Article on Miss Muriel and Other Stories by Ann Petry

Jimoh,, A Yemisi, PhD

English

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

University of Massachusetts AmherstScholarWorks@UMass AmherstAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series Afro-American Studies2002Ann Petry: Miss Muriel and Other StoriesA Yemisi Jimoh, PhDUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, jimoh@afroam.umass.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubsPart of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the OtherAmerican Studies CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion inAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, pleasecontact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.Recommended CitationJimoh,, A Yemisi PhD, "Ann Petry: Miss Muriel and Other Stories" (2002). Ann Petry: The Narrows. 70.Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubs/704/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format1/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567Miss Muriel andother StoriesSend to printerPetry, Ann(1971)A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst)Genre: Story Collection. Country: UnitedStates. Ann Lane Petry's chosen career as a shortfiction writer was interrupted when an editorfrom the publishing house Houghton-Mifflinasked her to submit a novel for considerationin their literary fellowship award. That editor'srequest came after Petry's first important shortstory, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon”was published in the December 1943 editionof Crisis, the official publication of the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format2/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567People (NAACP). While Petry's Publication ofher story in the Crisis was significant, it wasnot her first time in print. Ann Lane Petry'sfirst published short story, “Marie of the CabinClub”, had already appeared in the BaltimoreAfro-American in 1939. With the publication ofher first story, Petry not only disguised hername but also her gender when she selected thepen name Arnold Petri.From 1943 to 1947, the year following thepublication of Ann Lane Petry's first novel, TheStreet, she published eight short stories. Six ofthose eight stories Petry would later collect inher last book, a volume of thirteen shortnarratives titled Miss Muriel and OtherStories. Along with her six stories from the1940s, Petry would add five stories that hadbeen published in the 1950s and 1960s and onestory, “The Witness”, slightly revised, whichhad been published in Redbook in 1971 thesame year that Petry's short story collectionwas released. One story in Miss Muriel,“Mother Africa”, was original to the volume. Inthis book, Petry collects all of her previouslypublished short fiction except “Marie of theCabin Club” and “On Saturday the SirenSounds at Noon”, her first pieces of publishedfiction. Twelve stories in Miss Muriel initially4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format3/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567were published in anthologies such as CrossSection and Soon One Morning: New Writingby American Negroes, 1940-1962 as well as inmagazines and journals such as Crisis, TheNew Yorker, Redbook, Phylon,Magazine ofthe Year, and Opportunity, the officialpublication of the National Urban League.Upon publication of Miss Muriel and OtherStories in 1971, Petry became the second blackwoman to publish a collection of short stories,having done so one hundred and twelve yearsafter Frances Watkins (later Harper) publishedthe first short story by an African Americanwriter in 1859. In 1899, Alice Dunbar’s TheGoodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, wasthe first collection of short stories by an AfricanAmerican woman. Her husband Paul LaurenceDunbar in 1898 had published the firstcollection of short stories by a black writer inthe United States.Most of the stories in Miss Muriel are set inNew York, either in the fictional town ofWheeling, New York or in New York City. Twostories are set in New York and Connecticut,“Doby's Gone” and “Has Anybody Seen MissDora Dean?” Two stories are set inMassachusetts: “The Necessary Knocking at4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format4/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567the Door”, which takes place at a conferencesite in the Berkshires and addresses theinternal conflicts that arise when a blackwoman – without knowing it – fails to save thelife of a white woman who has used racialepithets and disparaged her because she isblack; and “The Bones of Louella Brown”, set inBoston, which is a satire on pseudo-scientifictheories of racial difference and on Bostonelitism. Petry's love story, “Olaf and His GirlFriend”, is set in Barbados and in New Yorkand addresses the issue of love across classbarriers.Ann Lane Petry has willingly acknowledgedthat she fictionalized her life as well as theworld in which she lived and the people thatshe found in that world. She uses in her storiesthe slightest details from events she hasexperienced or observed. In “The Witness”, forinstance, Petry describes the crew-cut that sheobserved on a congregational minister whotold her about delinquent boys that he wasunable to reach. In this story, Petry's character,Charles Woodruff, is a retired Englishprofessor and widower from Virginia who hasmoved to Petry's fictional town of Wheeling,New York and now teaches high schoolEnglish. He has been asked to help Dr. Shipley,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format5/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567a minister at the Congregational church, withsome young men who have been assigned tothe church by the juvenile court. CharlesWoodruff finds himself in a moral quandaryfollowing his session with the boys and theminister when the boys kidnap Charles and ayoung woman whom they rape while he isblindfolded. The English professor considersreporting the boys' crimes to the police, but hisknowledge of his own position as a black manin the small, predominately white town couldplace him under suspicion. He decides to leavetown instead.Petry also fictionalized significant events suchas the civil upheaval in Harlem that occurredwhile she lived there in 1943. This historicalevent is the source for Petry's story, whichsome would describe as a short novel, “InDarkness and Confusion”. In this piece, Petrybrings together several issues that wereprevalent in the 1940s when “In Darkness andConfusion” was published: unfair treatment ofblack soldiers, employment discrimination, theJim Crow segregation laws, shifts in theconstruction of womanhood, black youth'srejection of the prevalent racialized narrativesfor their lives, and housing discrimination. In“Mother Africa”, the only story in