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7. The Women of Peyton Place

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Unbuttoning America
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7It was the historian of paperbacks Kenneth Davis who first explored the connection between Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and the novel Peyton Place. What shocked Americans about Kinsey, Davis argued, was not simply the explicit nature of his findings; rather it was the lack of remorse expressed by unmarried mothers, adulter-ous wives, and sexually active single women. “The chaste conceded only that they had lacked opportunity,” he wrote. If Kinsey was right, women and girls not only enjoyed sex but also were enjoying lots of it, often on their own terms. “The news came as a major challenge to the polite notion that ‘good girls don’t.’ What was important about Peyton Place’s women,” Davis concludes, “is that they represented this unspoken reality.”1Peyton Place spilled the beans.Certainly for those on the outskirts of political life, for those who sel-dom gave a thought to politics or political action, the Kinsey Reports mate-rialized in useful ways a discourse of discontent, an articulation of things deeply felt but rarely discussed. Despite fierce counterattacks, Kinsey chal-lenged long-standing notions that there was such a thing as “too much” “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, canwe?”“Why not—why not—whynot?”Edith Wharton, The Ageof InnocenceThe Women of PeyTon PlAce
The Women of Peyton Place127sex or the “wrong kind” of sex. Anymphomaniac, the professor famously stated, was simply “someone who had more sex than you do.”2 Women, it seemed, were having not just more sex but apparently better sex, with Kinsey reporting a “distinct and steady increase in the number of females reaching orgasm.”3 Experimentation too was now viewed as part of the postwar legacy, as more and more women affirmed their willingness to engage in bedroom nudity, oral sex, and varied coital positions.Yet if sexual satisfaction among women had gained new respect, mar-ried women remained the site of investigation and research. Women may have liked sex, but official talk of sexual pleasure revolved around the marital bed, the confirmed site of erotic pleasure. Single women, unwed mothers, and women who rejected the roles of wife and mother remained on the dangerous edges of polite conversation even as their growing numbers revolutionized American life. Only publishers, it seemed, took notice.Between 1940 and 1945, the overall rate of mothers living without hus-bands increased by an astounding 40percent. Remorseful or not, sexually active women were rapidly altering the American landscape. While Kinsey collated his data, rates of premarital sex continued their rise unabated, a scenario the professor had thought unlikely, arguing instead that sex before marriage had peaked between 1916 and 1930 with only “minor” increases after that.4 Vital statistics, however, tell a different story. Between 1940 and 1960, the “frequency of single-motherhood among white women increased by more than two-and-one-half fold, rising from 3.6 newborns to 9.2 newbornsper thousand unmarried white women of childbearing age,” according to one study, rates that came to define a sexual revolution in the decade that followed.5 Even in New England, a region notorious for its sober “blue laws,” censorship, and prudery—“a land of frenzied mor-alists,” H.L. Mencken famously quipped—single pregnancy wasn’t just keeping pace with national rates; it often led the way.6 When it came to single pregnant women and premarital sex, in other words, the difference between the 1940s and the 1950s was one of “word, not deed.” Far from their being “an era of sexual candidness,” the historian Alan Petigny makes clear, “it was precisely the absence of such candidness that helped obscure the exploding levels of premarital sex during the forties and fifties.”7By the time Peyton Place was published, characters like Betty Anderson, “knowledgeable beyond her years,” Selena Cross, “dusky,” sensuous,
128Chapter Seven“gypsy-like,” Constance MacKenzie, “well-built, blond, lusty,” and Ginny Sterns, “a tramp and a trollop,” were familiar figures in the social landscape (7, 4). The unwed mother was an open secret in every town, neighborhood, and suburb across America. Still, if unmarried girls and women were hav-ing sex in greater numbers than before the war, it was hardly on their own terms. Even Esquire mourned the passing of the “hearty, love-happy nymph of song and story,” whom science, the magazine declared in 1954, had destroyed.8 As the Cold War deepened, uncontrolled sexualities coiled into a menacing force, catapulting family life into the center of contain-ment politics. Irregular and unconventional sexuality, critics charged, from homosexuality to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, endangered the health of the nation, increasing America’s weakness in the face of communist aggres-sion and signaling American vulnerability from within. In an unstable world, experts argued, safety resided in “traditional” morals nurtured in the home by submissive wives and protected by “family men” whose viril-ity marked them as both normal and patriotic Americans.In this Cold War version of the modern family, female sexuality was both acknowledged and desirable, but it was the wife’s ability to channel her sexual energy into marriage that neutralized her danger to society and defined female normality. No longer the “sexless angel” who tamed “men’s more insistent desires,” the newly eroticized wife nevertheless walked a fine line between respectability and moral depravity. The “sexy” wife, like the oversexed woman, raised fears not only about the disruptive and destructive force of female sexuality but about “emasculated” husbands as well.9 Husbands, the academic experts and health professionals agreed, should assume not just economic but sexual dominance. Kinsey idealized the husband as the “sexual athlete,” demonstrating both a familiarity and a felicity with what people cryptically called “the facts of life.” Sexy wives, daring single girls, divorced women, and even young widows all presented a potent threat to the social order because they disturbed the gendered and sexual foundations on which healthy families functioned.Enter the women of Peyton Place.Betty Anderson and Constance Standish MacKenzie represented a particularly troubling type of womanhood: women whose sexual pleasure and desire operated outside the confines of marriage. As wedlock gained new importance as society’s principal bulwark against subversion, the dan-gers posed by widows, single girls, unwed mothers, and female heads of
The Women of Peyton Place129household grew proportionately more serious as the decade wore on. Betty at first sight is “an overdeveloped seventh grader,” the daughter of an aspir-ing Peyton Place mill family whose hope for advancement had already been dashed by Betty’s older sister, who, readers are cryptically informed, “had to move away” (8, 139). The town’s “good girls” use her story as protection against the advances of their boyfriends. “She couldn’t even get a job in town,” Selena warns her clean-cut, respectable, but passionate boyfriend, Ted (139). “Bad girls” like Betty embrace it. In high school Betty flaunts her sexuality, dominating the sexual play of boys like Rodney Harrington, the mill owner’s son, “a normal, healthy, good-looking boy,” potentially entrapped by the girl from across the tracks (207).In the hundreds of yellowed and tattered copies of Peyton Place my stu-dents and Ithumbed through over the years, Betty earned the lion’s share of excited scribbles. Bold, beautiful, and comfortable with her sexuality, Betty seems at first glance to be the girl everyone knows will come to no good, but her sexual frankness, honesty, and confident manner underscore the ambi-guities of postwar girlhood and bring into view the contradictions so many oral historians have unearthed. She is intriguing and complicated, savvy but vulnerable, smart but without options. Betty discusses sex in the bold tough-guy language familiar to readers of Mickey Spillane, offering no apologies for the pleasure she takes in her body and in asserting her claim to sexual autonomy. “Listen, kid,” she tongue-lashes Rodney. “Idon’t have to account to you or anybody like you for my time. Get it?” (199). Betty is a cold smack of reality that triggers both anxiety and sympathy.“Betty was great,” a female reader recalled. “So out there and in con-trol. Ithink that was the thing that Iremembermost, her taking control of sex with Rodney and the others; she was the one who knew what was what—you wanted her to succeed.”10But Betty does not succeed. She becomes pregnant, is humiliated by her boyfriend and his wealthy father, is beaten by her own father, and is forced to leave town in disgrace, while Rodney blithely continues his amo-rous adolescence. In the promised glow of postwar consumerism, aspira-tions among working-class families like the Andersons and the Standishes grew rapidly. Almost 80percent of Americans defined themselves as middle class by mid-century. Among working-class whites and African Americans, the route to middle-class respectability, always precarious, was made even more so by the potential for sexual impropriety among their
130Chapter Sevendaughters. Across class and racial divides, daughters who violated codes of sexual conduct risked a family’s reputation, jeopardizing, perhaps forever, their families’ claims to respectability and middle-class status.Even as professionals redefined the white unwed mother as patho-logical—her pregnancy an expression of deep emotional trouble—her abil-ity to damage the family heightened the need for secrecy. With the national spotlight on the problems of male youth and juvenile delinquency,mil-lions of young girls moved under the radar, traveling out of town to mater-nity homes, distant relatives, or urban hospitals, where their babies were born and family reputations (somewhat) protected.11 “For those families moving up,” one author concluded, “whether white or black, there was a tremendous fear of losing the ground they had gained. Conforming to the middle-class values of the time was paramount. Many of the women Iinterviewed spoke about their parents’ fear of being ruined if anyone learned they had an unmarried pregnant daughter.”12Like Betty, Constance also learned the bitter unfairness of female sexu-ality. Ambitious and bored, she saw early on “the limitations of Peyton Place” (15), and over the protests of her widowed mother, Elizabeth, took off for New York City. There she became the mistress of a wealthy man, Allison MacKenzie, whose wife and children are as vaguely sketched as the place where they live: somewhere “up in Scarsdale” (15). When a daughter is born, Connie’s mother goes to the city, leaving behind elaborate excuses for friends and neighbors. For the rest of her life she will live with the fear that Peyton Place will find herout.“There goes Elizabeth Standish. Her daughter got into trouble with some feller down to New York.”“Constance had a little girl.”“Poor little bastard.”“Bastard.”“That whore Constance Standish and her dirty little bastard.” (16)Connie, in turn, cuts off all ties to her hometown until local gossip moves on and she is all but forgotten. But when her mother dies, she decides to return home, where, along with her baby girl, Allison, Constance care-fully reinvents herself as a widow whose husband left her enough money to open a small dress shop. The town’s old men can’t keep their eyes off
The Women of Peyton Place131Connie, “built like a brick shithouse.” But the town is sympathetic. “It’s a shame,” says Peyton Place. “It’s hard for a woman alone, especially trying to raise a child” (17). Still, the fears that haunted her mother are now her own. With every new visitor who comes “from away,” with every glance at the forged birth certificate, with every misstep she imagines for her daugh-ter, Constance expects the other shoe to drop. “In her worst nightmares she heard the voices of Peyton Place” (16).Only the ability to cover up a daughter’s “mistake” could save a family from ruin. In Betty’s and Constance’s fears of exposure and shame, we see the bitter limitations of female desire in postwar America, forever threat-ening “a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine.”13“Soon,” Constance tells herself, “Iwill have to tell [Allison] how dan-gerous it is to be a girl” (51).With so much at stake, the pressure on girls to give up their babies for adoption mounted throughout the decade. From the end of the Second World War until 1973, an estimated 1.5million young women turned their infants over to strangers rather than risk the stigma of unwed moth-erhood for themselves and their families. One woman who decided to give up her child remembered “being really afraid of how [her mother] would act” if she learned that the teenaged daughter on whom she’d pinned her hopes was pregnant. “Iwas the one child of her four who just might make it through school, might make it out of our little town.” In rural areas especially, postwar attitudes toward premarital sex represented a sharp departure from traditional ones. Before the war, whether in the North, South, or Midwest, unwed motherhood was a local affair, interpreted in the context of interwoven social relationships of long standing. Unwed mothers in small towns were valued as honest hard workers whose contri-butions to the family and community were far more important than their chastity.14 Children, whether or not born out of wedlock, were also needed for their labor. Unwed motherhood was considered less a sign of immoral-ity than of immaturity, and unwed mothers were deemed unfortunate but not necessarilybad.New England was no exception. Our image of the iconic spinster and hidebound “prude,” embodied by Bette Davis in her wartime film Now, Voyager, distorts the degree to which prenuptial sex remained an accepted part of rural Yankee life well into the middle of the twentieth century.
