SOURCE: “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion,” in African-American Review, Vol. 26, Fall, 1992, pp. 495–505.

In the following essay, the author provides a post-structuralist reading of The Street, with emphasis on the ways in which Petry's protagonist casts the American Dream in the context of her own black female experience.

I

The “American Dream” has been a prominent subject in American literature, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Miller—all of these writers have depicted characters in search of the utopian dream, few of whom find it. Their African-American counterparts' variation on this mythic search has followed a similar pattern in that their characters have also sought psychological and material fulfillment—a fact making Ralph Ellison's declaration that “the values of my own people are neither ‘white’ nor ‘black,’ they are American” (Shadow and Act 270) particularly resonant. But unlike Jay...