Miss4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format6/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567Muriel that had not been published previously,Petry demonstrates the problematical issues ofestablishing idealized concepts of beauty andconveys something of the spirit of culturalawareness and heritage that informed AfricanAmerican life during the Black Aesthetic andArts Movement and Black Power/LiberationMovement of the 1960s and 1970s. Throughher depiction of the junk and second-handclothing dealer Emanuel “Man” Turner, Petryprovides readers with an African Americaneveryman of the 1960s. This character'sconsciousness is so strongly influenced by thedominant ideals of beauty as well as asexualized view of women that he fails torealize that the ideal representation of beautythat he locates in a giant-sized bronze statue –which he obsessively cherishes and namesMother Africa – is a white woman.Several of Petry's stories in MissMuriel fictionalize details or experiences fromher own life. In “Doby's Gone”, Petry clearlyfictionalizes an experience that she and hersister had when they first entered primaryschool in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the smallNew England town where they were reared. Inthis story, Petry's young character Sue Johnsonhas recently moved to Wesex, Connecticut from4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format7/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567New York and finds that the children in hernew town reject her because she is differentfrom them. The feelings of isolation that Suefeels as the alienated outsider are assuagedthrough her creation of an invisible playmate,Doby. Sue is able to gain a friend from amongher classmates and eliminate Doby after sheresponds to the children's taunting by fightingback rather than relying on her imaginaryfriend.Ann Lane Petry ends her collection with thestory “Doby's Gone”. In this story, Petry'sthird-person narrator presents her story fromthe perspective of a child. In the first threestories in her collection, however, Petrypresents three seemingly connected fictionalpieces that are told by the same namelessnarrator who lives in Wheeling, New York andis the daughter of a pharmacist. In two of thestories, “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror”,Petry's narrator again is youthful. Readers firstencounter this young narrator at the age oftwelve in “Miss Muriel”, a story that isconstructed from entries in the narrator'sdiary. Through her narrator's diary entries,Petry incisively depicts the insularity – oftenself-imposed – of life for the sole black familyin a small town. In many of her stories,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format8/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567including “Miss Muriel”, Petry frequentlybrings the South into the North in order toillustrate the absurdities and horrors of skin-color privilege and racialized social andpolitical policies. One such absurdity Petrypresents through a story, told by the narrator'suncle and his friend Dottle, about a whitesouthern store owner who insists, because acertain brand of cigars comes in a box with apicture of a white woman, that his blackcustomers request “Miss Muriel” cigars. Petryfocuses the most probing aspect of this story,however, on her presentation of the narrator'sloss of innocence through her recognition ofthe barriers to love across ethnic lines.In “The New Mirror”, Petry's narrator appearsto be the same character that we met in “MissMuriel”; now she is fifteen and the only child ofthe Layen family. The Layens, as the only“admittedly” black family in Wheeling (theGranites are passing as Mohawk Indians) findthemselves on the verge of violating their self-imposed insularity after Mr. Layen does notreturn home one day. The final story that Petrynarrates through this narrator is “Has AnybodySeen Miss Dora Dean?” It is 1957; the narratoris now thirty-two, and has been called fromWheeling to the house of an elderly, widowed –4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format9/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567as a result of her husband's strange suicide –family friend Sarah Trumbull Forbes who livesin Bridgeport, Connecticut. Mrs. Forbesentrusts the narrator with a set of heirloomcups and saucers that she refuses to give herson or grandsons, as she believes they are justlike her deceased husband and not worthy ofcarrying forward the proud inheritance.An interesting aspect of Ann Lane Petry's shortfiction in Miss Muriel and Other Stories is thatshe frequently presents her stories from thepoint-of-view of her male characters. This isthe case in “The Bones of Louella Brown”, “TheWitness”, “In Darkness and Confusion”,“Mother Africa”, “The Migraine Workers”,“Like a Winding Sheet”, and “Solo on Drums”.Petry's central male character, Johnson, in thestory “Like a Winding Sheet” finds that thepressures of his daily life slowly kill what iscompassionate and kind in him, as he comeshome on the evening of Friday the thirteenthand beats his wife. Petry's story presentsdomestic abuse from the perspective of a blackman living in the pressure cooker of a color-conscious society. Her presentation, however,is controversial, as it presents a sympatheticportrait of this wife-beating husband.4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format10/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567Throughout her fiction Ann Lane Petryfrequently employs African American culturalmotifs such as blues and jazz music – “Solo onDrums”, “In Darkness and Confusion”, “HasAnyone Seen Miss Dora Dean?” – and oralstorytelling, which is an important element in“Miss Muriel”. Her short stories alsoconsistently demonstrate her concern withissues of gender, color, class, and social as wellas political injustice. Petry's approach to theseissues is frequently unconventional, as isclearly the case in several of the pieces in MissMuriel and Other Stories.A Yemisi Jimoh (University of MassachusettsAmherst)First published 25 October 2002Citation: Jimoh, A Yemisi. "Miss Muriel and otherStories". The Literary Encyclopedia. 25 October 2002.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3567, accessed 14 April 2012.]This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia.For information on making internet links to this page andelectronic or print reproduction, please read Linking andReproducing.All entries, data and software copyright © The LiteraryDictionary Company Limited4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format11/11www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=3567ISSN 1747-678X

Ann Petry: Miss Muriel and Other Stories

Jimoh,, A Yęmisi, PhD

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=afroam_faculty_pubs

Ann Petry: Miss Muriel and Other Stories

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst