Country Place by Ann Petry
"Country Place" is a novel by Ann Petry that marks a significant departure from her earlier work, "The Street," and diverges from traditional African American literature. Set in a small, rural New England town, the narrative centers on a predominantly white cast of characters while introducing minor characters of various ethnicities and backgrounds. The story explores class conflicts, particularly highlighting the struggles between the aristocratic and working classes, and delves into themes of bigotry, malice, and the complexities of personal relationships.
The plot unfolds with the return of Johnnie Roane from World War II, who faces disillusionment upon discovering his wife Glory’s infidelity. As Johnnie grapples with his idealized vision of Glory, the narrative shifts perspectives to reveal the motivations and conflicts of other characters, including Glory's manipulative mother, Lil, and the traditional yet evolving Mrs. Gramby. The novel culminates in a violent storm that forces characters to confront their realities and societal roles, ultimately leading to transformative decisions.
Critics have noted Petry's innovative narrative style and characterization, with "Country Place" being recognized for its departure from her debut and for its commentary on class dynamics within a racially diverse, albeit predominantly white context. Despite some criticism regarding its "raceless" quality, the novel has been praised for its literary versatility and depth, establishing Petry as a notable figure in American literature.
Country Place by Ann Petry
First published: 1947
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: Late 1940’s
Locale: Lennox, Connecticut
Principal Characters:
Johnnie Roane , a young veteran of World War IIMrs. Bertha Laughton Gramby , the wealthiest woman in townGlory Roane , Johnnie’s beautiful and promiscuous young wifeLillian Gramby , Glory’s motherThe Weasel , an observant, meddlesome outsiderPop Fraser , the town pharmacist
The Novel
Country Placeis a departure both from Ann Petry’s first novel, The Street (1946), and from African American literary tradition. Country Place focuses on a community of main characters who are predominantly white; the book’s minor characters are of varying ethnicities and cultures within a small, rural New England town. The conflicts that arise between the characters, however, are conflicts of class. Petry focuses on the demarcation between the aristocratic and working classes to expose the town’s underlying foundations of bigotry, malice, promiscuity, and violence.
The novel begins with the arrival of Johnnie Roane in Lennox as he returns home from World War II. He immediately discovers, in his taxi ride with the Weasel, that his prolonged absence has forced him to view Lennox more clearly. His dreams of a loving reunion with his wife Glory, who he hopes will help him to “forget wars and rumors of wars,” are dashed by the Weasel’s sly innuendo of Glory’s affair with the town rake, Ed Barrell.
Despite his suspicions, Johnnie continues to idealize Glory, even though his love for her thwarts his ambitions and keeps him trapped in Lennox: “You want Glory . . . but having her means Lennox. So you forget you ever heard of a paintbrush or a drawing pencil or a place known in some circles as Manhattan Island.” Glory, however, is not willing to accept Johnnie back. His absence has enabled her to feel independent, and her job at Perkin’s store allows her to receive much attention from the men in town. Bored with the thought of marriage and domestic chores, Glory becomes attracted to Ed Barrell, the town stud with a bad heart, who habitually enters into affairs with married women.
Glory’s mother, Lil, haunted by the uncertainties of her harsh financial existence as a working-class single mother, manipulates the unambitious but wealthy Mearns Gramby into marriage. Together, the couple lives at the Gramby home with the venerable Mrs. Gramby and the family servants. Despite her manipulations, Lil never seems to get what she wants. She is relegated to the background of the Gramby family and never receives the respect she believes her newfound status deserves, from either the townspeople or the Grambys’ servants. Lil’s prejudice compels her to lash out perpetually at the black maid, Neola, and at the family’s Portuguese gardener; she fantasizes about the day when Mrs. Gramby will die and the Gramby estate and prestige will become her own.
The plot becomes complicated, as a violent storm ensues that forces the characters’ “reluctant examination of their lives.” Johnnie’s discovery of Glory’s affair with Ed forces him to cast away his idealized portrait of her, and he comes to see her realistically as “the soapbubble, the dream, the illusion.” He considers himself as not only a veteran of World War II but also a veteran of “the never-ending battle between the ones who stayed at home and the ones who went away.” Escaping his entrapment of Glory and the town, Johnnie leaves for New York in order to find himself as an artist.
The darkness of the storm forces Mrs. Gramby to examine her guilt and motives as a woman blindly following tradition. Lamenting the knowledge she now possesses of Lil’s afffair with Ed, and her own complicity in the steps that led to it, she contemplates the nature of society as both good and evil. While she will revenge the cuckolding of her son, she vows to enable good to come out of evil. Transcending narrow-mindedness and the dictates of tradition, she hires the town’s only Jewish lawyer, David Rosenberg, to make out her will, which disinherits Lil to include Neola and the gardener in her place. She also wills land on Main Street to the Catholic church, which has been relegated to the impoverished section of town.
Lil, motivated by avarice and wholly unaware of Mearns’s and Mrs. Gramby’s discovery of her previous affair, attempts to kill Mrs. Gramby by withholding her insulin. Mrs. Gramby, however, lives to allow good to triumph over evil. She recovers enough to visit the courthouse in order to revise her will. In leaving, Mrs. Gramby dramatically falls down the institution’s steps, pushing Ed Barrell with her. They both fall to their death, suffering fatal heart attacks.
