I’d forgotten that Kathy ends up with one of the few good men and a happy ending! I think both Allison and Selena will land on their feet. Allison irritated me no end, but I think by the end of the book she’s finally growing up.
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Strangely, Allison struck me as more desperate than either Selena or Kathy.
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Even though Kathy’s fiancé / husband Lewis is one of the “good guys,” the author (or narrator – I guess I should distinguish between the two) still manages to be catty about him, writing that “There were some in Peyton Place who did not take to Lewis”, with his “penchant for practical jokes” and “sorry habit of greeting people with a resounding slap across the shoulders. Where others found him insincere and loud, Kathy thought him diplomatic, gay and wonderful.” Looks like Kathy may have gotten the last laugh there.
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That’s a really good article about the book.
Regarding Norman Page and the enemas – Norman seems to becoming “normal” while he woos Allison. But the evening Allison’s and Norman’s mothers freak out over the possibility of their being immoral together, Norman’s mother offers him an enema – and Norman says, “Yes, please.” To me, that meant that Norman was giving up. He abandoned being normal, with Allison or anyone, and agreed to be subjected by his mother.
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Was he actually wooing Allison? I thought Norman might be gay. It was partly his clinical approach to his not-very-passionate kissing of Allison, and also his physical description. Yes, I know a physical description is not related to whether or not a person is gay, but in 1939 (or 1955) a stereotype might have been used to suggest something that couldn’t be said outright.
Norman was “built on delicate lines…He was pretty the way a girl is pretty, and his voice, too, was like a girl’s, soft and high. The boys at school called Norman ‘sissy,’ a name with which the boy found no quarrel” (p. 111).
The enemas aren’t just Norman’s capitulation to his Mom’s abnormal world. There are also sexual undertones. The narrator notes that the enemas provide Norman with “a bittersweet sort of pleasure.”
And that, as Forrest Gump would say, is all I have to say about that. 
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00403.x
The Journal of Popular Culture
“Do You Love Mother, Norman?”: Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and Metalious’s Peyton Place as Sources for Robert Bloch’s Psycho
First published: 14 May 2007
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^ Omg, @jerseysouthmomchess, I’m a literary genius and I didn’t even know it! 
I’m going to see if I can get the full article from my librarian daughter.
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I found this podcast (The New York Public Library) for those interested in listening to a discussion of Peyton Place.
I’ve listened to some of it (not all).
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I believe that the group of old men sitting outside the store make fun of Norman behind his back, suggesting he is gay.
And back to Tom Makris for a minute. If I remember correctly, he tells Connie about a sexual experience that he had as an adolescent. He followed a younger girl into a bathroom and had sex. It didn’t sound consensual so scratch romantic bodice ripper thoughts. And as someone who’s read more than one bodice ripper, this … “slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand” moves everything a step or two beyond forced seduction, imho. Rhett would never have hit Scarlett regardless of whatever happened behind closed doors.
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My daughter sent me the McDermott essay from JSTOR. So interesting! (BTW, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” sounds horrifying – I never read it.) Here are some excerpts re the two Normans of Peyton Place and Psycho. Long quote, but relevant:
In 1955, when Metalious wrote the book, police had not studied serial killers to the extent they have today and animal killing was not yet considered typical behavior of a future, let us say Norman Bates. But it is now, and in hindsight, it is difficult to read this gruesome episode without concern for Norman Page’s future.
We leave Norman Page, in 1944, at the age of twenty-five. If we were to find Norman Page in 1959, he would be forty: the age of Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates when Mary Crane arrives at the motel to take her fateful shower. It is not hard to imagine Robert Bloch reading Peyton Place and realizing that it was not so much a soap opera as a horror story. As Richard Matheson notes, Bloch believed ‘‘the real horror is not in the shadows, but in that little twisted world inside our own skulls’’ and the inside of Norman Page’s skull would take little tweaking to become the inside of Norman Bates’s.