132Chapter SevenOne Vermonter admitted that his New England neighbors took far more offense at his “wife smoking on the front porch” than at “the three local cou-ples living together for years and having children all without the benefit of clergy.”15 Like the larger cultural reimagining of the region, Davis’s chaste Charlotte Vale grafted sexual reticence onto the old-fashioned Yankee character, adding sexual repression and female purity to the supposed white Anglo-Saxon virtues and traditional American values.16 Off screen, Davis augmented this image of the buttoned-up New Englander with per-sonal anecdotes and advice. “Do not be afraid of the term prude,” the New England native urged her fans. “Good sports get plenty of rings on the tele-phone, but prudes get them on the finger.”17 For rural working-class Yan-kee girls and women, however, the reality was far removed from popular mythology, often leaving those “from away” bewildered by the attitudes New Englanders actually took toward illicit sexuality.One New York woman, who moved with her family to what they imagined would be a “strait-laced and chaste” New England village, was so startled by the prevalence of unwed motherhood and the town leaders’ indifference to it that she felt compelled to send her story to the fledgling Yankee magazine. Published in the fall of 1936, the article by this incredu-lous newcomer portrayed her adopted hometown as riddled with sexual scandal. When she sought to enroll her children in the local school, the principal took her aside and warned her about the moral conditions she would find, explaining that only a few months before, “the president of the senior class and the head of the student council had been forced to leave the school, the one to take a job, the other to have a baby.” Suspect-ing the principal of overreacting to one small fall from grace, she enrolled her son and daughter anyway. Soon after, a friend of her thirteen-year-old daughter, impregnated by a thirty-year-old man, was forced to marry him. Two years later the teenage bride had her second child. “During my first winter in New England,” the woman wrote, “Ihad at various times five local girls, just past high school age, help me with my housework. Three had illegitimate babies. Two girls were of French, one of Swed-ish extraction—all had ‘Yankee’ names.” This was not a New Yorker’s New England. More troubling still, she wrote, was the fact that the towns-people “seemed to accept this condition without question.” Local doctors offered free medical care to the “child mothers,” while others provided them with nursing assistance and layettes. “As far as Icould see nothing,
The Women of Peyton Place133absolutely nothing, was being done to remedy the situation,” the author wailed. “Are these conditions common in New England?” she wondered fearfully.18Although Metalious sets her scene in prewar New England, characters like Betty and Constance typify the transformations that occurred in the years following the war. If illegitimacy continued unabated, community responses changed radically. The professionalization of social services and extension of federal policies built new bridges to the nation’s “island com-munities,” dramatically undercutting regional traditions and local con-texts. Interest and concern “moved away from the mother to the child.”19Once deemed unfortunates in need of support, guidance, and education, rural white girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were rebranded in the language of the new experts as disturbed, maladjusted, deviant, abnor-mal, and, by the end of the decade, unfit mothers and undeserving citi-zens, abusers of taxpayers’ money. In reaction to the civil rights movement, which made African American unwed mothers an especially convenient Figure 5.Peyton Place countered regionalist images of picturesque New England, drawing both humorous and serious attention to the “open secrets” behind this highly mythologized and romanticized region. Cartoon, New York Review of Books, February3, 1957.
134Chapter Seventarget, conservative lawmakers across the country introduced hundreds of bills criminalizing unmarried mothers with fines, jail time, and steriliza-tion.20Peyton Place put them on sympathetic display.From the letters sent to the author in the wake of its publication, we know that many readers were not unlike the women of Peyton Place. “Ithought you had used a crystal ball and read my past,” a woman wrote to “Mrs.Metalious” from El Cajon, California. “I’m Betty,” they told her, or “Iknow just what Selena felt,” or “Itoo am an outcast.” Suspecting that Metalious was the “real” Allison, they wrote as if to one of their own, con-fiding their thoughts with the intimacy appropriate to a treasured friend. “No one else knows that Iam writing you,” or “Who would imagine Iwould tell you these things,” they said. “Dear Grace,” they presumed. They offered emotional support, assured her of their sincerity, wished her well, and pressed upon her the singularity of their act as they slowly felt their way into the conversation. “This may seem foolish for a 40 year old woman to do”; “How do Istart this letter?”; “Iwant you to know Ihave never written to anyone before not even a movie star.” They tested the waters—“You must be saying, another nut”—and they struggled to get going: “How to begin?” But begin they did: “Please don’t think me crazy, but Ijust had to write you.” More emphatically, “why am iwriting this to you?” a Florida woman pondered. “Why?”The history of the fan letter has yet to be written, but by World WarII the practice of readers writing to authors was well established. Neither new nor unique to the twentieth century, it blossomed with modern celeb-rity culture and the popularity of fan clubs that sought to blur the distance between stars and fans while at the same time solidifying the elevated sta-tus of the celebrity. We can only speculate about the motives behind indi-vidual letter writers, but the genre of fan mail helped readers overcome their hesitations as they imagined themselves part of a larger collectivity of readers. “Ihad to write you,” they wrote again and again, as they struggled to explain the feelings Peyton Place stirred in them. “This isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever done, however, at my age of 40 [it] may be foolish,” wrote “Ginny,” signing no last name. “Like most people Idon’t like to write let-ters,” a man from New York began, “but... Ihave to write it.” So “life like,” a young boy from Georgia gushed. So “real to life,” so “true,” they affirmed, all so true, not earthy, as the critics claimed, but “down to earth,” genuine, and authentic. “I just had to write.”
The Women of Peyton Place135Certainly part of the imaginative labor of Peyton Place was to render the single girl and unconventional woman more visible and their vis-ibility more sympathetic. Yet the women of Peyton Place did more than reveal the unspoken realities of women’s sexual lives; they made them plausible, even possible, putting into print what once seemed to read-ers well beyond words. “Your story is so human, it gave me the cour-age to satisfy my urge to tell my story,” wrote one reader. “Oh,” another exclaimed, “there is so much to my story.” Turning themselves into sto-rytellers, letter writers worked through the emotional difficulties of their past, using the characters of Peyton Place as a narrative template to give order and meaning to what often seemed chaotic, random, and pointless. “Ihave been wanting to write to you since Isaw and read Peyton Place,” a “social outcast” from Maine wrote in a long letter to Metalious. “Idid a lot of off color things,” she confessed, which, in the wake of her read-ing, now seemed far less through any fault of her own. “Let me tell you about...,” she wrote, going on to tell of secret abortions, abusive hus-bands, sneering neighbors, two divorces, three out-of-wedlock pregnan-cies, and “the smart, threatening District attorney... that took advantage of me, with no friends and no one to turn to, and had me sign over my son by threatening to send me to jail if Icould not pay my baby’s board.” Searching for the words to make something of themselves, readers found in fiction a way to contain, at least imaginatively, what seemed beyond their control. Peyton Place fostered as well a sense of collective relief: “I am not alone.”For some, the dust jacket said it all. “The extraordinary new novel that lifts the lid off a small New England town,” it announced. In the mind’s eye of the 1950s, Metalious’s Peyton Place was geographically misplaced. Scenes of tarpaper shacks, incestuous fathers and drunken mothers, religious hypocrisy, clerical suicide, cats strangled by little boys, unwed mothers, sexually assertive girls, and Peeping Toms conjured the pellagra-ridden landscapes of the American South. “Everybody knew the South was degenerate,” the well-known author Merle Miller wrote. “Grace Metallious’s books insist—usually stridently—that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even Wil-liam Faulkner had come across.”21Peyton Place, one journalist noted, had brought “Tobacco Road up North” and given it a “Yankee accent.”22 Met-alious, it seemed, needed to reset her compass.
