Voyeurism: A Key to Peyton Place's Notoriety and Success

Voyeurism: A Key to Peyton Place’s Notoriety and Success

Between 1958 and 1975, Peyton Place was at the top of best-seller lists in the United States, far surpassing Gone with the Wind which had held that position since the 1930s. At the same time as many Americans avidly thumbed through its pages, many states banned the novel as obscene; libraries across the country refused to purchase it. Yet, as critic Ardis Cameron learned from an interviewee: “Everyone was reading it: college graduates, high school dropouts; even ‘Ozark Mountain boys’ who rarely read at all.” Another reader remembered, “It was the kid of book mothers would hide under the bed during the day” and friends would whisper about.[1] Why was Peyton Place simultaneously so popular and so controversial? Although many commentators emphasize the shocking sexual events the novel chronicles, perhaps the best answer is a bit larger. Peyton Place is a deeply voyeuristic book. The citizens of Peyton Place are constantly watching each other, peering with shock and glee into their neighbors’ deepest secrets, especially those having to do with sex. . The readers both watch them do this and watch with them. As a result, Peyton Place in the 1950s and 1960s both fascinated and horrified. Eager readers grabbed the novel off bookstore shelves even as libraries (and, in some cases, entire states and even countries) banned it.

Although the author of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious, claimed to be writing about a fictional small New England town, readers and critics almost immediately identified the setting as Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where Metalious lived for many years.[2] Almost no event in Peyton Place is so small as to miss the notice of the townspeople but the most important events have to do with sexual activities that are proscribed and hence need to be hidden. These include rape, incest, premarital sex, and extramarital sex. But there is also (to quote a reviewer) “old fashioned lechery … greed, hate, abortion, drunkenness, blasphemy …, cursing, suicide, lying...avarice, and reckless driving.” “What? No narcotics?” he adds sarcastically.[3] Another titled his review: “New Hampshire: Activities for Strong Stomachs.”[4] The result was a book that shocked and fascinated Metalious’s readers. Then and now, the response to Peyton Place certainly fits popular definitions of voyeurism as the act of observing or listening to unsuspecting individuals engaged in sexual activities, for the sexual pleasure of the voyeur.[5]

Thus, watching, leering, and gossiping are at the heart of Peyton Place. As early as the book’s third page, readers meet the old men who sit in front of the courthouse and comment on those who walk by. Their major interests are the weaknesses of others, especially sexual, and their comments are permeated with sexism. For example, when Kenny Stearns, the town handyman, walks by, they first comment on his alcoholism but quickly move to his sex life. “’Too Bad Kenny don’t have the same good luck with his wife as he does with plants. Mebbe Kenny’d be better off with a green pecker,’” one laughs.[6] The men go on to blame Kenny’s wife for his troubles: “‘Ginny Stearns is a tramp and a trollop… There ain't much a feller can do when he’s married to a born whore.’”[7]

With this vivid evocation of small-time gossips, Metalious begins her grim re-creation of the sexual misogyny of a small New England town in the late 1930s (her novel certainly reflects the time during which it was published, even though it is set earlier). The townspeople of Peyton Place have a deeply pessimistic view of one another, a take on sexual deviance that comes close to biological determinism. This is especially powerful in the mother-daughter stories at the center of the book but determinism shows up in even the most casual comments. For example, just as the old men casually dismissed Ginny Stearns as “a born whore,” a local teacher reflected sadly about her students: “What chance have any of these children to break out of the pattern in which they are born?” Why teach history to a boy who would grow up to milk cows or math to a girl “who would eventually need to count only to number the months of each pregnancy?”[8] While many Americans of the 1950s agreed with such sentiments, they were reluctant to express them with Metalious’s frankness, especially when that frankness focused on sexual behavior (as it so often did).

