, discover that surviving the streets of Harlem is easier said than done. The decision to include extensive details about Lutie’s opinion of violence throughout the book shows the changes that she makes a character. Violence follows Lutie throughout Harlem, and the increased exposure to it changes her into a violent, hate-filled person. The in depth description of the first scene explains the oppression happening in 1940’s Harlem. Before renting her apartment on 116th street, Lutie finds herself …show more content…
When walking down the street, Lutie notices a crowd of newspaper photographers looking down at a skinny, dead man lying on the ground. It is later explained that the thin, shabby man was holding up a line in a bakery, so the proprietor “stabbed him with a bead knife” (198). Lutie walks by the dead man late in the afternoon on a spring day, which means the man was murdered in the middle of the day, with plenty of people around. Lutie is completely surprised from the appalling sight of this man on the sidewalk, but the dead man’s sister just sighs and reflects, “I always thought it’d happen,” as if she was expecting her brothers death (197). The mid-day murder is not the only thing violent in Harlem; Lutie, who sings in the Casino one night with her friend, Boots, notices the “violent dance routines” and “violent applause” occurring in the casino (223, 224). Describing the applause and dancing as violent displays that even if there is not physical violence, everything in Harlem seems violent to someone as paranoid as a black woman in a sexist, racist city. Residents of Harlem experience violence every day in their lives, so they become accustomed to