Our December selection is the modern classic Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. Considered shockingly steamy when published in 1956, Metalious’s debut novel describes the scandals and dark secrets of the residents of a seemingly respectable New England town.
The novel sold 100,000 copies within the first month of its release and remained on The New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks. Today, Peyton Place is still what Kirkus Reviews calls “likeably trashy,” while at the same time, it explores themes of gender inequality, hypocrisy and class privilege.
Peyton Place remains viciously underrated…often left out of academic literary study and burying deeper the legacy of its creator, a largely forgotten literary and feminist trailblazer. - Book Riot
Metalious’s own experience of New England had included all kinds of want and unhappiness. She knew what she wished to say about gossip and shame and small-town telephone party lines, and she could say it deftly. - The New York Times
I tried out the link @Mary13 showed on the last discussion thread and managed to have the book sent directly to my Kindle. It took a few steps but this site explains exactly what you need to do.
Send this book direct to your kindle via email. We need your Send-to-Kindle Email address, which can be found by looking in your Kindle device’s Settings page. All kindle email addresses will end in @kindle.com . Note you must add our email server’s address, fadedpage@fadedpage.com , to your Amazon account’s Approved E-mail list. This list may be found on your Amazon account: Your Account → Manage Your Content and Devices → Preferences → Personal Document Settings → Approved Personal Document E-mail List → Add a new approved e-mail address .
After I added their email to my Amazon account and sent fadedpage my correct email address, I got this message:
The book 20160613 has been sent to kindle. It may take several minutes for Amazon’s servers to process before it appears in your account. You must sync your kindle device before it will appear.
I found the Sync command on my pull down menu and lo and behold the book appeared in my library. Fun!
I just picked up the book at my library!! I was lucky that they had it. It hadn’t been checked out since 2006. My library usually culls books that haven’t been checked out in 5 years!!! I guess that they consider this a classic.
It’s December 1st! Welcome to our discussion of Peyton Place by Grace Metallious.
I closed this book feeling that it was one of the most depressing depictions of the human race that I’d ever encountered. Even Doc Swain, who has a conscience and, on the whole, is compassionate and kind, is fond of terribly racist and sexist humor. Ted Carter starts out with promise and ends up self-centered and morally weak-kneed. Tom Chakris, who in the latter half of the book is the voice of reason, is a date rapist. And those are the good guys. Don’t even get me started on Lucas Cross, Rodney Harrington, the Carter parents or Evelyn Page. Sexism, racism (“N” word more times than I could count), cultural insensitivity, hypocrisy, greed, suicide, rape, murder, incest. And as it that weren’t enough, near the end, just for good measure, a girl gets her arm torn off in a fun house. If Grace Metallious really saw the world in this way, I don’t know how she even got out of bed in the morning.
Is there a message in all this? There’d better be! Let’s find it.
Its melodrama and sexuality aside, Peyton Place fits squarely in the long tradition of realistic working-class fiction. Some reviewers have argued that Metalious portrays Serena’s abuse by her stepfather as the fault not merely of one drunken woodsman but also of the entire society of Peyton Place. Discuss this proposition with examples from the novel.
Peyton Place is, above all, a novel about women—their desires, their frustrations, and their attempts to achieve some degree of selfhood in a society that constricts them. But what about the men in the novel? Many of the male characters constrain women either violently (Lucas) or through the exercise of social power (Leslie Harrington). A few show some degree of sympathy for those less fortunate than themselves (Tom Mackris, Doc Swain, Seth Bushnell). Discuss Metalious’ portrayal of these “good men.” Does she find them ineffectual, or in some cases, even irrelevant? Or does she, finally, undercut the strong women of her novel by surrendering to the belief that a woman needs a good man to get what she wants?
One thing the article notes is that it is usually quite surprising for modern readers to find that the novel is set in the late 1930’s, not in the 1950’s. I was definitely surprised by that! That explains some things (racist language), but in other ways—such as the open sexuality—the book doesn’t fit my image of a small pre-war town in the 1930’s. I prefer Bedford Falls – the fictional east coast town at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Oh, my, @Mary13 , I don’t agree with your Post #11 at all!
Take Connie, for example. She had such shame over having had Allison out of wedlock, but finally, when Allison goes to live in NYC, she realizes (through the convictions of the way-too-perfect Tom Makris) that her daughter’s life is her own to live as she sees fit. I also loved that Allison had an affair with her agent and came to realize it was stupid. Growth of characters!
Selena Cross surprises us all with her maturity and ability to overcome her environment. She will succeed, thanks to the wise but difficult choice of Doc Swain.
I also think the novel is hugely feminist, written at a time when no one had ever heard of such a concept. (Well, maybe the suffragettes had). Selena wants a life only with someone who values her; she doesn’t fall into the trap her upbringing suggests. Connie, after having what she acknowledges was a stupid affair with Mr. MacKenzie, becomes a successful store owner. Allison doesn’t want just marriage and a family; she wants a career. Even Betty Anderson, Rodney’s girlfriend for a while, tells him where to shove it – literally – when she’s angry that Rodney brought Allison to the dance. I think these women see the society they’re in and, though they can’t change their environment, they try to change where they wind up in life.
I found the book depressing even as I recognized elements of the small town where I grew up. The scenes describing Doc’s internal debate and the appendectomy particularly resonated with me given current events; hard to believe it was published 65 years ago.