At multiple points in Peyton Place, Metalious also scandalized her contemporaries by uncovering the class differences that underlay persistent patterns of social stagnation. For example, early on, the “townspeople,” often used as generic narrators, comment, “You know what they say. The rich get richer, and the poor get children.”[9] Again and again, the elite of Peyton Place contemptuously refer to the poor as responsible for their sad lives. For example, at a poker game, the local physician, Dr. Swain, criticizes “the shackowners” as parasites on the town, people who live in “cesspools” and “produce kids by the dozen.” In response, Seth Buswell, editor of the Peyton Place Times, reflects, “Doubtless he [the shack dweller] has his hopes and dreams the same as all of us, yet it appears that all he ever dwells upon is liquor, sex, and food, in that order.” They watch with a fascinated voyeuristic interest the people whom Buswell characterizes as “tame animals.”[10]

Subsequent events challenge this notion that the “animals” of Peyton Place were “tame,” as well as the complacent view that only those who lived in the town’s shacks were animals. Perhaps most shocking, even fifty years after Peyton Place’s publication, is the scene in which Lucas Cross rapes his teenage daughter, Selena (whom censors insisted be described as his stepdaughter—as if that made the incest more acceptable). Tellingly, there are two witnesses to the rape, two reluctant watchers: Selena’s friend Alison and her little brother Joey. Metalious here was so grimly graphic that contemporary readers may have difficulty understanding why the scene was viewed as salacious in the early 1950s:

“’You goddamn’ sonofabitch,” roared Lucas, beside himself. “You goddamn whorin’ little slut!”

He grabbed at Selena and when she wrenched away from his grasp, he was left holding the entire front of the girl’s blouse. Selena backed away from Lucas, her breasts naked…. Lucas dropped his hands and stared at Selena.…

“Yep,” said Lucas, ‘you’re gettin’ to be quite a gal, honey.”

Slowly, he raised his two grimy hands, and his forehead moved when he smiled his grotesque smile.

Selena’s scream ripped the stillness with a sound like tearing fabric.[11]

When Lucas subsequently impregnates Selena, she shudders at the thought of how the town would respond: “She knew her town, and its many voices. ‘The tramp. The dirty little tramp.’ ‘Well, that’s the shack dwellers for you.’”[12] She is right; at this point and multiple others in the book, the townspeople chant “tramp” again and again, almost like a Greek chorus. Eventually, however, the town’s voyeurism serves to protect Selena from her father/stepfather. Doctor Swain uses the threat of public revelation to stop Lucas, saying (after Lucas tries to accuse another man of impregnating Selena whom he describes as a “goddamn little tramp” and threatens with “a beatin’ she won’t forget”):

“‘I’ll raise an alarm all over town. I’ll go personally and tell every father in Peyton Place what you did, Lucas. I’ll tell them their daughters aren’t safe with you around. The fathers will come after you, Lucas, the same way they’d go after a wild and dangerous animal. But they won’t shoot you….Know how long it’s been since we had a lynching in this town, Lucas?”[13]

Some years later, Lucas comes back and attempts to rape his stepdaughter again. This time, however, she resists, and ends up killing him. Her trial heightens the level of voyeurism in Peyton Place, expanding the audience to include non-residents as well. Even,“the summer people who usually by-passed Peyton Place in favor of the better known, more highly advertised sections of the state, came to town in streams of expensive cars, all bearing out of state license plates.”[14]

Although both in the 1950s and today, the story of Selena and her stepfather attracts the most attention, there is a second, more subtle and taboo incest narrative in Peyton Place. This story involves a mother and son. Evelyn Page lives alone with her son Norman and tries to control his every movement. As he becomes an adolescent, she increases her surveillance. Again, the people of Peyton Place, especially its leading men, watch closely. Seth Buswell, the newspaper editor, wishes Norman Page “a long life and a merry one, providing Evelyn doesn’t eat him alive first.” In response, Doctor Swain says, “’She expects too much from him—love, admiration, eventual financial support, unquestioning loyalty, even sex.”[15] In case readers misunderstand the doctor’s reference, Metalious adds the following conversation (once again, using language that seems brutally grim rather than lascivious):

“Oh come now, said Seth. “Don’t go tellin’ me that Evelyn Page is sleepin’ with her son.”