136Chapter SevenReaders disagreed. Imaginatively recasting picturesque New England, Peyton Place pulled into the 1950s the starker vision of Edith Wharton’s small towns, with their “dark, unsuspected life—the sexual violence, even incest—that went on behind the bleak walls of the farmhouses.”23 In Met-alious’s hands, New England becomes an abject place, a “silhouette of society on the unsteady edges of the self,” its tarpaper shacks, queer folks, autonomous women, and inexact sexualities a haunting and disruptive presence in the national landscape.24 “Itoo, am from the New England States,” Vivian Freund wrote Grace Metalious from her home in Pennsyl-vania. “In the small village Iwas brought up in one ‘respectable’ married woman ran away (and had a baby) with one of the town’s ‘respectable’ men!! And another ‘nice’ man hanged himself in his apple orchard. Still, another was a dope fiend, and a real church going girl had a child by her father!!! Etc. etc. etc. buT,” she continued, “Iwas a real sinner because Isneaked away and went into show business!!”With her “dark complexion” and family secrets, Selena Cross troubles the confident myth of straitlaced New England and its ethnic sameness, her “slightly slanted” eyes and “gypsyish beauty” a transgressive specter as unsettling as the bleak interiors her family inhabits. Even the surname Cross, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson points out, “suggests ambiguity and hybrid-ity, as well as a burden to be endured.”25 Along with Tom Makris, the new schoolteacher and “a goddamned Greek” (94), Selena infuses the region with the disorder and danger seen as inherent in the fluidity of border crossing and unregulated sexuality.In popular culture, Selena represented as well a growing fascination with and controversy over girls who existed outside the confines of white middle-class respectability. In hit songs like “Patches,” “Teen Angel,” and “Town Without Pity,” girls from “the wrong side of the tracks” were increasingly represented as victims of social circumstances and class preju-dice, “good girls” wronged by society rather than by blood. Like Selena, they find romance on the other side of town with respectable middle-class boys who, unlike their disapproving parents, neighbors, and teachers, reject prejudice and class boundaries as old-fashioned and unjust. The narrative arc of these “wrong side of the tracks” stories, however, usu-ally ends in suicide or separation, underscoring the difficulties, even the naïveté, of cross-class and, at times, interracial mingling, at least on a per-manent basis. Metalious, by contrast, used the story of Selena as a potent
The Women of Peyton Place137vehicle for excoriating both the invented whiteness of New England and the indifference of town leaders and churchgoers to the problems of the rural working poor in general and to their daughters in particular. In an era of free education, the narrator of Peyton Place explains,the woodsmen of northern New England had little or no schooling.... “They’re all right,” the New Englander was apt to say, especially to a tour-ist from the city. “They pay their bills and taxes and they mind their own business. They don’t do any harm.” This attitude was visible, too, in the well-meaning social workers who turned away from the misery of the woodsman’s family. If a child died of cold or malnutrition, it was consid-ered unfortunate, but certainly nothing to stir up a hornet’s nest about. The state was content to let things lie, for it never had been called upon to extend aid of a material nature to the residents of the shacks which sat, like running sores, on the body of northern New England. (29)“You are quite right,” a Mainer scribbled in her decorated letter just above a recipe for Indian pudding. “Facts are facts, and there is much more to be written, long buried facts in the countless graveyards of New England.” Because it was frank rather than romantic, female-centered rather than sentimental, Peyton Place represented a radical leap in its conception of women characters, encouraging readers to recognize themselves or one of their neighbors in its pages. “What hurts in Peyton Place,” one reader notes, “is that it hits home a little hard.”26New Englanders were not alone. Across the nation, readers felt the stab of recognition. The women of Peyton Place touched a national nerve, their true-to-life stories simultaneously well known and silenced, the subject of clandestine gossip and a will-to-not-know. Postmarked by rural postmis-tresses and big-city clerks, letters from every regional nook and cranny in America flowed into the Metaliouses’ Gilmanton post office box. “Your story is my own,” fans wrote again and again. “Ilive in Peyton Place.” Even today, readers rememberthe shock of representation, the open secrets Peyton Place dared to name. “Metalious wrote about contemporary prob-lems... that no one dared speak about in real life,” one reader recalled. “Irememberthose days. Iwas about 13 when the book came out.... No one talked about incest and child abuse; no one even talked about premari-tal sex (you weren’t supposed to have it) or nice, decent girls getting preg-nant before marriage or having babies out of wedlock.”27 Another recalled
138Chapter Sevenhow she used Peyton Place to categorize her neighbors: “Iwas alone and didn’t quite fit in, so Isimply gave my neighbors the names of characters in the book—that helped me understand them better and be nicer towards them. Iwas Allison, of course.”28Peyton Place invited readers to identify across sexual and gender dif-ference, to engage with “narrative fantasy from a variety of subject posi-tions and at various levels.”29 Allison, Norman, Selena, Betty, Constance: readers inserted themselves into one then into another, entwining selves, forging new ones, using difference to revise their understandings of iden-tity, place, future, and past. “It made no difference,” one elderly woman recalled, “they all drew me in. Iimagined myself at once Norman and Allison.”30 One young gay man told me: “The only way Ican explain my obsession with Peyton Place is that it was like a shadow world. You know, everything inside of me seemed less clear, blurry, and so Ibecame Norman for a while, then Mike, then Allison and Selena. Ithink Ikind of put mas-culinity and femininity together in ways that worked for me. But Icould never really explain it.”31Social commentators seldom addressed the needs of readers who found reflections of themselves in Peyton Place. While liberal reformers sought to bring sex education into the schools, contraception and abortion remained fiercely opposed. Charges of child sexual abuse, rape, and incest: it was all lies and too much imagination. Unconventional sex was the stuff of locker room jokes. Girls were either “good” or “bad.” Case closed. In his influ-ential 1962 study Growing Up Absurd: The Problems of Youth in the Orga-nized Society, Paul Goodman capped off a decade’s dismissive attitudes toward young women like Connie, Allison, Betty, and Selena. “Our ‘youth troubles,’” Goodman told readers, “are ‘boys’ troubles.”32 Like many post-war social commentators, Goodman equated “youth” with young men and boys. Girls, no matter their class, racial, or ethnic differences, were subsumed by the alchemy of female sameness and the certitude of gen-der expectations. Angry men, alienated Beats, ethnic bad boys, urban gang members, and unconventional beatniks symbolized for many the social underside of American materialism and prosperity, their troubled lives a source of highly visible concern, study, and drama.33The story of American girls was sweet and simple. For good girls, mar-riage was a symbol of maturity, for bad girls a sign of reform, a return to
The Women of Peyton Place139respectability. Speaking for many, Goodman argued that the young girl is “not expected to make something of herself... for she will have chil-dren.”34 Increasingly understood as the single most important transition into adulthood, marriage took on a new inevitability in the fifties, with couples commonly marrying in their teenage years. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the men-tally defective,” one expert noted, “almost everyone has an opportunity (‘and, by implication, a duty’) to marry.”35 By 1959, just under 50percent of all brides married before they turned nineteen years old.36 Children arrived not long after the honeymoon, with three offspring the new norm in popular songs and 3.2 in actuality. The year before Peyton Place was published, fewer than 10percent of Americans believed that an unmarried person could be happy. “The family is the center of your living,” an advice manual proclaimed. “If is isn’t, you’ve gone astray.”37 To marry was to define oneself as “good”—a good person and a good citizen. “Should Iget married? Should Ibe good?” Beat poet Gregory Corso asks while toying with the decade’s most popular image of the “aproned young and lovely” wife “wanting my baby.”38Allison MacKenzie would have found him a crushing bore. “Don’t you think it’s just awful?” Allison’s friend Kathy asks as they discuss Betty’s pregnancy.“Oh, Idon’t know” Allison responds. “Ithink it would be sort of excit-ing to have a child by one’s lover.”Should Betty have married Rodney?“No,” Allison cries! “Marriage is for clods, and if you go and get mar-ried the way you plan, Kathy, that will be the end of your artistic career. Marriage is stultifying” (212).In her wish to remain single yet sexually active, to delay marriage and pursue a career, Allison mapped out the terrain of the single girl who was yet to find a public voice. By the time Helen Gurley Brown offered advice to the sex-friendly single girl, Peyton Place had already assured an audience would be waiting.39 Allison’s mother, Constance, was equally prescient, her independence, career, and convoluted road to marriage foretelling second-wave shifts in the tidy progression of love, marriage, sex, and child-birth. The blond bombshell was nobody’sfool.Poised and “well built,” the widowed Constance refuses to date, posi-tions herself at a respectable distance from the town (“the only mother to
140Chapter Sevenhave dinner instead of supper,” Allison complains [18–19]). Yet despite her fair good looks, Constance avoids men. Indeed, after a scandalous youth, Connie becomes something of a New England prude when she returns home with her infant daughter. “Never having been highly sexed,” she leads a sexless life. Economically autonomous, she retains a certain whiff of Victorian “single blessedness,” wherein life without a man is both wel-comed and preferred. “The truth of the matter,” the narrator explains, “was that Constance enjoyed her life alone.” Conforming to the social codes she knows so well, Mrs.MacKenzie keeps her worrisome past secret and her nose to the grindstone. “She stays in that shop of hers ’til six o’clock every night,” townspeople approvingly observe (17). She is contained by honestwork.Still, Connie’s undersexed life elicits both sympathy and suspicion. At a time when sexual fulfillment was growing into an accepted, even essen-tial part of mature womanhood, Connie’s contentment stood out. So odd was the woman without a husband that one study called such women “a separate species” who “inhabit a half-secret subculture.”40 In 1954 Esquireproclaimed the working wife “a menace.”41As new norms for female sexual response gathered momentum in the fifties, women who rejected marriage, and the sexual maturity it con-firmed, lost the safe perch that “single blessedness” had once provided. In its place came dozens of expert explanations, scientific categories, and therapies constructed in relation to the new norm of mutual gratification and sexual satisfaction in the marriage bed. Was Constance a latent homo-sexual, one of Peyton Place’s “Lizzies”? Was she frigid? Or was she actu-ally oversexed, her frigidity less a rejection of innate femininity than the result of repressed desire? Was Connie suffering from nymphomania?How to read Constance MacKenzie?Early in the novel, Connie explains her lack of sexual feelings as a prod-uct of her painful love affair with Allison’s father. When she looks back, she decides that perhaps she never loved him and that he could not have loved her, for if he did, “his first thoughts should have been for her pro-tection, coming ahead of his desire to lead her to bed” (119). His crime, she reasons, was not adultery but his failure to use contraception, a failure to offset the injuries that she alone would suffer. This was not love but sex, a foolish act that ruined her life and one she must now guard against. Marriage, she muses, is about companionship and friendship “based on
