“Blacks, Greeks, and Freaks: Othering as Social Critique in Peyton Place”

by David M. Jones

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

414 Hibbard Hall – English Department

Eau Claire, WI 54703

jonesm@uwec.edu

Two photos of Grace Metalious in the November 12, 1956 issue of Life magazine illustrate an article entitled, “An Unpopular Best Seller.” The first shot shows the author pensively peering into the camera, her straight dark hair tied back, behind her the large wooden frame buildings where her husband George served as principal (George Metalious was fired from his job a few weeks before the publication of Peyton Place). The second photo shows the author from the back, with the same untucked white blouse rolled to her elbow and wrinkled at the bottom. At the left of the photo, a woman and her young son stare at her as she advanced towards them. The article quotes a Gilmanton citizen who claims that “she’s written a dirty story about us.” The article also tells readers that despite being ostracized in Gilmanton, the Metalious family will remain there, having bought a run-down white Cape Cod house on the outskirts of town.

Metalious’ best known novel, Peyton Place, was a bestseller and a media phenomenon in the mid-1950s and 1960s, creating a stir because of its depictions of teenage sexuality, incest, and illegal abortion. Surprisingly, however, few close examinations of the novel’s content and style have been published by literary critics. This essay provides a discussion of a key concern in the novel: racial, ethnic, geographical, and sexual marginality. Written to challenge the inscription of white, middle class, nuclear family life as the standard by which difference should be measured, Peyton Place features several characters who inhabit the metaphorical margins of American society, including Samuel Peyton, an escaped slave and the founder of the town; Tomoas Makris, a mysteriously handsome Greek school principal with several resemblances to George Metalious; and Selena Cross, a dark-skinned, beautiful young woman describes as a “gypsy,” whose life ties in to the incest and abortion subplots within the novel. I will provide a working definition of marginality and “othering” to begin this essay, followed by a discussion of Metalious’ social status as a French Canadian in New Hampshire, a description of the characterizations of Samuel Peyton and Selena Cross, and a final word on realism, reception, and the novel’s legacy.

Marginality and “othering” are terms that have a long history in literary and critical discourse of the 20^th century. In cultural criticism of the last three decades, these terms have been used to describe differences in power among individuals, nations, and cultural forms. In Orientalism, for instance, Edward Said invokes this idea of marginality and othering in his description of Europe’s relationship with the Orient. According to Said,

It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries (57).

In Said’s formulation, the Orient is both a geographical space and a discursive formation that has an essential function in the European imagination. Given the imaginative and material presence of this marginalized landscape, European identity can be constructed “as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures” (7). However, the relationship of marginal to dominant, familiar “I” with unfamiliar “other,” can shift if the distribution of power in a given culture is altered, or if new and radical meanings of everyday social practices and identities circulate widely enough to challenge normative assumptions. As this essay proceeds, I will show how Grace Metalious’ novel Peyton Place uses characterization and setting to intervene in the matrix of representations that cast African Americans and ethnic minorities as marginal “others.”

Metalious herself was of French Canadian ancestry, born in 1924 in Machester, New Hampshire, about one hour from the hometown of another celebrated French Canadian writer of the 1950s – Jack Kerouac. Her given name was Grace Marie Antoinette Jeanne d’Arc, shortened to Marie Grace de Repentigny for the birth record. According to Richard Sorrell, a historian who has studied her biography, “many may be surprised to learn that Grace Metalious came from a heritage steeped in maintenance of traditional national and religious values, and famous for militant defenses of conservatism, Catholicism, and family.” A similar statement might well be made about Jack Kerouac, whose novels are also described as a radical or countercultural challenge to normative values of sexual monogamy, economic mobility, and suburban home ownership. However, Kerouac, whose experimentation with novelistic form and fascination with Buddhism and bebop jazz are noted often, remained a devout Catholic until the end of his left and hesitated to express opinions on explicitly political questions. In his landmark novel On the Road, African American characters are depicted realistically at times but idealistically as well, with racial injustice presented mainly as a fact of life that intensified African American artistic production. Metalious, on the other hand, uses Father Fitzgerald and Nellie Cross in Peyton Place to examine Catholic theology closely and critically, and depicts African American characters in a way that compels the reader to consider the history of slavery and racial discrimination in America.