“The trouble with you, Seth,” said the doctor with mock severity, is that you think of all sex in terms of men sleeping with women. It is not always so. Let me tell you about a case I saw once, a young boy with the worst case of dehydration I ever saw. It came from getting too many enemas that he didn’t need. Sex, with a capital S-E-X.”[16]

While Doctor Swain denies that he is taking about the Pages, readers (like Swain) know the truth: that Norman’s mother does give him frequent enemas, in a highly-sexualized ritual. Both of these incest stories were even more shocking in the 1950s than they would be today. Fifty years ago, neither experts nor popular commentators acknowledged incest as child abuse. (At that time, child abuse, when it was talked about at all, referred primarily to battering.) According to historian Ian Hacking, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place was a pioneering book in this respect. He calls her book “one of the most valuable—and most predictive—documents of the fifties.[17]

Further evidence for Metalious’s daring can be found in the total silence on the this issue in the equally notorious Kinsey volume on female sexuality, published in 1953, only a year before Peyton Place. There is not a single reference to incest in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The sole reference in its predecessor, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, refers to sibling sex, dismissed by Kinsey and his collaborators as happening “more frequently in the thinking of clinicians and social workers than it does in actual performance.”[18]

About other areas of sexual activity, for example, premarital sex, adultery, and illegitimacy, Kinsey and his colleagues and Grace Metalious are in greater agreement, although the open cheerfulness with which the scientists treat these subjects contrasts starkly with the equally frank but grim perspective of Metalious, whose explicit language and graphic detail attracted attention and offended censors. However, Metalious’s description of the corrosive power of efforts to hide illicit sexuality (even though she concedes the negative and prurient voyeurism that attempts to uncover it) supports Kinsey’s views about the damage done by Americans’ refusal to acknowledge the frequency of such behavior. In Metalious’s book, for example, Elizabeth Standish is haunted and deeply damaged by her efforts to hide her daughter Constance’s affair with a married man, an affair that led to the birth of a child, Allison MacKenzie. Both Elizabeth and Constance conspire to “spread a respectable fiction” about Constance, which involves a fictive marriage and subsequent widowhood. Elizabeth’s efforts to hide the truth exact a terrible toll:

From the day Allison was born, Elizabeth Standish lived with fear. …. In her worst nightmares she heard the voices of Peyton Place

“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.”[19]

Constance to fears that the peering eyes of others in her community might reveal what she sees, for most of the novel, as a horrible truth. She spends much time imaging the judgments that would ensue should the fiction of widowhood be penetrated and her true history revealed. Deeply lonely and unhappy, she cannot imagine that the man she comes to love will accept her if he learns the truth. “How well would he love a woman who had taken a lover and been stupid enough to bear him a bastard child?” she asked herself. Similarly, she worries that her daughter will follow in her path, making what she and others refer to as “'A Mistake.’” During Allison’s adolescence, not only does Constance watch her bookish daughter carefully (and in a manner that verges on the voyeuristic) but she fears that others in Peyton Place are doing the same:

A quick picture of her daughter Allison, lying in bed with a man, flashed through her mind….

Oh, she’ll get hurt! Was the first thought that filled her.

Then: “Oh, she’ll get in trouble!