The Women of Peyton Place141a community of tastes and interests, together with a similarity of back-ground and viewpoint” (119), a brew of emotions called “love.” Love and marriage might go together in popular song, but sex, Connie reasons, has nothing to do with it. Sex, she tells readers, is something altogether dif-ferent. When one is young, sexual urges are a test of love, of a man’s com-mitment, but later in life, sex is just a minor upset, “not unlike a touch of indigestion,” she tells herself (17).Today’s readers often compare Connie to Betty Draper of television’s Mad Men: cold, remote, and emotionally unavailable. In the early decades of the twentieth century, she was a familiar type much deployed in literary texts to connote the frigid woman. Typically blond, refined, upper class, and Anglo-Saxon, the frigid woman represented a mélange of theories that linked sexual coldness to “overcivilization” among delicate, upper-class, urban, and urbane wives.42 With the rise of the women’s movement in the early 1900s, sexual indifference and unresponsiveness quickly tran-sited into the ranks of female pathology. What was once understood as an aberration among men and women, a deficiency rather than a perversion, became the inevitable result of women’s “will to power,” induced by a hid-den desire to dominate and “triumph over men.” As the century unfolded, frigidity became solely a female malady, its causes located deep within the woman herself, “an act of will,” a choice, albeit an unconscious one, trig-gered perhaps by an insult or “an indignity.”43While intense professional interest began to wane after World War II (albeit with notable exceptions like the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte), ideas about frigidity lingered in marriage manuals well into the 1960s and 1970s. In the national imaginary, sexual coldness also continued to take on a multitude of forms. In films, magazine stories, and paperback novels, strong, domineering career women, suffocating mothers, and Boston spinsters carried more than a suggestion of frigidity, often repre-sented as repression in need of sexual awakening by a strong masculine type. By the early fifties, neo-Freudian theories increased public interest and uncertainty as professionals connected frigidity with nymphomania. Simply put, women who were overly sexed might actually be suffer-ing from an underlying lack of sexual desire. In the new formulation, undersexed women were simply the other side of the nymphomaniac coin, their desire just waiting to be released. “Not lascivious desires or hot blood,” experts argued, “but lack of sexual satisfaction most often bred
142Chapter Sevennymphomania.”44 How to unlock Connie’s sexuality? How to restore her to sexual normalcy?For most readers today, Connie’s “sexual awakening” is not just dif-ficult to understand; it makes no sense. It begins on a beach where Tom Makris takes Connie for a moonlight swim. Makris is the town’s new school principal, “dark skinned, black haired,” handsome in “an obviously sexual way.” He stands in stark contrast to Connie, with her English fea-tures and the hard-shelled sexual repression she represents. Worse, in the eyes of Peyton Place’s xenophobic establishment, Makris is “a goddamned Greek” (100, 94). But for Metalious, whose husband was Greek American, he represents the perfect figureof masculine virility to unleash Connie’s sexual desires. They kiss, they partially disrobe, but when Connie refuses to have sex with him, Tom picks her up, drives her home, and forces him-self onher.“I’ll have you arrested,” she stammers. “I’ll have you arrested and put in jail for breaking and entering and rape—”He stood on the floor beside the bed and slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of hishand.“Don’t open your mouth again,” he said quietly. “Just keep your mouth shut.”He bent over her and ripped the still wet bathing suit from her body, and in the dark she heard the sound of his zipper opening as he took off his trunks.“Now,” he said. “Now.” (150)It is a scene of violence and rape. Yet not one letter writer took note; not one objected. They liked Tom. Not one critic took aim at the scene or raised a voice against the violence directed at Connie. Metalious’s publishers loved it. Indeed, they had asked her to write just such an episode to help explain Connie’s engagement to Tom. Her editor, Leona Nevler, and publisher, Kitty Messner, wanted a hot, sexy scene on the beach between Tom and Connie. Metalious obliged, retreating to the publisher’s office, where she hammered out the scene in half an hour. She thought it a good imitation of Mickey Spillane. It was. Whether the woman’s problem was nympho-mania or frigidity, “the love of a strong, forceful, masculine man” was a popular literary cure for many female problems.45
The Women of Peyton Place143Rape, at least white-on-white rape, was seldom taken seriously in the years prior to second-wave feminism. Scenes of rough sex initiated by men were a staple of hard-boiled novels and magazine fiction. Many states demanded corroborating evidence of sexual assault, allowed the victim’s sexual history into evidence at trial, and “required judges to invoke the seventeenth-century dictum, ‘rape is the easiest charge to make and the most difficult to prove.’” In North Carolina, a victim first had to prove that she’d been a virgin before she could enter a claim of rape.46 Among more than one hundred interviews Iconducted, almost every reader remem-bered thinking of the scene at the time they read it as “steamy,” “hot,” “thrilling,” a “big wow.” Only later did they wonder at the prevalence of such scenes, their casual acceptance of them, and the depth of cultural tol-erance for them. Even one college professor was surprised that he could still quote the scene’s most famous line: “Your nipples are as hard as dia-monds” (277).47If the possibility of exciting married sex resolves Connie’s conflicted relationships with men, her daughter finds resolution in the pursuit of a career and life as a sexually active single girl. Uncomfortable with the only options available to her, Allison is “peculiar and different,” a dreamy girl at odds with the requirements of her gender. Like many readers, she imagines others to have the “attraction and poise” she lacks. The world around her is boring and uninteresting; only when reading or walking in the woods does she feel a “shred of happiness” (11). Yet Allison is not a conventional heroine, her discomfort and rebellion resolved by the arms of a strong man. Behind the façade of her femininity rest not only the vague rebellions of youth but also the masculine ambitions for independence and personal success. Sensitive, she avoids the sentimental, dismisses marriage, and is indifferent to motherhood. Rather than enter college, she leaves home to become a writer, moving to Greenwich Village, where she rooms with a bachelor girl daringly named Stevie, and eventually puts her home-town’s talk into a best-selling novel.In many ways Allison embodies the discontent, unrest, defiant pose, and outsider identity available to “Beat” boys and rebellious men in gray flannel suits. But she is also a new kind of female rebel, deeply in revolt against traditional femininity, capable of assuming “masculine” qualities that allow her to pursue sex without commitment and a career that will be her own. Before Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan, or Mary Tyler
144Chapter SevenMoore made sex and the single girl a popular cultural trope, Allison gave the single girl a powerful place in the cultural imaginary.Teenagers wrote Metalious in gratitude and admiration for giving them Allison. Yet older readers were also drawn to the character, iden-tifying less with her career ambitions than with her vague longings and loneliness. “Icould write pages and pages to you,” a Florida reader con-fided to “Grace”—“things Ithink, feel, do.” Then a few lines down, she quotes from her favorite passage from Peyton Place—“But it was not the season that weighed heaviest on Allison. She did not know what it was. She seemed to be filled with a restlessness, a vague unrest, which nothing was able to ease”—adding, “Ithink a lot of women now feel this, not only myself, or you, at one time... that feeling of what am ihere for? Perhaps some women feel only a vague restlessness they can’t analyze... but it isan unfruitful feeling, and just raising children to maturity doesn’t seem the full answer. Perhaps too many modern conveniences have robbed a woman of her own creativeness in the home? Thus that creativeness has no full outlet?” Unlike Allison, the letter writer feels stuck in her small Florida town. “Where were my guts twenty years ago?” she wonders. For comfort she goes fishing and sends letters to Grace, to whom she had been writing since the summer of 1956. The letter was written in 1961, two years before Betty Friedan identified “the problem that had no name.”Allison is not the only woman in Peyton Place to represent inchoate yearnings and ambitions that would later be described as feminist. Among her circle of friends are the town’s outsiders, an assortment of girls and boys who defy conventional roles. There’s Selena Cross, of course, “her 13 year old eyes as old as time.” She and Allison make a “peculiar pair” (6–7). If critics made a great hullabaloo out of the “outhouse” language Metalious used,48 they failed to note her many uses of terms like “peculiar,” “differ-ent,” “odd,” “queer,” and “Lizzie.” Metalious’s biographer counted only three four-letter words in the entire text. Had she counted the vocabulary of social, sexual, class, and gender difference, she would have discovered a far more disruptive language, one that gave new meaning and motive force to outsider identities and the readers who would come to confirm and claim them. “If one reads her carefully,” an astute critic noted in 1971, “an interesting pattern emerges, for Grace Metalious knew in her blood what it meant to be an outsider, hungering for respectability.”49
The Women of Peyton Place145The women of Peyton Place make their way without apology. They sur-vive. At times they triumph, morally if not always materially. Selena has an abortion, gets over her boyfriend’s rejection, and finds a good job at Con-nie’s fashionable dress “shoppe.” She “had never been one to let the opin-ions of Peyton Place bother her in any way,” the narrator tells us. “Let ’em talk”—she didn’t care. She knew that girls from the “backwoods” would “always be branded ‘hotblooded,’ so let ’em talk” (138–39). If Connie finds sexual satisfaction with Tom, she refuses to accept sex as a sign of love. “Speak to Tom,” she tells Allison. “He’s the one who taught me to call a spade a spade” (358). For Allison, the town’s many voices turn into a career that makes her famous. And Betty, offstage, continues to haunt the town. In defiance of literary convention, she does not succumb to consumption, die in childbirth, or surrender her baby to a rich but barren couple. Rather it is boyfriend Rodney who pays the ultimate price. Unable to keep his eyes off his latest sexual conquest, who sits beside him in his convertible—“she was like something he had read about in what he termed ‘dirty books’”—Rodney dies with her in a spectacular car crash as he reaches over to unbut-ton her blouse at fifty milesper hour (314).Years later Metalious will write that she left Betty Anderson “pretty much up in the air.” Her hope, in a projected third sequel, was “to focus more on Betty’s happy life with her father-in-law and son, Rodney Harrington, Jr.”50 It is a book Grace will never write. Yet the women of Peyton Place do not disappear. They surface again and again, in novel form; in television’s first, and most widely watched, primetime serialized drama; and in the 1960s, when they find social traction in the outsider identities and unconventional behaviors they made imaginable, real, and normal.In the years immediately following publication of the novel, however, it is Grace Metalious who will become the most watched woman of Peyton Place, her life the most talked-about sequel she would ever produce.
