Peyton Place :: essays research papers

In 1956, a woman from middle club Manchester, New Hampshire wrote a book that shocked the nation. At 32 old age old, Grace Metalious wrote the blockbuster novel Peyton Place. It transformed the publishing industry and do the author one of the most talked more or less people in the nation. Metalious wrote about incest, abortion, sex, rape, adultery, repression, lust, and the secrets of comminuted town New England, things that were never discussed before in ultraconservative America. She interpreted incest, wife beating, and poverty as social failures instead of item-by-item flops. When Metalious published Peyton Place, the uncouth was in the grasp of a new riffle 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. part of Rhode Island, Indiana, an d Nebraska followed suit arguing that the book would corrupt young minds. monied communities banished Peyton Place. To read Peyton Place was to read it in secret and were sometimes discussed unless 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 some other married person in most states was illegal. Also, abortion was illegal, and birth hold in 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 inclined by the female characters. Peyton Place begins with Indian summer in 1939. It takes stray 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 lawlessly changed Allisons birth certificate and lied to the Peyton Place locals that her husband died. Connie didnt want any of the town folk to find out the loyalty 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 aspect Allison was having sex with one of her friends, and so she lashed out the truth to Allison.