What Peyton Place and Psycho are telling us to avoid is not really little boys named Norman or overbearing mothers, it is our urge to look away, to ignore signs of trouble when they are right in front of us. Metalious expresses this theme again and again, questioning the public’s reluctance to get involved if things do not seem safe or healthy.
Both Metalious and Bloch worked within traditions, yet pushed boundaries. It should not be surprising that their novels, long regarded as fluff or simply genre pieces, can show us new ways to view the struggle between our split selves. They also show the connection between the writers who came before and the ones who follow, striving for an original voice… It is no wonder Metalious, in particular, was emotionally spent after her work on Peyton Place.
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Peyton Place seems tame by today’s standards. My daughter sent me another article: From Peyton Plantation to Peyton Place: Gothic Tropes in Grace Metalious’s Infamous New England Novel by Melanie Anderson. It opens as follows:
Published in 1956, Peyton Place was a popular book, despite—or most likely because of—the accusations of its risqué subject matter. By the end of 1956, one in twenty-nine Americans had purchased the novel, and it was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for fifty-nine weeks.
Critics denounced it as “wicked,” “sordid,” “cheap,” “moral filth,” and “indecent,” among other pejoratives. It was the kind of book that young people clamoured for, which resulted in one Rhode Island bookseller’s conviction for selling a mature book to a minor; he was sentenced to a fine and time in prison.
This seems outrageous, right? But do you think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction? It seems impossible that there could ever be another “shocker” novel like Peyton Place because pretty much anything goes these days in books and on screen.
The article focuses on Peyton Place as a displaced “Southern Gothic” novel, sharing these characteristics with that genre:
To understand American literature, and indeed America, one must understand the Gothic, which is, simply, the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans. The Gothic has given voice to suppressed groups, and has provided an approach to taboo subjects such as miscegenation, incest, and disease. The study of the Gothic offers a forum for discussing some of the key issues of American society, including gender and the nation’s continuing drama of race.
…Peyton Place is a novel about domestic secrets, the conflict between public and private, and female sexuality and independence, as critics argue, but it also interacts with the nation’s problematic history of race and the uncomfortable idea that the region of New England is somehow separate from that dark history.
The writer makes an interesting observation that not only is Samuel Peyton banished to the outskirts of town, he is also banished to the outskirts of the novel, with his powerful story only being told in the final pages. She believes this was deliberate on Metalious’ part, that Samuel’s “banishment to the margins of the town, the novel, and history emphasizes the intolerance that Metalious portrays through her small-town, southern, New England gothic story.”
Samuel Peyton is forced to become a recluse not simply because he is a Black man, but because he is Black man who aligns himself too closely with the white world: “He is too much like them in his manner of dress, his choice of wife, his belief in personal liberty.”
Within a few pages tucked into the latter part of her novel, Metalious neatly layers complex versions of American history into one place—Peyton Place. This supposedly free and picturesque New England town is built on the same past of slavery and discrimination as the entire nation, and these civil horrors have continued into the national present of the novel’s publication and beyond.
The author adds that Doc Swain, with his perpetual white suit, is Metalious’ sly nod to the southern Gothic novel. He lives in a “white house, fronted with tall, slim pillars” that the townspeople describe as “southern looking," and Tom Makris says the Doc is "a walking ad for Planter’s Punch. A goddamned Kentucky colonel in this place!”
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I passed the novel to a friend when I finished. When she finished she said that truthfully it was set in the South despite its locale in a northern state. I’ll have to let her know that, according to this, she got it right.
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Dirty Whites & Dark Secrets Sex & Race in Peyton Place by Sally Hirsh Dickinson posits that Samuel Peyton’s race, and the town being named after him, is the ultimate and most horrifying scandal, the bombshell saved until the very end. Really thought-provoking observations throughout.
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I didn’t get housechatte’s entire article, but linked to this from her link,
The chronicle of higher education article review about Sally HirshDickinson’s thesis.
More than other “sexy” books, Metalious’s went so far as to foreground female libido, echoing Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , released three years earlier. In fact, for many readers, “Peyton Place seemed like a novelization of Kinsey’s work,” writes Sally Hirsh-Dickinson in Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets: Sex and Race in “Peyton Place,” to be published next month by the University of New Hampshire Press/University Press of New England.