© 2017 Cornell University Press, Ithaca

7It was the historian of paperbacks Kenneth Davis who first explored the connection between Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and the novel Peyton Place. What shocked Americans about Kinsey, Davis argued, was not simply the explicit nature of his findings; rather it was the lack of remorse expressed by unmarried mothers, adulter-ous wives, and sexually active single women. “The chaste conceded only that they had lacked opportunity,” he wrote. If Kinsey was right, women and girls not only enjoyed sex but also were enjoying lots of it, often on their own terms. “The news came as a major challenge to the polite notion that ‘good girls don’t.’ What was important about Peyton Place’s women,” Davis concludes, “is that they represented this unspoken reality.”1Peyton Place spilled the beans.Certainly for those on the outskirts of political life, for those who sel-dom gave a thought to politics or political action, the Kinsey Reports mate-rialized in useful ways a discourse of discontent, an articulation of things deeply felt but rarely discussed. Despite fierce counterattacks, Kinsey chal-lenged long-standing notions that there was such a thing as “too much” “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, canwe?”“Why not—why not—whynot?”Edith Wharton, The Ageof InnocenceThe Women of PeyTon PlAce
The Women of Peyton Place127sex or the “wrong kind” of sex. Anymphomaniac, the professor famously stated, was simply “someone who had more sex than you do.”2 Women, it seemed, were having not just more sex but apparently better sex, with Kinsey reporting a “distinct and steady increase in the number of females reaching orgasm.”3 Experimentation too was now viewed as part of the postwar legacy, as more and more women affirmed their willingness to engage in bedroom nudity, oral sex, and varied coital positions.Yet if sexual satisfaction among women had gained new respect, mar-ried women remained the site of investigation and research. Women may have liked sex, but official talk of sexual pleasure revolved around the marital bed, the confirmed site of erotic pleasure. Single women, unwed mothers, and women who rejected the roles of wife and mother remained on the dangerous edges of polite conversation even as their growing numbers revolutionized American life. Only publishers, it seemed, took notice.Between 1940 and 1945, the overall rate of mothers living without hus-bands increased by an astounding 40percent. Remorseful or not, sexually active women were rapidly altering the American landscape. While Kinsey collated his data, rates of premarital sex continued their rise unabated, a scenario the professor had thought unlikely, arguing instead that sex before marriage had peaked between 1916 and 1930 with only “minor” increases after that.4 Vital statistics, however, tell a different story. Between 1940 and 1960, the “frequency of single-motherhood among white women increased by more than two-and-one-half fold, rising from 3.6 newborns to 9.2 newbornsper thousand unmarried white women of childbearing age,” according to one study, rates that came to define a sexual revolution in the decade that followed.5 Even in New England, a region notorious for its sober “blue laws,” censorship, and prudery—“a land of frenzied mor-alists,” H.L. Mencken famously quipped—single pregnancy wasn’t just keeping pace with national rates; it often led the way.6 When it came to single pregnant women and premarital sex, in other words, the difference between the 1940s and the 1950s was one of “word, not deed.” Far from their being “an era of sexual candidness,” the historian Alan Petigny makes clear, “it was precisely the absence of such candidness that helped obscure the exploding levels of premarital sex during the forties and fifties.”7By the time Peyton Place was published, characters like Betty Anderson, “knowledgeable beyond her years,” Selena Cross, “dusky,” sensuous,
128Chapter Seven“gypsy-like,” Constance MacKenzie, “well-built, blond, lusty,” and Ginny Sterns, “a tramp and a trollop,” were familiar figures in the social landscape (7, 4). The unwed mother was an open secret in every town, neighborhood, and suburb across America. Still, if unmarried girls and women were hav-ing sex in greater numbers than before the war, it was hardly on their own terms. Even Esquire mourned the passing of the “hearty, love-happy nymph of song and story,” whom science, the magazine declared in 1954, had destroyed.8 As the Cold War deepened, uncontrolled sexualities coiled into a menacing force, catapulting family life into the center of contain-ment politics. Irregular and unconventional sexuality, critics charged, from homosexuality to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, endangered the health of the nation, increasing America’s weakness in the face of communist aggres-sion and signaling American vulnerability from within. In an unstable world, experts argued, safety resided in “traditional” morals nurtured in the home by submissive wives and protected by “family men” whose viril-ity marked them as both normal and patriotic Americans.In this Cold War version of the modern family, female sexuality was both acknowledged and desirable, but it was the wife’s ability to channel her sexual energy into marriage that neutralized her danger to society and defined female normality. No longer the “sexless angel” who tamed “men’s more insistent desires,” the newly eroticized wife nevertheless walked a fine line between respectability and moral depravity. The “sexy” wife, like the oversexed woman, raised fears not only about the disruptive and destructive force of female sexuality but about “emasculated” husbands as well.9 Husbands, the academic experts and health professionals agreed, should assume not just economic but sexual dominance. Kinsey idealized the husband as the “sexual athlete,” demonstrating both a familiarity and a felicity with what people cryptically called “the facts of life.” Sexy wives, daring single girls, divorced women, and even young widows all presented a potent threat to the social order because they disturbed the gendered and sexual foundations on which healthy families functioned.Enter the women of Peyton Place.Betty Anderson and Constance Standish MacKenzie represented a particularly troubling type of womanhood: women whose sexual pleasure and desire operated outside the confines of marriage. As wedlock gained new importance as society’s principal bulwark against subversion, the dan-gers posed by widows, single girls, unwed mothers, and female heads of
The Women of Peyton Place129household grew proportionately more serious as the decade wore on. Betty at first sight is “an overdeveloped seventh grader,” the daughter of an aspir-ing Peyton Place mill family whose hope for advancement had already been dashed by Betty’s older sister, who, readers are cryptically informed, “had to move away” (8, 139). The town’s “good girls” use her story as protection against the advances of their boyfriends. “She couldn’t even get a job in town,” Selena warns her clean-cut, respectable, but passionate boyfriend, Ted (139). “Bad girls” like Betty embrace it. In high school Betty flaunts her sexuality, dominating the sexual play of boys like Rodney Harrington, the mill owner’s son, “a normal, healthy, good-looking boy,” potentially entrapped by the girl from across the tracks (207).In the hundreds of yellowed and tattered copies of Peyton Place my stu-dents and Ithumbed through over the years, Betty earned the lion’s share of excited scribbles. Bold, beautiful, and comfortable with her sexuality, Betty seems at first glance to be the girl everyone knows will come to no good, but her sexual frankness, honesty, and confident manner underscore the ambi-guities of postwar girlhood and bring into view the contradictions so many oral historians have unearthed. She is intriguing and complicated, savvy but vulnerable, smart but without options. Betty discusses sex in the bold tough-guy language familiar to readers of Mickey Spillane, offering no apologies for the pleasure she takes in her body and in asserting her claim to sexual autonomy. “Listen, kid,” she tongue-lashes Rodney. “Idon’t have to account to you or anybody like you for my time. Get it?” (199). Betty is a cold smack of reality that triggers both anxiety and sympathy.“Betty was great,” a female reader recalled. “So out there and in con-trol. Ithink that was the thing that Iremembermost, her taking control of sex with Rodney and the others; she was the one who knew what was what—you wanted her to succeed.”10But Betty does not succeed. She becomes pregnant, is humiliated by her boyfriend and his wealthy father, is beaten by her own father, and is forced to leave town in disgrace, while Rodney blithely continues his amo-rous adolescence. In the promised glow of postwar consumerism, aspira-tions among working-class families like the Andersons and the Standishes grew rapidly. Almost 80percent of Americans defined themselves as middle class by mid-century. Among working-class whites and African Americans, the route to middle-class respectability, always precarious, was made even more so by the potential for sexual impropriety among their
130Chapter Sevendaughters. Across class and racial divides, daughters who violated codes of sexual conduct risked a family’s reputation, jeopardizing, perhaps forever, their families’ claims to respectability and middle-class status.Even as professionals redefined the white unwed mother as patho-logical—her pregnancy an expression of deep emotional trouble—her abil-ity to damage the family heightened the need for secrecy. With the national spotlight on the problems of male youth and juvenile delinquency,mil-lions of young girls moved under the radar, traveling out of town to mater-nity homes, distant relatives, or urban hospitals, where their babies were born and family reputations (somewhat) protected.11 “For those families moving up,” one author concluded, “whether white or black, there was a tremendous fear of losing the ground they had gained. Conforming to the middle-class values of the time was paramount. Many of the women Iinterviewed spoke about their parents’ fear of being ruined if anyone learned they had an unmarried pregnant daughter.”12Like Betty, Constance also learned the bitter unfairness of female sexu-ality. Ambitious and bored, she saw early on “the limitations of Peyton Place” (15), and over the protests of her widowed mother, Elizabeth, took off for New York City. There she became the mistress of a wealthy man, Allison MacKenzie, whose wife and children are as vaguely sketched as the place where they live: somewhere “up in Scarsdale” (15). When a daughter is born, Connie’s mother goes to the city, leaving behind elaborate excuses for friends and neighbors. For the rest of her life she will live with the fear that Peyton Place will find herout.“There goes Elizabeth Standish. Her daughter got into trouble with some feller down to New York.”“Constance had a little girl.”“Poor little bastard.”“Bastard.”“That whore Constance Standish and her dirty little bastard.” (16)Connie, in turn, cuts off all ties to her hometown until local gossip moves on and she is all but forgotten. But when her mother dies, she decides to return home, where, along with her baby girl, Allison, Constance care-fully reinvents herself as a widow whose husband left her enough money to open a small dress shop. The town’s old men can’t keep their eyes off
The Women of Peyton Place131Connie, “built like a brick shithouse.” But the town is sympathetic. “It’s a shame,” says Peyton Place. “It’s hard for a woman alone, especially trying to raise a child” (17). Still, the fears that haunted her mother are now her own. With every new visitor who comes “from away,” with every glance at the forged birth certificate, with every misstep she imagines for her daugh-ter, Constance expects the other shoe to drop. “In her worst nightmares she heard the voices of Peyton Place” (16).Only the ability to cover up a daughter’s “mistake” could save a family from ruin. In Betty’s and Constance’s fears of exposure and shame, we see the bitter limitations of female desire in postwar America, forever threat-ening “a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine.”13“Soon,” Constance tells herself, “Iwill have to tell [Allison] how dan-gerous it is to be a girl” (51).With so much at stake, the pressure on girls to give up their babies for adoption mounted throughout the decade. From the end of the Second World War until 1973, an estimated 1.5million young women turned their infants over to strangers rather than risk the stigma of unwed moth-erhood for themselves and their families. One woman who decided to give up her child remembered “being really afraid of how [her mother] would act” if she learned that the teenaged daughter on whom she’d pinned her hopes was pregnant. “Iwas the one child of her four who just might make it through school, might make it out of our little town.” In rural areas especially, postwar attitudes toward premarital sex represented a sharp departure from traditional ones. Before the war, whether in the North, South, or Midwest, unwed motherhood was a local affair, interpreted in the context of interwoven social relationships of long standing. Unwed mothers in small towns were valued as honest hard workers whose contri-butions to the family and community were far more important than their chastity.14 Children, whether or not born out of wedlock, were also needed for their labor. Unwed motherhood was considered less a sign of immoral-ity than of immaturity, and unwed mothers were deemed unfortunate but not necessarilybad.New England was no exception. Our image of the iconic spinster and hidebound “prude,” embodied by Bette Davis in her wartime film Now, Voyager, distorts the degree to which prenuptial sex remained an accepted part of rural Yankee life well into the middle of the twentieth century.