So many of the characters demonstrated the fragility of privilege, be it gender, class, education or whatever. The constant need to curate one’s public image in order to navigate the social world is exhausting, and probably ultimately ineffective.
Finished this book a couple of weeks ago. I’d never read it and never seen the movie or the TV show. It’s hard to describe how I feel about this book – I both like it and dislike it. (Accordingly, I gave a thumbs up to the comments from both @Mary13 and @VeryHappy.)
I’m also surprised the book is set in the 1930s/1940s. I wonder why Metalious did that and also how different it would be if she had set it in her present day, i.e. the mid-1950s?
I grew up in a town of about 18,000 in New England. Did any of these “scandals” happen there? Most likely, but I didn’t know about them at the time. I remember feeling as if “everyone knew your business,” especially for those whose family had been in town for several generations and/or those who had family members active in town affairs. Both were true for my brothers and me. As one example, my father was Chairman of the School Committee and we often heard how we had to “behave ourselves” because how would it look if we got into trouble? (Spolier alert: we didn’t.)
Exactly … however, I don’t find the book “hugely feminist” at all.
Connie returns to Peyton Place hiding the truth about Allison’s birth. She opens a dress shop and raises Allison on money left to her by her married lover. If he hadn’t left her money …
Selena wants a life with someone who values her and may get that only because of the town doctor. Doctor Swain comes to her rescue not once but twice. If he hadn’t …
Betty Anderson may have told Rodney where to go - once - but she comes back for more. His father takes care of her when she gets more complicated than an easy screw. I figure Betty wants money earned by having it given to her … Implication was she couldn’t have been sure exactly who the father might be. The Harringtons had money so why not go that route. Just because she tells Ronnie where to go in eighth grade doesn’t make her an early feminist. Now if she hadn’t gone back for more again and again … maybe.
Allison wants a career but, by the end, moves from one man to the one waiting in the wings. Does she or does she not want (gee, I forget his name). The older man (her agent?) really gives her no choice but to move on, does he? Telling Allison about his wife and children with no words of endearment for her despite the weekend.
And back to Connie, she married a man who raped her and had evidently raped at least one other person. I can’t quite hit feminist accolades for that one. More like “what the heck?” No.
Men control any successes these women have or don’t. In almost every case, they need a man to do so.
Thinking about it, both Allison and Selena lose their virginity to older married men. Selena’s rape (incest) is inexcusable. Allison isn’t raped but neither does the man let her know about his family and he has the opportunity to do so. I looked back to check.
Lots of purple prose and so many unlikable characters, but it was actually somewhat less trashy than I expected. Metalious seems to have something to say about the pettiness of much small town life, with its toxic masculine culture and casual racism. There are plot lines that get dropped, and Allison (presumably standing in for the author) is considerably less interesting than the author thinks. In some ways the most interesting aspect of the book was how so many parents, even the well meaning ones, manage to damage their children.
Except for the doctor I thought all the men were despicable. And I can’t see Connie’s husband as anything but a rapist.
It was a page turner and I can see how it became a successful soap opera.
I was very surprised when at some point I realized it was set in the 1930s.
@VeryHappy, I knew you would have the opposite viewpoint and I respect that!
Obviously, our gut reactions were very different. However, I agree with you as regards Selena. She is incredibly resourceful and resilient and the only character worth her salt, if you ask me.
Although I appreciate the fact that Connie found a way to raise Allison and be an entrepreneur, I thought she was too screechy and out-of-touch where her daughter was concerned. (Not that I had a whole lot of sympathy for Allison – she seemed to go through adolescence and young adulthood with a “poor, poor me” attitude.)
And Connie’s falling in love with and marrying her rapist bothered me, too. However–and I think this is important!–I viewed that rape with a 2022 sensibility, not a 1939 one. The passage reminded me SO much of the scene in “Gone with the Wind” where Rhett scoops up Scarlett and carries her upstairs as she tries to beat him off. Next morning, she’s purring like a kitten in bed. This was considered incredibly romantic in 1939 – and I’ll wager that viewpoint still hadn’t changed too much by the 1950’s. Come to think of it, that notion of “sexy” was still going strong in the 1970’s: Anybody remember Luke and Laura from General Hospital?
While there was some stuff that I didn’t like, I am very glad that I read the book. There are so many references to our current culture that refer to Peyton Place. We all knew what it referred to but having never read the book or saw the soap opera, my imagination went wild. l definitely agree that we cannot judge Connie’s husband by today’s standards. She married him and not reluctantly or unwillingly. She truly loved him. Her reluctance to sex was because of her relationship with Allison’s father.
I think that the whole book needs to be looked at through 1939 eyes. Unmarried sex was so shocking and sinful, but everyone did it. What great lengths did Connie go to protect Allison from finding out about her father? Even when Allison thought less of her than her father.
Metalious wrote the book when she was 30 and died at age 39 of cirrhosis of the liver. Her 3 other books never sold well.
Yesterday while playing bridge I learned why all of the women hated a certain prominent man in our town who now suffers from dementia. It was a “couldn’t happen to a better person.” My husband socializes with him. Now we are new to the area, so we don’t know the history of certain people. We live in a small town. He was an officer at the bank and it seems that he absolutely hated that women worked there. He was always making unwanted advances, pinching their bottoms, and countless other things. When the sexual harassment was reported it was always swept under the rug. The “good old boy network”. I am amazed that people still talk to him. I now understand why women aren’t thrilled to see him when they bump into him. I am sure that all places from large cities to small towns have the same store, different names.