Sorrell, in a 1980 article entitled “A Novelist and Her Ethnicity: Grace Metalious as a Franco-American,” suggests that a series of personal conflicts – rooted in part in the familiar foci of gender and class – might explain Metalious’ interest in treating themes of marginality in her fiction: “Metalious’ matriarchal upbringing featured an incredibly unhappy and insecure family environment, resulting in class status contradictions and a desire for upward mobility, combined with an uncertain sense of what her proper status as a woman should be” (286). Indeed, she was raised in what at the time would be called a “broken home,” as she, her mother, and her younger sister were raised by her mother after her parents’ divorce in the mid-1930s. Her mother, Laurette, took extreme pride in the French side of her ancestry and cultivated tastes that were probably unattainable given the family’s economic status, dreaming of “Paris trips, a chauffeured limousine, and a Colonial house with a fanlight over the front door,” according to the author’s own words (Toth 15). Metalious married young, and pregnant, in the early 1940s. By the time Peyton Place was published in 1956, the author’s marriage had survived her husband’s long stints in World War II, affairs by both George and Grace, and Grace’s term as a P.H.T. (putting hubby through) during George’s attendance at the University of New Hampshire, where Grace began to compose her novelistic treatments of marginality. Neighbors during this period were highly critical of how she raised her two children: “Marsha and Mike would appear on other people’s porches, their noses running with the cold, because Grace had locked them out…Locked in the apartment, Grace was writing” (59). In this way, the author herself was cast as the unfamiliar “other,” in opposition to hegemonic constructions of motherhood and femininity, as the Life magazine article on “The Unpopular Best Seller” illustrates.

Two key characters in Peyton Place (Samuel Peyton and Selena Cross) are similarly cast as marginalized “others” in opposition to social norms that are also deconstructed in the novel. The first of these characters, Samuel Peyton, is the founder of the town and figures prominently in Metalious’ interrogation of who within Peyton Place is the “us,” and who is the “other.” An early mention of Samuel Peyton occurs when an outsider arrives in town and challenges much of what the town takes for granted as tacit knowledge. Tomas Markris, a Greek man hired sight unseen as a school principal because of a sudden death, arrives in Peyton Place from New York. Stereotypical talk precedes his arrival in the town, as the following passage from the novel illustrates: “’A Greek?’ demanded Peyton Place incredulously. ‘For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we’ve got a whole colony of Polacks and Canucks working in the mills without letting the Greeks in?’” (95).

After his arrival in town by train, Makris is surprised by how little the townspeople want to engage in conversation. Speaking with the owner of the town cafe, Corey Hyde, Markris receives evasive answers when he asks about the origin of the town’s name:

“Peyton Place…is the oddest name for a town I’ve every heard. Who is it named for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Corey, making unnecessary circular motions with a cloth on his immaculate counter. “There’s plenty of towns have funny names. Take that Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had a kid took French over to the high school. Told me Baton Rouge means Red Stick. Now, ain’t that a helluva name for a town? Red Stick, Louisiana. And what about that Des Moines, Iowa? What a crazy name that is.”

“True,” said Markis. “But for whom is Peyton Place named, or for what?”

“Some feller that built a castle up here, back before the Civil War. Feller by the name of Samuel Peyton,” said Corey, reluctantly.

“A castle!” exclaimed Makris.

“Yep. A real, true, honest-to-God castle, transported over here from England, every stick and stone of it.”

“Who was this Peyton? asked Makris. “An exiled duke?”

“Nah,” said Corey Hyde. “Just a feller with money to burn. Excuse me, Mr. Makris. I got things to do in the kitchen.”

The old man at the end of the counter chuckled. “Fact of the matter, Mr. Makris,” said Clayton Frazier in a loud voice, “is that this town was named for a friggin’ nigger. That’s what ails Corey. He’s delicate like, and just don’t want to spit it right out” (102).

The latter sections of the novel tell more about Samuel Peyton, when a reporter from out of town interviews Clayton Frazier. According to Frazier, Peyton escaped from slavery long before the Civil War, “at a time when most folks looked on niggers as work horses, or mules” (329). He escaped to France, married a French girl, and built a castle on the highest point in the then-unoccupied landscape around Peyton Place. Both Peyton and his wife eventually die of tuberculosis, and according to his will, the land and castle was given to the state, left in disrepair but towering over the town of Peyton Place that grew up around it.

Metalious’ development of the Peyton plot focuses on racial difference, setting up a conditional shift in power as the townspeople live their lives in the physical and symbolic shadow of Samuel Peyton. In the film and television versions, Samuel Peyton is no longer identified as an African American character – in the television version, he becomes a wealthy industrialist with a resemblance to J.R. Ewing of Dallas. It is telling, then to consider that the published text of the novel treated black/white relations as a central issue in the collective life of New Englanders and the nation.

Selena Cross is a second character that represents the social and discursive margins of Peyton Place. Selena is the daughter of Nellie Cross, a domestic worker, and the stepdaughter of a millworker, Lucas Cross. The entire family lived in the shacks “which sat, like running sores, on the body of Northern New England” (29). In the author’s words, “Lucas was a woodsman of a now-and-then variety common to Northern New England…had he lived in another section of America, he might have been called an Okie, or a hillbilly, or poor white trash. He was one of a vast brotherhood who worked at no particular trade, propagated many children with a slatternly wife, and installed his oversized family in a variety of tumble-down, lean-to, makeshift dwellings” (28-29).