132Chapter SevenOne Vermonter admitted that his New England neighbors took far more offense at his “wife smoking on the front porch” than at “the three local cou-ples living together for years and having children all without the benefit of clergy.”15 Like the larger cultural reimagining of the region, Davis’s chaste Charlotte Vale grafted sexual reticence onto the old-fashioned Yankee character, adding sexual repression and female purity to the supposed white Anglo-Saxon virtues and traditional American values.16 Off screen, Davis augmented this image of the buttoned-up New Englander with per-sonal anecdotes and advice. “Do not be afraid of the term prude,” the New England native urged her fans. “Good sports get plenty of rings on the tele-phone, but prudes get them on the finger.”17 For rural working-class Yan-kee girls and women, however, the reality was far removed from popular mythology, often leaving those “from away” bewildered by the attitudes New Englanders actually took toward illicit sexuality.One New York woman, who moved with her family to what they imagined would be a “strait-laced and chaste” New England village, was so startled by the prevalence of unwed motherhood and the town leaders’ indifference to it that she felt compelled to send her story to the fledgling Yankee magazine. Published in the fall of 1936, the article by this incredu-lous newcomer portrayed her adopted hometown as riddled with sexual scandal. When she sought to enroll her children in the local school, the principal took her aside and warned her about the moral conditions she would find, explaining that only a few months before, “the president of the senior class and the head of the student council had been forced to leave the school, the one to take a job, the other to have a baby.” Suspect-ing the principal of overreacting to one small fall from grace, she enrolled her son and daughter anyway. Soon after, a friend of her thirteen-year-old daughter, impregnated by a thirty-year-old man, was forced to marry him. Two years later the teenage bride had her second child. “During my first winter in New England,” the woman wrote, “Ihad at various times five local girls, just past high school age, help me with my housework. Three had illegitimate babies. Two girls were of French, one of Swed-ish extraction—all had ‘Yankee’ names.” This was not a New Yorker’s New England. More troubling still, she wrote, was the fact that the towns-people “seemed to accept this condition without question.” Local doctors offered free medical care to the “child mothers,” while others provided them with nursing assistance and layettes. “As far as Icould see nothing,
The Women of Peyton Place133absolutely nothing, was being done to remedy the situation,” the author wailed. “Are these conditions common in New England?” she wondered fearfully.18Although Metalious sets her scene in prewar New England, characters like Betty and Constance typify the transformations that occurred in the years following the war. If illegitimacy continued unabated, community responses changed radically. The professionalization of social services and extension of federal policies built new bridges to the nation’s “island com-munities,” dramatically undercutting regional traditions and local con-texts. Interest and concern “moved away from the mother to the child.”19Once deemed unfortunates in need of support, guidance, and education, rural white girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were rebranded in the language of the new experts as disturbed, maladjusted, deviant, abnor-mal, and, by the end of the decade, unfit mothers and undeserving citi-zens, abusers of taxpayers’ money. In reaction to the civil rights movement, which made African American unwed mothers an especially convenient Figure 5.Peyton Place countered regionalist images of picturesque New England, drawing both humorous and serious attention to the “open secrets” behind this highly mythologized and romanticized region. Cartoon, New York Review of Books, February3, 1957.
134Chapter Seventarget, conservative lawmakers across the country introduced hundreds of bills criminalizing unmarried mothers with fines, jail time, and steriliza-tion.20Peyton Place put them on sympathetic display.From the letters sent to the author in the wake of its publication, we know that many readers were not unlike the women of Peyton Place. “Ithought you had used a crystal ball and read my past,” a woman wrote to “Mrs.Metalious” from El Cajon, California. “I’m Betty,” they told her, or “Iknow just what Selena felt,” or “Itoo am an outcast.” Suspecting that Metalious was the “real” Allison, they wrote as if to one of their own, con-fiding their thoughts with the intimacy appropriate to a treasured friend. “No one else knows that Iam writing you,” or “Who would imagine Iwould tell you these things,” they said. “Dear Grace,” they presumed. They offered emotional support, assured her of their sincerity, wished her well, and pressed upon her the singularity of their act as they slowly felt their way into the conversation. “This may seem foolish for a 40 year old woman to do”; “How do Istart this letter?”; “Iwant you to know Ihave never written to anyone before not even a movie star.” They tested the waters—“You must be saying, another nut”—and they struggled to get going: “How to begin?” But begin they did: “Please don’t think me crazy, but Ijust had to write you.” More emphatically, “why am iwriting this to you?” a Florida woman pondered. “Why?”The history of the fan letter has yet to be written, but by World WarII the practice of readers writing to authors was well established. Neither new nor unique to the twentieth century, it blossomed with modern celeb-rity culture and the popularity of fan clubs that sought to blur the distance between stars and fans while at the same time solidifying the elevated sta-tus of the celebrity. We can only speculate about the motives behind indi-vidual letter writers, but the genre of fan mail helped readers overcome their hesitations as they imagined themselves part of a larger collectivity of readers. “Ihad to write you,” they wrote again and again, as they struggled to explain the feelings Peyton Place stirred in them. “This isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever done, however, at my age of 40 [it] may be foolish,” wrote “Ginny,” signing no last name. “Like most people Idon’t like to write let-ters,” a man from New York began, “but... Ihave to write it.” So “life like,” a young boy from Georgia gushed. So “real to life,” so “true,” they affirmed, all so true, not earthy, as the critics claimed, but “down to earth,” genuine, and authentic. “I just had to write.”
The Women of Peyton Place135Certainly part of the imaginative labor of Peyton Place was to render the single girl and unconventional woman more visible and their vis-ibility more sympathetic. Yet the women of Peyton Place did more than reveal the unspoken realities of women’s sexual lives; they made them plausible, even possible, putting into print what once seemed to read-ers well beyond words. “Your story is so human, it gave me the cour-age to satisfy my urge to tell my story,” wrote one reader. “Oh,” another exclaimed, “there is so much to my story.” Turning themselves into sto-rytellers, letter writers worked through the emotional difficulties of their past, using the characters of Peyton Place as a narrative template to give order and meaning to what often seemed chaotic, random, and pointless. “Ihave been wanting to write to you since Isaw and read Peyton Place,” a “social outcast” from Maine wrote in a long letter to Metalious. “Idid a lot of off color things,” she confessed, which, in the wake of her read-ing, now seemed far less through any fault of her own. “Let me tell you about...,” she wrote, going on to tell of secret abortions, abusive hus-bands, sneering neighbors, two divorces, three out-of-wedlock pregnan-cies, and “the smart, threatening District attorney... that took advantage of me, with no friends and no one to turn to, and had me sign over my son by threatening to send me to jail if Icould not pay my baby’s board.” Searching for the words to make something of themselves, readers found in fiction a way to contain, at least imaginatively, what seemed beyond their control. Peyton Place fostered as well a sense of collective relief: “I am not alone.”For some, the dust jacket said it all. “The extraordinary new novel that lifts the lid off a small New England town,” it announced. In the mind’s eye of the 1950s, Metalious’s Peyton Place was geographically misplaced. Scenes of tarpaper shacks, incestuous fathers and drunken mothers, religious hypocrisy, clerical suicide, cats strangled by little boys, unwed mothers, sexually assertive girls, and Peeping Toms conjured the pellagra-ridden landscapes of the American South. “Everybody knew the South was degenerate,” the well-known author Merle Miller wrote. “Grace Metallious’s books insist—usually stridently—that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even Wil-liam Faulkner had come across.”21Peyton Place, one journalist noted, had brought “Tobacco Road up North” and given it a “Yankee accent.”22 Met-alious, it seemed, needed to reset her compass.