And, finally, worst of all: SHE’LL GET HERSELF TALKED ABOUT![20]

The costs of keeping secrets about sexuality is high. The adolescents of Peyton Place sometimes turn to overt voyeurism and their secret looking is described by Metalious in her usual unflinching detail. While 1950s censors often viewed such passages as salacious, contemporary readers are more likely to have the opposite response, finding her descriptions of sex grim, even repelling. A good example here is the section of Peyton Place in which the adolescent Norman Page attempts to find out at what his neighbor, Miss Hester, is looking. Hiding beneath the porch on which Miss Hester sits, he (along with Miss Hester) observes another neighbor, Mr. Card, having sex with his pregnant wife. Although Metalious describes Mr. Card as stroking his wife’s stomach “gently” and even kissing it, the sight of “the huge, blue-veined growth which was Mrs. Card’s abdomen” makes Norman want to vomit. He continues to be repelled even as he is fascinated by the sight of Mrs. Card’s breasts, even though they were cupped lovingly by her husband. For Norman, “these, too, were swollen and blue veined” and hence abhorrent.[21]

Although censors sometimes suggested that Metalious was trying to titillate readers with such details about sexual activity, the outcome of this story about voyeurism suggests the opposite. The scene ends with Miss Hester dead in her chair and her tom cat, who has been tied to the chair, yowling. Terribly upset, Norman strangles to death the cat, while crying. “’Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’”[22]This is a horrifying passage to read even today. Like much of Peyton Place, the scene suggests that Metalious’s own views of sexuality are, at times, a bit unclear. However, she clearly dislikes voyeurism, the punishment for which (in this horrifying case) is death.

Voyeurism and its negative consequences are at the center of much of the discussion of premarital sex as well. For example, when Selena’s boyfriend Ted Carter argues against having sex before getting married, he talks about negative social reactions, not moral values:: “'You know what this town is like. You know how they treat a girl that gets in trouble. Remember when it happened to the Anderson girl, Betty’s sister? She had to move away, she couldn’t even get a job in town.’”[23] The story of Betty Anderson makes clear that his fears are legitimate. When Anderson, whose father is a mill hand, gets impregnated by the mill owner’s son, the news of her downfall and the abortion paid for by the mill owner spreads quickly. Metalious captures the talk with an evocative simile: “The gossip about Betty Anderson was like a candy bar in the hands of children. That is, it was not allowed to linger overlong on any one pair of lips before it was passed on quickly to another….That evening, the true story about Betty Anderson was served, along with the meat and potatoes, at every supper table in Peyton Place. Allison MacKenzie heard it from her mother, who used it as a sort of hammer with which to drive home her reasons for chastity in young girls.”[24]

In addition, as at multiple other points in Peyton Place, gender and class converge to ruin working class girls and let their middle-class male partners escape relatively unscathed, at least for the moment. (Later in the book, Rodney, the male responsible for Betty’s downfall, is punished in a dramatic scene that has a moral impact unappreciated by Metalious’s censors but blatantly obvious to contemporary readers. Drinking and attempting to grab his date’s breast while speeding in a car, Rodney is hit head on by a truck and killed.[25]

There is some positive watching in the novel, most often linked to honesty and openness. For example, when Constance finally reveals the truth about her past to Tom, they engage in wonderful passionate sex. Interestingly, watching once again is central:

For the first time in their relationship, she undressed herself and let him watch her, and still there was this joy of giving in her. She could not lie still under his hands.

“Anything,” she said. “Anything. Anything.”

“I love this fire in you…” [Tom responded][26]

That same night, Constance is even able to joke about sex; in a rare moment in the novel, she and Tom use the metaphor of prostitution to capture their love for one another. She laughs, “’You just stick around me for sex , don’t you?’” and adds. “’That’ll be two dollars, please.” He responds jocularly, “’Be good and I may tip you.’”[27] Given the frequency with which the inhabitants of Peyton Place, including Constance, refer with disgust and horror to “tramps,” “whores,” and “prostitutes,” this passage stands out. Clearly, like Alfred Kinsey, Metalious felt that openness about sex and sexual histories was essential to sexual happiness.