The Characters
Although Pop Fraser is initially seen as the narrator of the novel, Petry’s narrative rotates point of view among the characters, a technique that enables the collective history of the characters to emerge from individual points of truth, as well as to illustrate that no single character holds a monopoly on the truth. Pop Fraser acquaints readers with the action of the narrative, and he represents a delightful combination of the best of the old traditions as they merge with the best of the new.
Johnnie’s point of view and inner conflict emerges distinctly through his descriptions of Glory’s hair as a shimmering net, “spread wide to hold his heart.” Ironically, through Glory, Johnnie is trapped by his idealization and dreams. Only when confronted directly with the truth of Glory’s infidelity can Johnnie see her clearly. His glimpse of reality affords him the opportunity to view himself and his place in Lennox in a harsher light. Glory’s infidelity is the impetus for his change, which mirrors the changes he sees around him in Lennox and in American society as a result of the war.
Glory is trapped by her fears of an uncertain future in a society that is reeling from two world wars. She watches her life unfurl before her with the avid interest of an audience watching a cinema show. She imagines herself as a film heroine, a fantasy that is fueled by her affair with Ed, who compares her to the actress Lana Turner. Glory is a representation of the brassy and cheap new society, enamored of glamour and hungry for materialism. Unlike Johnnie, Glory is unable to break free from her working-class roots and her escapist, fantasy state. A product of a society in which traditions have collapsed, she does not have the moral fortitude to disentangle herself from society’s dictates. She succumbs to the fantasy of the cinema world, the imagined glamour of which becomes her reality.
Lil, too, is a product of a changing society. Living through the societal and economic upheaval caused by World War II has made her a grasping, greedy woman, a cold egotist who can see only herself. She, too, represents the new society’s cheap materialism and avariciousness. Despite her machinations, however, she remains thwarted in her attempts to achieve financial security and status. Her husband gives her a pittance of an allowance, and Mrs. Gramby relegates her to the status of an unwelcome guest in the Gramby home. A narrow-minded and bigoted woman, the product of outmoded tradition, Lil schemes for the day when she will own the Gramby home and will be able to establish her dominance over the ethnic servants.
Mrs. Gramby, entrapped by dated traditions and her own resistance to change, represents the best of the town’s traditions in the face of a morally lax and vulgar modern age. Mrs. Gramby is able to juxtapose the best of the past’s values with the context of the present, as she reaches out to the minorities her daughter-in-law and the townspeople scorn. She provides them with financial independence as a method of empowerment for herself and the working-class servants, an act that enables those involved to transcend societal conventions. Coming to terms with the inevitability of change, Mrs. Gramby decides to influence the direction of such change for the better. Through her will, Mrs. Gramby can speak from the grave and demonstrate to the town “how impossible it is to control the earth, to arbitrarily decide who is to own it.”
The Weasel symbolizes all the ugliness that hides beneath the picturesque town—the pettiness, promiscuity, bigotry, greed, and violence. His sadistic manipulations, not unlike the storm, result in change and transcendence for some characters—and continued entrapment for others.
Critical Context
Country Place, Petry’s second novel, represents a sharp departure from her first novel, the naturalistic and critically acclaimed The Street, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award. Country Place also deviates largely from much of African American literary tradition and convention. The characters of Country Place represent a cast of largely white characters, with the minor characters representing various ethnic and cultural origins. This aspect of the novel, as well as its rural setting, gave rise to criticism of the narrative’s “raceless” aspect. However, literary historian Arthur Davis, in his 1974 text From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960, defends Petry’s choice of a small town as her subject, stating that Petry had written “about a life that in all probability she knew better than the life she wrote about in The Street. ”
Petry’s skillful manipulation of point of view, her brilliant characterization, and her economical writing style have prompted many critics to judge Country Place her most successful novel. Comparing Petry’s work to that of Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Willard Motley, and Frank Yerby, the renowned literary critic and historian Robert Bone referred to Country Place as “the best of the assimilationist novels.” Bone called Country Place a “distinguished achievement” and judged it among one of the finest novels of the protest period because it is “a manifestation not so much of assimilation as of versatility.”
Bibliography
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Pioneering work that traces the evolution of the African American novel from 1890 to 1952. Examines Petry’s work within the context of the postwar expansion.
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Examines Petry in the context of other major African American writers and calls Country Place “small-town realistic fiction.” Includes biographical information and bibliography.
Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Petry. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Collection of sixteen book reviews and twenty-six scholarly articles on Petry, ordered chronologically according to the novel to which they respond. Includes a critical and biographical introductory essay by the editor.
Lubin, Alex, ed. Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Collection of essays that together stress the importance of Petry’s participation in progressive political action for understanding her work. Includes an essay by Paula Rabinowitz on Country Place as pulp fiction, as well as several more general studies of Petry’s fiction.
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “Ann Petry.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Examines the “unique double perspective” that Petry brings to her literary work as a result of her middle-class upbringing in a small New England town and her years of living and working with impoverished African Americans in New York City. Explores this dichotomous writing style as it presents itself in Petry’s three novels, including Country Place.
Petry, Ann. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” Interview by Mark Wilson. MELUS 15, no. 2 (1988): 71-84. Petry discusses her personal and professional life, particularly her New England childhood and its influence upon much of her later writing.
Shinn, Thelma J. “Women in the Novels of Ann Petry.” In Contemporary Women Novelists, edited by Patricia M. Spacks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Explores Petry’s novels and their female protagonists. Illustrates Petry’s focus on the individual’s struggle with society, in which the morally weak are misled by illusions and destroyed by impoverishment, and the morally strong are forced to symbolize the very society they reject.