136Chapter SevenReaders disagreed. Imaginatively recasting picturesque New England, Peyton Place pulled into the 1950s the starker vision of Edith Wharton’s small towns, with their “dark, unsuspected life—the sexual violence, even incest—that went on behind the bleak walls of the farmhouses.”23 In Met-alious’s hands, New England becomes an abject place, a “silhouette of society on the unsteady edges of the self,” its tarpaper shacks, queer folks, autonomous women, and inexact sexualities a haunting and disruptive presence in the national landscape.24 “Itoo, am from the New England States,” Vivian Freund wrote Grace Metalious from her home in Pennsyl-vania. “In the small village Iwas brought up in one ‘respectable’ married woman ran away (and had a baby) with one of the town’s ‘respectable’ men!! And another ‘nice’ man hanged himself in his apple orchard. Still, another was a dope fiend, and a real church going girl had a child by her father!!! Etc. etc. etc. buT,” she continued, “Iwas a real sinner because Isneaked away and went into show business!!”With her “dark complexion” and family secrets, Selena Cross troubles the confident myth of straitlaced New England and its ethnic sameness, her “slightly slanted” eyes and “gypsyish beauty” a transgressive specter as unsettling as the bleak interiors her family inhabits. Even the surname Cross, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson points out, “suggests ambiguity and hybrid-ity, as well as a burden to be endured.”25 Along with Tom Makris, the new schoolteacher and “a goddamned Greek” (94), Selena infuses the region with the disorder and danger seen as inherent in the fluidity of border crossing and unregulated sexuality.In popular culture, Selena represented as well a growing fascination with and controversy over girls who existed outside the confines of white middle-class respectability. In hit songs like “Patches,” “Teen Angel,” and “Town Without Pity,” girls from “the wrong side of the tracks” were increasingly represented as victims of social circumstances and class preju-dice, “good girls” wronged by society rather than by blood. Like Selena, they find romance on the other side of town with respectable middle-class boys who, unlike their disapproving parents, neighbors, and teachers, reject prejudice and class boundaries as old-fashioned and unjust. The narrative arc of these “wrong side of the tracks” stories, however, usu-ally ends in suicide or separation, underscoring the difficulties, even the naïveté, of cross-class and, at times, interracial mingling, at least on a per-manent basis. Metalious, by contrast, used the story of Selena as a potent
The Women of Peyton Place137vehicle for excoriating both the invented whiteness of New England and the indifference of town leaders and churchgoers to the problems of the rural working poor in general and to their daughters in particular. In an era of free education, the narrator of Peyton Place explains,the woodsmen of northern New England had little or no schooling.... “They’re all right,” the New Englander was apt to say, especially to a tour-ist from the city. “They pay their bills and taxes and they mind their own business. They don’t do any harm.” This attitude was visible, too, in the well-meaning social workers who turned away from the misery of the woodsman’s family. If a child died of cold or malnutrition, it was consid-ered unfortunate, but certainly nothing to stir up a hornet’s nest about. The state was content to let things lie, for it never had been called upon to extend aid of a material nature to the residents of the shacks which sat, like running sores, on the body of northern New England. (29)“You are quite right,” a Mainer scribbled in her decorated letter just above a recipe for Indian pudding. “Facts are facts, and there is much more to be written, long buried facts in the countless graveyards of New England.” Because it was frank rather than romantic, female-centered rather than sentimental, Peyton Place represented a radical leap in its conception of women characters, encouraging readers to recognize themselves or one of their neighbors in its pages. “What hurts in Peyton Place,” one reader notes, “is that it hits home a little hard.”26New Englanders were not alone. Across the nation, readers felt the stab of recognition. The women of Peyton Place touched a national nerve, their true-to-life stories simultaneously well known and silenced, the subject of clandestine gossip and a will-to-not-know. Postmarked by rural postmis-tresses and big-city clerks, letters from every regional nook and cranny in America flowed into the Metaliouses’ Gilmanton post office box. “Your story is my own,” fans wrote again and again. “Ilive in Peyton Place.” Even today, readers rememberthe shock of representation, the open secrets Peyton Place dared to name. “Metalious wrote about contemporary prob-lems... that no one dared speak about in real life,” one reader recalled. “Irememberthose days. Iwas about 13 when the book came out.... No one talked about incest and child abuse; no one even talked about premari-tal sex (you weren’t supposed to have it) or nice, decent girls getting preg-nant before marriage or having babies out of wedlock.”27 Another recalled
138Chapter Sevenhow she used Peyton Place to categorize her neighbors: “Iwas alone and didn’t quite fit in, so Isimply gave my neighbors the names of characters in the book—that helped me understand them better and be nicer towards them. Iwas Allison, of course.”28Peyton Place invited readers to identify across sexual and gender dif-ference, to engage with “narrative fantasy from a variety of subject posi-tions and at various levels.”29 Allison, Norman, Selena, Betty, Constance: readers inserted themselves into one then into another, entwining selves, forging new ones, using difference to revise their understandings of iden-tity, place, future, and past. “It made no difference,” one elderly woman recalled, “they all drew me in. Iimagined myself at once Norman and Allison.”30 One young gay man told me: “The only way Ican explain my obsession with Peyton Place is that it was like a shadow world. You know, everything inside of me seemed less clear, blurry, and so Ibecame Norman for a while, then Mike, then Allison and Selena. Ithink Ikind of put mas-culinity and femininity together in ways that worked for me. But Icould never really explain it.”31Social commentators seldom addressed the needs of readers who found reflections of themselves in Peyton Place. While liberal reformers sought to bring sex education into the schools, contraception and abortion remained fiercely opposed. Charges of child sexual abuse, rape, and incest: it was all lies and too much imagination. Unconventional sex was the stuff of locker room jokes. Girls were either “good” or “bad.” Case closed. In his influ-ential 1962 study Growing Up Absurd: The Problems of Youth in the Orga-nized Society, Paul Goodman capped off a decade’s dismissive attitudes toward young women like Connie, Allison, Betty, and Selena. “Our ‘youth troubles,’” Goodman told readers, “are ‘boys’ troubles.”32 Like many post-war social commentators, Goodman equated “youth” with young men and boys. Girls, no matter their class, racial, or ethnic differences, were subsumed by the alchemy of female sameness and the certitude of gen-der expectations. Angry men, alienated Beats, ethnic bad boys, urban gang members, and unconventional beatniks symbolized for many the social underside of American materialism and prosperity, their troubled lives a source of highly visible concern, study, and drama.33The story of American girls was sweet and simple. For good girls, mar-riage was a symbol of maturity, for bad girls a sign of reform, a return to
The Women of Peyton Place139respectability. Speaking for many, Goodman argued that the young girl is “not expected to make something of herself... for she will have chil-dren.”34 Increasingly understood as the single most important transition into adulthood, marriage took on a new inevitability in the fifties, with couples commonly marrying in their teenage years. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the men-tally defective,” one expert noted, “almost everyone has an opportunity (‘and, by implication, a duty’) to marry.”35 By 1959, just under 50percent of all brides married before they turned nineteen years old.36 Children arrived not long after the honeymoon, with three offspring the new norm in popular songs and 3.2 in actuality. The year before Peyton Place was published, fewer than 10percent of Americans believed that an unmarried person could be happy. “The family is the center of your living,” an advice manual proclaimed. “If is isn’t, you’ve gone astray.”37 To marry was to define oneself as “good”—a good person and a good citizen. “Should Iget married? Should Ibe good?” Beat poet Gregory Corso asks while toying with the decade’s most popular image of the “aproned young and lovely” wife “wanting my baby.”38Allison MacKenzie would have found him a crushing bore. “Don’t you think it’s just awful?” Allison’s friend Kathy asks as they discuss Betty’s pregnancy.“Oh, Idon’t know” Allison responds. “Ithink it would be sort of excit-ing to have a child by one’s lover.”Should Betty have married Rodney?“No,” Allison cries! “Marriage is for clods, and if you go and get mar-ried the way you plan, Kathy, that will be the end of your artistic career. Marriage is stultifying” (212).In her wish to remain single yet sexually active, to delay marriage and pursue a career, Allison mapped out the terrain of the single girl who was yet to find a public voice. By the time Helen Gurley Brown offered advice to the sex-friendly single girl, Peyton Place had already assured an audience would be waiting.39 Allison’s mother, Constance, was equally prescient, her independence, career, and convoluted road to marriage foretelling second-wave shifts in the tidy progression of love, marriage, sex, and child-birth. The blond bombshell was nobody’sfool.Poised and “well built,” the widowed Constance refuses to date, posi-tions herself at a respectable distance from the town (“the only mother to
140Chapter Sevenhave dinner instead of supper,” Allison complains [18–19]). Yet despite her fair good looks, Constance avoids men. Indeed, after a scandalous youth, Connie becomes something of a New England prude when she returns home with her infant daughter. “Never having been highly sexed,” she leads a sexless life. Economically autonomous, she retains a certain whiff of Victorian “single blessedness,” wherein life without a man is both wel-comed and preferred. “The truth of the matter,” the narrator explains, “was that Constance enjoyed her life alone.” Conforming to the social codes she knows so well, Mrs.MacKenzie keeps her worrisome past secret and her nose to the grindstone. “She stays in that shop of hers ’til six o’clock every night,” townspeople approvingly observe (17). She is contained by honestwork.Still, Connie’s undersexed life elicits both sympathy and suspicion. At a time when sexual fulfillment was growing into an accepted, even essen-tial part of mature womanhood, Connie’s contentment stood out. So odd was the woman without a husband that one study called such women “a separate species” who “inhabit a half-secret subculture.”40 In 1954 Esquireproclaimed the working wife “a menace.”41As new norms for female sexual response gathered momentum in the fifties, women who rejected marriage, and the sexual maturity it con-firmed, lost the safe perch that “single blessedness” had once provided. In its place came dozens of expert explanations, scientific categories, and therapies constructed in relation to the new norm of mutual gratification and sexual satisfaction in the marriage bed. Was Constance a latent homo-sexual, one of Peyton Place’s “Lizzies”? Was she frigid? Or was she actu-ally oversexed, her frigidity less a rejection of innate femininity than the result of repressed desire? Was Connie suffering from nymphomania?How to read Constance MacKenzie?Early in the novel, Connie explains her lack of sexual feelings as a prod-uct of her painful love affair with Allison’s father. When she looks back, she decides that perhaps she never loved him and that he could not have loved her, for if he did, “his first thoughts should have been for her pro-tection, coming ahead of his desire to lead her to bed” (119). His crime, she reasons, was not adultery but his failure to use contraception, a failure to offset the injuries that she alone would suffer. This was not love but sex, a foolish act that ruined her life and one she must now guard against. Marriage, she muses, is about companionship and friendship “based on