There are few published comments that explained the motivations of those who censored Peyton Place in the 1950s, whether small-town librarians or officials of the state. However, those motives are fairly easy to infer from reviewers of the book and especially the subsequent film, as well as from those who, then and now, defend the book. The enormous success of Peyton Place prompted Hollywood to make a film of the novel with amazing rapidity. What was acceptable (when not banned) in the pages of a book, however, could not be transferred to the big screen. According to one reviewer (who approved of the censorship), although sex was still important, the resulting movie was “as conventionally moral” as its peers and most of its characters had “not done anything so terribly wicked.” Allison’s “amorous adventures” in the big city were cut completely, although the story of rape at the hands of a stepfather remained.[28] In what a later writer described as a “sanitizing’ choice,” Selena’s abortion became a miscarriage.[29] Another reviewer notes that the film avoids “the sexual excesses, both natural and unnatural, which filled the best-selling original.”[30] Additional evidence for the shocking nature of Metalious’s story can be found even in the titles given to the

sanitized film version in Europe. In France, Peyton Place” became “The Pleasures of Hell” and in Munich, “Glowing Fire under the Ashes.”[31] As a commentator said many years later, “People talked about the dark things that went on in Gilmanton… all the time, but not publicly. You don’t put that stuff in a book.”[32] As a result, as Ardis Cameron notes, Peyton Place was denounced as “’wicked,’ ‘sordid,’ ‘cheap,’ ‘moral filth,’ ‘a tabloid version of life.’”[33] Cameron makes an important additional argument about the political message of Metalious’s story of private doings, when she observes that “by reinterpreting incest, wife beating, and poverty as signs of social as well as of individual failure, Metalious turned ‘trash’ into a powerful political commentary on gender relations and class privilege.”[34]

Of course, much of the popularity of Peyton Place was due to just that quality ; Metalious’s exposure to public view not of things that were known to people but things that had been talked of only in hushed voices, peered at indirectly or secretly. In addition, as even reviewers of the time noted, Peyton Placeis written in a prose that pulls in readers. As Fuller said in the New York Times, “the pace is swift, for Mrs. Metalious has great narrative skill…. For all its gaucheries and extremes it has life and vigor, and fragmentary authenticity.” A review of a later Metalious book claims that it has the same qualities as Peyton Place: “a narrative level which hovers on the verge of malicious gossip” but nonetheless remains enormously readable.[35] The success of Peyton Place, its compelling quality for millions of readers, is not just because it is a story about sex. Instead, it gives readers the change to watch others who are watching. Whatever sexual gratification Peyton Place provides (substantially less today than in the 1950s), its readability and popularity are clearly linked to the opportunity it offers to look at voyeurism voyeuristically.

Bibliography

“Canada Oaks Novel.” Los Angeles Times (April 13, 1958),p. 30.

Cameron, Ardis. “Introduction,” Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (New York: Virago, 19xx), pp. vii-xxxvi.

Donahue, Bill. “Bad Dirt.” Http://www.salon.com/books/features/1999/04/15/peyton/print.html.

Fuller, Edmund. “Best Seller Revisited,” New York Times (November 29, 1959), pp. BR62.

______. “New Hampshire: Activities for Strong Stomachs.” Chicago Daily Tribune (September 23, 1956), B7.

Hacking, Ian. “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 253-275.

“Hampton Bans ‘Peyton Place.’” Washington Post and Times (Oct. 16, 1957), p. C2.

Kelly, James. “All Isn’t What It Seems,” New York Times (Sept 24, 1960), p. BR5.

Leonard, Vickie. “Grace of Peyton Place.” off our backs, Vol. 11, iss. 11 (December 31, 1981), p. 17.

“Libel Suit is Settled.” New York Times (Nov. 27, 1955), p. 4.

MacCorkadale, Sam. “How to See ‘Peyton Place,’” Los Angeles Times (August 17, 1958), pp. TW20.

Metalious, Grace. Peyton Place. New York: Random House, 1999. (Originally published in 1954.)

“’Peyton Place Raided.’” Los Angeles Times (April 27, 1956), p. 42.

Scheuer, Philip K. “Film ‘Peyton Place’ Tempers Lascivious Look of Novel,” Los Angeles Times. (December 1, 1957), E1.

