The racy novel that changed 1950s America
Grace Metalious was a housewife and mother in small-town New England when she wrote the steamy novel Peyton Place, which dealt with issues usually kept under the covers: incest, abortion and premarital sex. It was 1956, the Eisenhower era, when Father Knows Best was a popular TV show and suburbia with its neat lawns and sidewalks reeked of conformity. Peyton Place sold more than 30 million copies. In 1957, it was made into a movie with Lana Turner, and later it became a television series starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal. Ardis Cameron, a professor of American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine, explores the novel’s effect in Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place. Our conversation has been edited for length.
Tell me about the impact of the book.
It was considered an outrageous book so it is startling to realize that one in 29 Americans bought a copy. It was the bestselling novel of the 20th century until The Godfather came along. So many of the unconventional sexual and gender behaviours that were going on in the 1950s were under the radar screen. But the women of Peyton Place — Selena Cross, Allison MacKenzie and Betty Anderson — dealt with issues such as unwed mothers, incest, homosexuality. That resonated for many people. Readers could identify with these stories. They could use the stories to describe their own feelings and describe behaviours they felt were beyond words, like incest. It attracted all kinds of readers, from Julia Child, who found it a great read, to John Waters.
There was a great deal of pressure during the 1950s for people to conform to particular norms of behaviour. Women were supposed to have erotic feelings but only for their husbands. A single woman or a divorced woman was considered dangerous. Peyton Place disrupted that; it normalized what was seen as abnormal behaviour. People could use the book to talk about things they couldn’t discuss before. Grace Metalious was a classic ’50s housewife with children, but she was also a non-conformist who dressed in men’s clothing — jeans and sneakers and flannel shirts.
She grew up in Manchester, N.H., the daughter of a poor French-Canadian family. She married young, during the war, and worked to support her family, but she had aspirations. In a sense, she was a bohemian. She was a stay-at-home mom and, yes, she wore jeans but it was her behaviour that was unconventional. She felt different because she was Franco- American. She liked hanging out with the guys at the rod and gun club. She hated being the wife of a schoolteacher because she had to go to socials and she didn’t like the role pushed on her. She had a sense of humour. She was bawdy. She felt like an outsider among the rural, more staid New Englanders. There was a trend in the 1950s of housewives penning novels and poems. You don’t mention Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, poets who were expressing the angst of women who may have been educated but couldn’t get out of the house. How did Metalious cope?
Anne Sexton was writing for a different audience, an educated upper class. Grace was read by upper-class people and working people. That is part of her appeal. She did not conform to the middle-class ideas of Father Knows Best or to any particular model of womanhood or femininity. She was criticized for it but she didn’t care. She had an adulterous relationship, then divorced her husband. She talked publicly about it and about her alcoholism. She was candid about her sexuality, and her readers were amazed by her frankness.
In Peyton Place, the character of Betty Anderson struck a chord with readers because she was, like Grace, comfortable with her sexual feelings. In those days it was supposed to be a mark of deviance. At times, women who were sexual were forced to have electroshock therapy or other kinds of psychiatric treatment.
Peyton Place is absent from American bibliographies. Why?
The term “Peyton Place” has entered into the American lexicon. Sen. Lindsey Graham used the term Peyton Place to describe the Clinton White House. Grace Metalious may not be remembered, but the title of her book is. And the novel has been rediscovered over the past 10 years. There are about 50,000 copies sold each year. But, you’re right, in general it has faded from memory. The TV show you recall watching was seen by one in three Americans during the 1960s.
The reason I wrote about Peyton Place is because I believe it had a tremendous impact on American history and because Metalious was a sharp critic of the social landscape. My interest is in it as a cultural work, and its impact is something people haven’t looked at or explored. My book is a biography of a novel; I am trying to talk about how Peyton Place had an impact both politically and culturally.
A woman writer showed there was a way for other women to get out of their mediocre, impoverished lives. I am not arguing that Grace Metalious is like Jane Austen, but she made people reflect about the world they lived in. People could talk about things they hadn’t been able to discuss before. Peyton Place got people’s tongues wagging, and that’s what I am trying to explore. jhunter@thestar.ca