The Women of Peyton Place141a community of tastes and interests, together with a similarity of back-ground and viewpoint” (119), a brew of emotions called “love.” Love and marriage might go together in popular song, but sex, Connie reasons, has nothing to do with it. Sex, she tells readers, is something altogether dif-ferent. When one is young, sexual urges are a test of love, of a man’s com-mitment, but later in life, sex is just a minor upset, “not unlike a touch of indigestion,” she tells herself (17).Today’s readers often compare Connie to Betty Draper of television’s Mad Men: cold, remote, and emotionally unavailable. In the early decades of the twentieth century, she was a familiar type much deployed in literary texts to connote the frigid woman. Typically blond, refined, upper class, and Anglo-Saxon, the frigid woman represented a mélange of theories that linked sexual coldness to “overcivilization” among delicate, upper-class, urban, and urbane wives.42 With the rise of the women’s movement in the early 1900s, sexual indifference and unresponsiveness quickly tran-sited into the ranks of female pathology. What was once understood as an aberration among men and women, a deficiency rather than a perversion, became the inevitable result of women’s “will to power,” induced by a hid-den desire to dominate and “triumph over men.” As the century unfolded, frigidity became solely a female malady, its causes located deep within the woman herself, “an act of will,” a choice, albeit an unconscious one, trig-gered perhaps by an insult or “an indignity.”43While intense professional interest began to wane after World War II (albeit with notable exceptions like the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte), ideas about frigidity lingered in marriage manuals well into the 1960s and 1970s. In the national imaginary, sexual coldness also continued to take on a multitude of forms. In films, magazine stories, and paperback novels, strong, domineering career women, suffocating mothers, and Boston spinsters carried more than a suggestion of frigidity, often repre-sented as repression in need of sexual awakening by a strong masculine type. By the early fifties, neo-Freudian theories increased public interest and uncertainty as professionals connected frigidity with nymphomania. Simply put, women who were overly sexed might actually be suffer-ing from an underlying lack of sexual desire. In the new formulation, undersexed women were simply the other side of the nymphomaniac coin, their desire just waiting to be released. “Not lascivious desires or hot blood,” experts argued, “but lack of sexual satisfaction most often bred
142Chapter Sevennymphomania.”44 How to unlock Connie’s sexuality? How to restore her to sexual normalcy?For most readers today, Connie’s “sexual awakening” is not just dif-ficult to understand; it makes no sense. It begins on a beach where Tom Makris takes Connie for a moonlight swim. Makris is the town’s new school principal, “dark skinned, black haired,” handsome in “an obviously sexual way.” He stands in stark contrast to Connie, with her English fea-tures and the hard-shelled sexual repression she represents. Worse, in the eyes of Peyton Place’s xenophobic establishment, Makris is “a goddamned Greek” (100, 94). But for Metalious, whose husband was Greek American, he represents the perfect figureof masculine virility to unleash Connie’s sexual desires. They kiss, they partially disrobe, but when Connie refuses to have sex with him, Tom picks her up, drives her home, and forces him-self onher.“I’ll have you arrested,” she stammers. “I’ll have you arrested and put in jail for breaking and entering and rape—”He stood on the floor beside the bed and slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of hishand.“Don’t open your mouth again,” he said quietly. “Just keep your mouth shut.”He bent over her and ripped the still wet bathing suit from her body, and in the dark she heard the sound of his zipper opening as he took off his trunks.“Now,” he said. “Now.” (150)It is a scene of violence and rape. Yet not one letter writer took note; not one objected. They liked Tom. Not one critic took aim at the scene or raised a voice against the violence directed at Connie. Metalious’s publishers loved it. Indeed, they had asked her to write just such an episode to help explain Connie’s engagement to Tom. Her editor, Leona Nevler, and publisher, Kitty Messner, wanted a hot, sexy scene on the beach between Tom and Connie. Metalious obliged, retreating to the publisher’s office, where she hammered out the scene in half an hour. She thought it a good imitation of Mickey Spillane. It was. Whether the woman’s problem was nympho-mania or frigidity, “the love of a strong, forceful, masculine man” was a popular literary cure for many female problems.45
The Women of Peyton Place143Rape, at least white-on-white rape, was seldom taken seriously in the years prior to second-wave feminism. Scenes of rough sex initiated by men were a staple of hard-boiled novels and magazine fiction. Many states demanded corroborating evidence of sexual assault, allowed the victim’s sexual history into evidence at trial, and “required judges to invoke the seventeenth-century dictum, ‘rape is the easiest charge to make and the most difficult to prove.’” In North Carolina, a victim first had to prove that she’d been a virgin before she could enter a claim of rape.46 Among more than one hundred interviews Iconducted, almost every reader remem-bered thinking of the scene at the time they read it as “steamy,” “hot,” “thrilling,” a “big wow.” Only later did they wonder at the prevalence of such scenes, their casual acceptance of them, and the depth of cultural tol-erance for them. Even one college professor was surprised that he could still quote the scene’s most famous line: “Your nipples are as hard as dia-monds” (277).47If the possibility of exciting married sex resolves Connie’s conflicted relationships with men, her daughter finds resolution in the pursuit of a career and life as a sexually active single girl. Uncomfortable with the only options available to her, Allison is “peculiar and different,” a dreamy girl at odds with the requirements of her gender. Like many readers, she imagines others to have the “attraction and poise” she lacks. The world around her is boring and uninteresting; only when reading or walking in the woods does she feel a “shred of happiness” (11). Yet Allison is not a conventional heroine, her discomfort and rebellion resolved by the arms of a strong man. Behind the façade of her femininity rest not only the vague rebellions of youth but also the masculine ambitions for independence and personal success. Sensitive, she avoids the sentimental, dismisses marriage, and is indifferent to motherhood. Rather than enter college, she leaves home to become a writer, moving to Greenwich Village, where she rooms with a bachelor girl daringly named Stevie, and eventually puts her home-town’s talk into a best-selling novel.In many ways Allison embodies the discontent, unrest, defiant pose, and outsider identity available to “Beat” boys and rebellious men in gray flannel suits. But she is also a new kind of female rebel, deeply in revolt against traditional femininity, capable of assuming “masculine” qualities that allow her to pursue sex without commitment and a career that will be her own. Before Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan, or Mary Tyler
144Chapter SevenMoore made sex and the single girl a popular cultural trope, Allison gave the single girl a powerful place in the cultural imaginary.Teenagers wrote Metalious in gratitude and admiration for giving them Allison. Yet older readers were also drawn to the character, iden-tifying less with her career ambitions than with her vague longings and loneliness. “Icould write pages and pages to you,” a Florida reader con-fided to “Grace”—“things Ithink, feel, do.” Then a few lines down, she quotes from her favorite passage from Peyton Place—“But it was not the season that weighed heaviest on Allison. She did not know what it was. She seemed to be filled with a restlessness, a vague unrest, which nothing was able to ease”—adding, “Ithink a lot of women now feel this, not only myself, or you, at one time... that feeling of what am ihere for? Perhaps some women feel only a vague restlessness they can’t analyze... but it isan unfruitful feeling, and just raising children to maturity doesn’t seem the full answer. Perhaps too many modern conveniences have robbed a woman of her own creativeness in the home? Thus that creativeness has no full outlet?” Unlike Allison, the letter writer feels stuck in her small Florida town. “Where were my guts twenty years ago?” she wonders. For comfort she goes fishing and sends letters to Grace, to whom she had been writing since the summer of 1956. The letter was written in 1961, two years before Betty Friedan identified “the problem that had no name.”Allison is not the only woman in Peyton Place to represent inchoate yearnings and ambitions that would later be described as feminist. Among her circle of friends are the town’s outsiders, an assortment of girls and boys who defy conventional roles. There’s Selena Cross, of course, “her 13 year old eyes as old as time.” She and Allison make a “peculiar pair” (6–7). If critics made a great hullabaloo out of the “outhouse” language Metalious used,48 they failed to note her many uses of terms like “peculiar,” “differ-ent,” “odd,” “queer,” and “Lizzie.” Metalious’s biographer counted only three four-letter words in the entire text. Had she counted the vocabulary of social, sexual, class, and gender difference, she would have discovered a far more disruptive language, one that gave new meaning and motive force to outsider identities and the readers who would come to confirm and claim them. “If one reads her carefully,” an astute critic noted in 1971, “an interesting pattern emerges, for Grace Metalious knew in her blood what it meant to be an outsider, hungering for respectability.”49
The Women of Peyton Place145The women of Peyton Place make their way without apology. They sur-vive. At times they triumph, morally if not always materially. Selena has an abortion, gets over her boyfriend’s rejection, and finds a good job at Con-nie’s fashionable dress “shoppe.” She “had never been one to let the opin-ions of Peyton Place bother her in any way,” the narrator tells us. “Let ’em talk”—she didn’t care. She knew that girls from the “backwoods” would “always be branded ‘hotblooded,’ so let ’em talk” (138–39). If Connie finds sexual satisfaction with Tom, she refuses to accept sex as a sign of love. “Speak to Tom,” she tells Allison. “He’s the one who taught me to call a spade a spade” (358). For Allison, the town’s many voices turn into a career that makes her famous. And Betty, offstage, continues to haunt the town. In defiance of literary convention, she does not succumb to consumption, die in childbirth, or surrender her baby to a rich but barren couple. Rather it is boyfriend Rodney who pays the ultimate price. Unable to keep his eyes off his latest sexual conquest, who sits beside him in his convertible—“she was like something he had read about in what he termed ‘dirty books’”—Rodney dies with her in a spectacular car crash as he reaches over to unbut-ton her blouse at fifty milesper hour (314).Years later Metalious will write that she left Betty Anderson “pretty much up in the air.” Her hope, in a projected third sequel, was “to focus more on Betty’s happy life with her father-in-law and son, Rodney Harrington, Jr.”50 It is a book Grace will never write. Yet the women of Peyton Place do not disappear. They surface again and again, in novel form; in television’s first, and most widely watched, primetime serialized drama; and in the 1960s, when they find social traction in the outsider identities and unconventional behaviors they made imaginable, real, and normal.In the years immediately following publication of the novel, however, it is Grace Metalious who will become the most watched woman of Peyton Place, her life the most talked-about sequel she would ever produce.
© 2017 Cornell University Press, Ithaca

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents ix
  3. Acknowledgments xi
  4. Introduction: Small Talk 1
  5. 1. The Novel Truth 17
  6. 2. The Sheep Pen Murder 38
  7. 3. Scenes of Writing 54
  8. 4. The Other Side of Writing 70
  9. 5. The Gendered Eye 93
  10. 6. Sex Talk 106
  11. 7. The Women of Peyton Place 126
  12. 8. Excitable Fictions 146
  13. Epilogue: Memento Mori 177
  14. Notes 189
  15. Index 211
Readers are also interested in:
https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801456107-009

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents ix
  3. Acknowledgments xi
  4. Introduction: Small Talk 1
  5. 1. The Novel Truth 17
  6. 2. The Sheep Pen Murder 38
  7. 3. Scenes of Writing 54
  8. 4. The Other Side of Writing 70
  9. 5. The Gendered Eye 93
  10. 6. Sex Talk 106
  11. 7. The Women of Peyton Place 126
  12. 8. Excitable Fictions 146
  13. Epilogue: Memento Mori 177
  14. Notes 189
  15. Index 211
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