Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place, by Ardis Cameron
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Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place, by Ardis Cameron
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Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a best seller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events. The novel sold more than 30 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and it was adapted into a hit Hollywood film in 1957 and a popular television series that aired from 1964 to 1969. More than half a century later, the term "Peyton Place" is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets.
In Unbuttoning America, Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon. She argues that Peyton Place, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class and ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, was more than a tawdry potboiler. Metalious's depiction of how her three central female characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings anticipated second-wave feminism. More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America.
Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place, by Ardis Cameron- Amazon Sales Rank: #149913 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-06-02
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 514 minutes
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Admirable Effort and a Fabulous Read By Laura D WHAT a fabulous book, and why couldn't it be longer? I gobbled it up this afternoon and evening, as soon as it was delivered in the mail. There is so much to say about the cultural influence of Peyton Place and Grace Metalious' life -- well covered in Emily Toth's excellent 1981 and so far only extant biography, yes, but here is updated information from Ardis Cameron on the 1947 Barbara Roberts case (whom Toth, to my and perhaps other readers' puzzlement, covers with the pseudonym of "Jane Glenn", so that for years I thought that WAS the victim's real name).It's so absolutely true that the novel had a dark, despairing interior which the silly, squeaky-clean movie version of course came nowhere near capturing, and for once an old fart like myself can say that I was too young to have ever seen the 1960's TV series, but I'd always heard it was even worse than the movie. I wonder, I just wonder what it would be like to actually do a film version which is really true to the book, setting it in the 1930's, and WWII-and-postwar 1940's -- to really have it as sordid and shabby with tragic class struggles and grim sexual cruelty as Grace Metalious' novel portrayed. They can even throw in the sleazy aspects of the sequel novel, Return to Peyton Place, but how interesting it would be to have 1940's period authenticity (just like in the 1996 version of Lolita, which makes the story one of heartrendingly sad and tragic abuse belying the bucolic settings, instead of snickering trash like the 1962 version). I don't understand why no film company, especially an indie one, would want to undertake this project, and highlight the proto-feminist undertone of the story, which Metalious probably didn't even realize she was doing. I'd heard that for some time there was going to be a film biography of Grace Metalious, and THAT would be very interesting.There is some disparity of agreement of whether or not Metalious' publisher had a ghostwriter pull together the sequel novel, because Grace was by then severely alcoholic and the book, such as it was, proved to be a mess, yet she was able to follow it with two readable, in fact fairly well written, books: The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden, although both novels sorely lacked the pungency of the first Peyton Place. One wonders what Grace Metalious could have been capable of had she lived, been able to temper or even recover from her drinking trouble, and sailed into the 1970's with novels of possibly equal merit (as far as popular fiction is concerned,but let's face it, we can't be literary snobs here; this book's appearance in the mid-1950's blew everyone out of the water.) If critics grumble that Sinclair Lewis did pretty much the same thing in the 1920's, just remember that getting the story from a woman's point of view isn't the same as having a woman actually write it, and rather than scraping against or hinting at scandal, she bravely dove into a roman a clef which exposed the very worst of a small community's rancid hypocrisy and exploitation of the poor and helpless. Whether or not it was quasi-autobiographical really doesn't matter some 60 years later. She showed people the ghastliness of their lives which none of the existing blue laws or churchgoing or smug acceptance of everyone "knowing their place" could successfully quash, no matter how many town elders and librarians fought to keep the novel out of circulation and from being sold in bookstores. Yes, of course since the 1900's there'd been plenty of novels showing how wormy and vile supposedly pastoral small towns can be -- Bellemann, Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, et. al. -- but having a woman write it, with females as acting protagonists instead of ornaments, was a revelation in its time. And really, I am disappointed this remarkable effort by Cameron wasn't longer -- it truly should have been; there is much to expound upon to expand it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Dangerous Ideas Packaged as Pulp Fiction By takingadayoff It's hard to imagine what a splash the book Peyton Place made when it came out in the Fifties. It addressed issues that were largely not discussed except in whispers, issues such as incest, child abuse, date rape, and perhaps the most dangerous of all, feminism. Of course it was the sex that sold the book, and that's what most people remember about it even today.American Studies Professor Ardis Cameron looks at Peyton Place in its mid-century historical context, as a publishing phenomenon, at its incarnations as a movie and as a TV series, at the reactions among critics and fans, and at the author, Grace Metalious.The divide that Peyton Place exposed was evident in a single household. While noted critic Bernard De Voto was harrumphing over the "cultural tripe" that was infesting the literary world, his wife, book reviewer and editor Avis De Voto got a letter from family friend Julia Child (yes, the French Chef) saying she had "quite enjoyed it." She said that Metalious "does have a style, and a manner of creating atmosphere and character." And that having finished Peyton Place, Child was ready to return to the Goethe she'd been tackling before that.Metalious wrote Peyton Place as a serious effort, not as is suggested by the lurid paperback cover art, as pulp fiction. In a way, it was as much a protest against the status quo as was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which wouldn't appear until 1963, seven years after the debut of Peyton Place. Metalious was considered an outsider of sorts due to her "exotic" ethnicity as French Canadian and her husband's Greek heritage. She would never be allowed to fit in, so she decided to stand out.Cameron makes an academic treatment of literature into a fascinating ride into Fifties culture, post-War angst, publishing and bookselling, the results of sudden fame and fortune, and reverberations that reach into the 21st century.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. The last part of the book finally deals with Grace Metalious and The Book Peyton Place and I really enjoyed it. However having s By bookwomen37 This review is really a 3 1/2 star review. I found the beginning of the book to be rather slow and the author repeated herself a lot, sometimes word for word. The beginning of the book was more of a history of publishing and reading. The last part of the book finally deals with Grace Metalious and The Book Peyton Place and I really enjoyed it. However having studied Women's Lit, read Peyton Place and the Grace Biography there was not a lot of new information to me in this book. The letters to Grace are interesting but they are too many of them that basically say the same thing. I am glad I finished this book since I enjoyed the ending and for those not familiar with Peyton Place or Grace should enjoy reading about this publishing phenomenon.
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