Peyton Place by Grace Metalious In 1956, a woman from middle class
Manchester, New Hampshire wrote a book that shocked the nation. At 32 years old,
Grace Metalious wrote the blockbuster novel Peyton Place. It transformed the
publishing industry and made the author one of the most talked about people in
the nation. Metalious wrote about incest, abortion, sex, rape, adultery,
repression, lust, and the secrets of small town New England, things that were
never discussed before in conservative America. She interpreted incest, wife
beating, and poverty as social failures instead of individual flops. When
Metalious published Peyton Place, the country was in the grasp of a new wave of
sexual panic. The book turned the “private” into the “political.” The
avant-garde disturbed the country and critics called the book “wicked,”
“sordid,” and “cheap.” Canada declared it indecent and made the importation of
the book illegal. Parts of Rhode Island, Indiana, and Nebraska followed suit
arguing that the book would corrupt young minds. Wealthy communities banished
Peyton Place. To read Peyton Place was to read it in secret and were sometimes
discussed only among the closest of friends. Everyone was reading it – college
and high school students, college graduates, mothers, wives, and even husbands
and fathers. In 1956, a sexual act such as sodomy, oral sex, and intercourse
with another married person in most states was illegal. Also, abortion was
illegal, and birth control was unreliable and in many cases, difficult to find.
To many critics, Metalious’ book was not scandalous because of its case in
point, but because of the sexual pleasures that were received and given by the
female characters. Peyton Place begins with Indian summer in 1939. It takes
place in a very descriptive, postcardesque New England town. The main story
focuses on three women characters and their underlying search for their
identities as sexual women in small town America. Allison Mackenzie is the
bastard daughter of Constance Mackenzie who had an affair with a married man.
She illegally changed Allison’s birth certificate and lied to the Peyton Place
locals that her husband died. Connie didn’t want any of the town folk to find
out the truth that the father of her child was a married man because she would
become the town gossip of ridicule. She kept this secret to herself, and only to
herself until an argument between her and Allison occurred when Connie thought
Allison was having sex with one of her friends, and so she lashed out the truth
to Allison. As a child, Allison was always teased about being childish, and not
interested in boys, and always into books. But as she grew up she was full of
conflicting sexual emotions, and after graduating high school, she left Peyton
Place to pursue a writing career in New York.
