Peyton Place
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Peyton Place
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 ...
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