But Hirsh-Dickinson is persuaded that something else explains the public frenzy. Her theory: It was because Peyton Place was a sly but scathing reflection on the race relations of its day.
That is a striking claim, because readers and critics have barely noticed race as an element of the novel. But Hirsh-Dickinson details how Metalious linked a catalog of “unpleasantness, bad behavior, and broken taboos” not only to the town’s grimy abuses of power and privilege, but also to a secret it is harboring: that it was founded by a wealthy, freed black slave, Samuel Peyton.
Metalious little by little reveals the town’s simmering “collective shame and silence about its black founding father,” Hirsh-Dickinson claims. Readers finally learn that Peyton made a small fortune, married a white Frenchwoman, was chased out of Boston on account of his race, and settled in New Hampshire to build his castle while coming to hate Northern hypocrisy so powerfully that he ran arms to the South during the Civil War.
E This theory does not convince Emily Toth, who initiated academic studies of Peyton Place with her 1981 biography, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious . In response to a general description of Hirsh-Dickinson’s claims, Toth (a columnist for The Chronicle ) says by e-mail that Metalious “was not particularly interested in racial matters.” Yes, she says, “Metalious was interested in ethnic prejudices, especially against Franco-Americans (her own group), and in prejudices about women and social class.” But racism simply wasn’t a social issue in northern New England at the time.
Toth adds that Hirsh-Dickinson is not alone in noticing Peyton Place’s black origins. But that, says Toth, “is a small detail in the book that recent readers have made much of and built an interpretation which is not at all what Grace Metalious wrote or intended.”
Anticipating such objections, Hirsh-Dickinson writes that surely Metalious’s management of her narrative must have meant something. She created a town racked by white dysfunction and haunted by its black legacy; then she portrayed some of her characters as not black, but marginalized by the town because they are “dark.” When one of these darker characters marries a fair-skinned, fair-haired local, townsfolk hail the union. That typifies ways in which Metalious repeatedly “races” the sex of the novel, Hirsh-Dickinson suggests.
Read Peyton Place in light of Hirsh-Dickinson’s gloss, and it becomes difficult not to notice the shading she identifies. In the last 25 of its first 100 pages, for example, the narration alludes four times to the Peyton story, the town doctor mocks the racism of a nurse, townsfolk commonly use expressions of racial opprobrium, and one girl sees her friend being beaten by her stepfather and is reminded of a picture of a black slave girl, stripped to the waist, being flogged by her master—details with resonances that Metalious must surely have intended.
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It’s interesting that the two Peyton Place experts, Emily Toth and Sally Hirsh-Dickinson, have such differing views on what Metalious was trying to express (if anything) about race relations. Such is academia, I guess.
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And maybe Metalious was just writing a dirty book.
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Hirsh-Dickinson I think goes a little too far, but I think she is on to something. It reminds me of when I was in high school and I used to write these essays arguing some point that my English teacher totally disagreed with, but I’d marshal so much evidence that it was hard to rebut my thesis. Luckily we got on well, and I was certainly often over the top. I too noticed the weird references to Tomas Makris’ swarthy complexion almost as though he was standing in for a real Black person, because that would have been going too far.
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I think Makris was “swarthy” simply to emphasize that he was different from the rest of the town.
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Despite being judgmental, hypocritical and intolerant, the residents of Peyton Place do circle the wagons when necessary. Selena is still one of their own, even after a murder trial. When young, she insists she will get out of town as soon as she can, but at the end, she is still there, running Connie’s store.
And when outsider Delaney suggests that Doc Swain’s career is over because of the abortion, Peter Drake shrugs and says, “Come back in a year, to see if Matt Swain is still in business. I’ll bet you a solid gold key to Peyton Place that he’ll still be living on Chestnut Street and going out on night calls” (p. 615).
Peyton Place is sort of Brigadoon, without the charm. Those born there are protected inside its walls, but leaving is not an option.
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