[1] Ardis Cameron, “Open Secrets: Rereading Peyton Place,” Peyton Place (New York: Gramery/Virago, 1999), pp. viii-ix, For specific censorship stories, see “’Peyton Place’ Raided” (about Italy’s censoring of the novel on the grounds of obscenity), New York Times (April 27, 1958), p. 42; “Hampton Bans ‘Peyton Place’,” Washington Post (October 16, 1957), p. C2. Initially, Canada also barred Peyton Place but then its Tariff Board, by a 2-1 decision, allowed it to be sold in Canada. (“Canada OksNovel,” Los Angeles Times [April 13, 1958], p. 30.

[2] The identification was so close that Thomas Makris, a former Gilmantin school teacher , along with his wife sued Metalious on the grounds of “public contempt and slander.” (Metalious had named a prominent character in the book, also an educator, Tomas Makris.) Eventually, the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money and Metalious changed the teacher’s name in subsequent editions of the novel. (“Libel Suit is Settled,” New York Times [Nov. 22, 1958], p. 4. Metalious’s neighbors never forgave her. Many years after Metalious’s death, a reporter who spent childhood summers in Gilmantin, reported widespread (but unsubstantiated) local rumors that Metalious “was too drunk and too randy” to write the book. Instead, they claimed, it had been written by her best friend, Laurie Wilkens, a Barnard graduate and local columnist. As Bill Donahue noted, “The author of ‘Peyton Place’ implicated her neighbors in many sins. Now, they’re returning the favor.” (Bill Donahue, “Bad Dirt,” Salon Books [http://www.salon.com./books/feature/1999/04/15/peyton/print.html].)

[3] William Smith, “Grace Metalious—Her Fictional Sins Pay Off,” Chicago Daily Tribune (May 26, 1957), C34.

[4] Edmund Fuller, “New Hampshire: Activities for Strong Stomachs,” Chicago Daily Tribune (Sep. 23, 1956), B7.

[5]For a shortened version of the formal definition offered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, IV-R, see http://www.behavebet.com/capsules/disorders/voyeriumTR.htm.

[6] Grace Metalious, Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place (New York: Gramercy Books, 1959), p. 3. (First published in 1954.)

[7] Ibid., p. 4.

[8] Ibid, pp. 8-9.

[9] Ibid, p. 21.

[10]Ibid, pp. 22, 30

[11] Ibid, p. 57.

[12] Ibid, p. 138.

[13] Ibid., pp. 156-157.

[14] Ibid, p. 326.

[15] Ibid, pp. 136-137.

[16] Ibid., p. 137.

[17] Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 253-275.

[18] Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) (first published in 1953); Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) (first published in 1948), p. 558.

[19] Metalious, p 16.

[20] Ibid, p. 50.

[21] Ibid, p. 253.

[22] Ibid, p. 255.

[23] Ibid, p. 139.

[24] Ibid, pp. 210-211.

[25] Ibid, p. 314.

[26] Ibid, p. 277.

[27] Ibid, p. 278.

[28] “Film ‘Peyton Place’ Tempers Lascivious Look of Novel,” Los Angeles Times (Dec. 1, 1957), E1.

[29] Cindy Wojtecki, “Reproductive Rights: Informed Decision Making,” Celebrating Voices, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Jan. 31, 2000), p. 4.

[30] Scheuer.

[31] Kelly, James. “All Isn’t What It Seems,” New York Times (Sept 24, 1960), p. BR5. For a bitter attack on the cinematic sanitization of the novel, see Leonard, Vickie. “Grace of Peyton Place.” off our backs, Vol. 11, iss. 11 (December 31, 1981), p. 17.

[32] Donahue.

[33] Cameron, ix.

[34] Ibid, xv.

[35] Fuller, “Best Seller Revisited;” James Kelly, “All Isn’t What It Seems,” New York Times (September 25, 1960), BR5.