![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lutie’s father, Pop, and his girlfriend Lil, live in a seven shared room apartment, and Lutie believes they both will negatively impact Bub, especially Lil when, “she thought of where she lived now…a place spilling over with Lil…drinking beer…giving Bub a drink on the sly getting Bub to light cigarettes for her…Bub at eight with smoke curling out his mouth” (Petry 10). She also lives in fear of ‘what-ifs’ and what may lie ahead of her in the future, which is apparent in the beginning of the novel when she wants to move from her father’s home. Lutie Johnson, a young black mother who is struggling to make ends meet and raise her eight year old son named Bub, cannot escape the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940’s. Hedges dreamed of the American dream, they both lost hope, and conformed to their environment. The female characters of the Street once had their very own “American dreams”, but due to the oppressed community, their American dreams were snatched away. The street, in which the female characters of the novel live, acts as a captor that traps its inhabitants within the confines of an unruly environment and destroys any ounce of hope. Ann Petry’s The Street, a novel written in 1946, traces the struggles African-American women endured while chasing the American dream and living in Harlem’s racially oppressed environment. ![]()
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