Examples Of Personification In The Street By Ann Petry

In Ann Petry’s, The Street, Lutie Johnson has a negative relationship with the urban setting around her. The wind is a distraction and is a bully to not only Lutie Johnson, but also the people in the city’s street. Ann Petry uses forceful personification, dark imagery, and is very attentive with her selection of detail in “The Street” to help the reader understand how Lutie Johnson’s relationship to her surroundings is negative. The forceful personification in the novel shows not only how Lutie Johnson adapts to her urban setting, but also to show how violent the wind is. Johnson adapts to her urban setting by witnessing what the wind does to passing pedestrians and stays determined to not let it intimidate her. Petry states that “it did everything it could to discourage people walking along the street”. Seeing this, Johnson continues on with her journey and doesn’t get scared of the wind even when she knows it’s capability.

The entire first paragraph is an example of the wind causing mayhem and being violent. Petry describes what the wind is doing when Johnson is just merely observing her surroundings as “The wind set the bits of paper to dancing high in the air, so that a barrage of paper swirled into the faces of the people on the street” and “it had rattled the tops of garbage cans, sucked window shades out through the tops of opened windows and set them flapping back against the windows; and drove most people off the street in the block…” The wind had obviously been making a mess of the city’s streets and scaring anyone away who stepped foot in those streets. Lutie didn’t let the wind take her focus away and she was stronger than the other pedestrians in the street. While people were bending double to avoid the wind, she had only shivered when the wind had attacked her. It was as if she knew there was no avoiding it so she just embraced whatever were to come her