Lucas and Nellie are contrasted with their daughter Selena, who has a physical appearance that distinguishes her from many other residents of the region: “Selena had long dark hair that curled of its own accord in a softly beautiful fashion…her skin was clear and of a honey-tan shade which looked as if it had been acquired under the sun but which, on Selena, never faded to sallowness in the long months of the harsh New England winter.” The schoolteacher, Miss Thornton, remarks that “put a pair of gold hoops in her ears…and she’d look like everybody’s idea of a perfect gypsy” (31). Constance Mackenzie, the town’s most eligible and elegant unmarried woman and the owner of the town’s only boutique, observes that “at thirteen, she has the look of a beautifully sensual, expensively kept woman” (40). Many of the descriptions of Selena in the text emphasize her beauty, ambition, and “natural” sexual charisma.

The characterization of Selena Cross energizes one of the most controversial subplots in Peyton Place, since it touches on several taboo subjects of teenage sexuality, incest, and rape. Allison Mackenzie, Constance’s daughter and Selena’s best friend, comes by the Cross house on a Saturday in midwinter, and witnesses Lucas’s first assault of Selena. Allison had always been curious about why Selena never invited her into the house, and while waiting for her in the back yard by the sheep pen, she peered into the kitchen window, discovering a setting that Allison’s mother had always cautioned her to avoid. Here is the description of the Cross house from Allison’s point of view as she looks into the kitchen:

So this is what the inside of a shack looks like, thought Allison, fascinated. Her eyes took in the unmade cots and the sagging double bed and the dirty dishes which seemed to be strewn from one end of the room to the other. She saw a garbage can in one corner which had not been emptied for a long time, and on the floor next to it was an empty can that had once held tomatoes and one that had contained beans. Lucas was sitting at a table that was covered with a streaked oil cloth so old and filthy that the pattern in it was no longer discernible, and Selena was filling a coffeepot from a pail of water, with a long-handled dipper. Allison thought of the houses in town that Nellie Cross kept spotless, and she remembered the food she had eaten in various homes that had been cooked by Selena’s mother (55).

Allison sees Lucas drinking, “the brown liquid [flowing] in an unbroken stream down Lucas’ throat” (55). Then, Lucas tosses the bottle into a corner, as Selena remarks “we got a trash can, Pa.” Lucas replies, “You getting’ fancy ideas from your little prune-faced friend Allison MacKenzie?” (56). After another remark from Selena, Lucas grabs her, tearing her blouse as she pulls away and leaving her naked to the waist. Lucas then corners her. Selena’s little brother Joey confronts his father, only to be thrown aside. Allison sees no more of the scene, as she fell “off the packing crate and lay on the cold ground” (57).

These passages illustrate the effects of marginality and othering in this cliffhanger novel, focused on the issues of poverty, domestic abuse, and sexual exploitation. The town’s entire landscape is depicted by Metalious as marginal, unevenly and unpredictably unaffected by historic events of the period such as the Great Depression and World War II. The silence and danger of the town’s marginal landscape is evident not only because of the notable influences of poverty, alcoholism, and sexual assault, but because nearly everyone in the town avoids speaking in public about the numerous issues that confront all of the characters in the text. The remarkable sales record of Peyton Place insured that a wider public – indeed a national public – confronted a range of taboo issues. The novel landed on bestseller lists and gained Hollywood film studio interest before it reached the bookstores on September 24, 1956, selling over 100,000 copies within a month. According to the Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, one in six Americans read at least parts of the text – and as a result, patterns of marginality and othering in an “idyllic New England setting” (and metaphorically, the nation as a whole) were subjected to a necessary interrogation.

Critics who praise Peyton Place usually remark on the novel’s realism and regional focus, the New York Times, for instance, praising the novel for capturing “a real sense of the temper, texture, and tensions of a small town” (Stearns 382), and comparing the novel to the works of Sherwood Anderson. The novel has also been praised for treating the lives of women centrally, as romance fiction often does. In the words of Kay Mussell, “[romance] heroines face dilemmas in fiction that all women confront, consciously or unconsciously, in daily life.” The treatment of marginality and othering, however, unite the novel’s related concerns with race, gender, sexuality, and geography, highlight the novel’s seemingly transparent but highly engaging form, and provide an enriched understanding of the novel’s legacy. The unique and provocative treatments of marginality and othering in Peyton Place illustrate conflicts and anxieties that remain unresolved in 21^st century American culture.

Works Cited

Mussell, Kay. Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romance

Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Sorrell, Richard S. “A Novelist and Her Ethnicity: Grace Metalious as a Franco-American,”

Historical New Hampshire, Fall 1980: 284-327.

Stearns, Jane and Michael Stearns. “Peyton Place.” Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. New

York: Harper, 1992: 381-383.

Toth, Emily. Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2001.

“Unpopular Best Seller.” Life, November 12, 1956: 104.