Peyton Place and Pleasantville: The Mirroring and Distortion of American Myth

When Grace Metalious unleashed her novel, Peyton Place, in 1956 to the repressed conscious of 1950s America she shocked a nation. The nation responded by making Peyton Place a blockbuster, best-selling novel. There was something about her book that both outraged and intrigued a country in the midst of the post-war baby boom. Grace Metalious had her finger on the pulse of small-town America that provided a scandalous look into the idealized notion of the American family in the setting of a small community. She tackled the taboo subjects of sex, incest, rape, abortion, class and how these matters fit into the daily life of the small-town American family. This is what her critics did not want to hear, a reflection of the very unpleasant facets of their lives and the lives of people around them. The censorship and ban on this book reflected America's discomfort with the realities, instincts, and urges of the human condition. Yet, the book's ravenous consumption by many members of America's public spoke of the need for men and women to face a gritty, unpolished reality: their own. Pleasantville, a movie made more than 40 years after the release of Peyton Place, is a filmic representation of the sociological effect Peyton Place, and other such artistic and literary works, had on the psyche of 1950s America. Both in real life and in the movie, the truths of passion, emotion, sex and scandal were always there, always lurking below the surface; it was the acknowledgement of these truths that brought everything into "color".

The notion of the family was a highly idealized in the 1950s. Although dysfunction existed in the family unit during the '50s as it exists today, it was deemed totally inappropriate to air one's dirty laundry, especially in a small town where one "…knew well the discomfort of getting oneself talked about" (Peyton Place 15). An emphasis was placed upon keeping up appearances. As Constance MacKenzie put it, "If you take to locking your door in Peyton Place, people will begin to think that you have something to hide"(Peyton Place 148). That is why sitcoms such as Leave it to Beaver underwent enormous success. The Cleavers represented the ideal family unit and the pinnacle of functional ability within a nuclear family. They represented what every American family should strive to be. However, this portrayal of the perfect family unit was simply a fantasy, an anesthetic used to mitigate the sense of failure in realizing that ideal. In the movie Pleasantville the character David, played by Toby Maguire, is present day teenager who is obsessed with the 1950s sitcom Pleasantville (a Leave it to Beaver type parody). He uses the show as an escape from his angst regarding his own family life. He longs for the small town fantasy world of Pleasantville, and when he finally gets there he wants desperately to preserve its innocence. This same sensibility pervaded the conscious of the people who took to banning and burning books in the 1950s, the same people who banned and were outraged by Peyton Place. The iconic level to which the small-town was raised is a testament to the desperate need to hold onto a myth of infallible American values and virtue. With Peyton Place, Metalious exposed the icon of the virtuous small town for what it was - a myth.

The role of passion and sex in Peyton Place and in Pleasantville is integral into the discovery of the true knowledge of one's self. The social importance of both these works is to comment on how sexuality and desire was just as present in the 1950s as were TV dinners; yet it was repressed and scandalized. In Peyton Place both Allison Mackenzie and her mother, Constance, are able to not only understanding themselves, but each other through their individual sexual experiences. Constance MacKenzie was unable to recognize the passion that had been lying dormant in her for years until Tomas Makris awakened it. Her sexual reawakening was not complete until she could admit to Tomas the secrets she had been shielding from him, Allison, and the town for over 20 years about Allison's illegitimate birth. With the guidance of Tomas, Constance was able to see that she had been unfairly spewing forth her own anxiety and fear regarding sex and the shame associated with being a unmarried girl "in trouble" onto her daughter. She refused to accept Tomas's theory that all teenager are sexual beings, including her daughter, until she could accept her own self as being sexual. It was not until she relinquished shame, guilt, and a lifetime of lies that she could truly find herself and her sexuality. Constance says to Tomas, "I didn't know it could be like this-so comforting with nothing to fear"(Peyton Place 277).

A woman experiencing pre-marital sex without shame in the 1950s might have happened in reality, but it certainly was not written about and glorified as a sort of freedom. But Metalious did not stop here. She used sex as a weapon and as a bargaining device, putting power into the hands of the woman, as is evident in the spring dance scene when Betty Andersen humiliates Rodney Harrington by sexually arousing him and then leaving him to himself in the backseat of her dates car. (Peyton Place 124) Not only is sex used as a weapon but as way to bridge the deep gap of understanding between Constance MacKenzie and her daughter. Allison was unable to forgive, or understand for that matter, her mother's scandalous relationship with her father, a man who had a wife two children. She believed her mother weak and foolish for allowing herself to get caught up in that relationship, and on top of that to get pregnant. It was not until Allison herself experienced a sexual relationship with a man who ended up being married and having two children that she could make peace with her mother.

She had experienced a sexual awakening and understanding of her own. She writes in a letter to her friends David, "I used to think that the business of confusing love with sex was childish and stupid, but now I know why so many women do this. It is because it is too painful afterward, if one can remember nothing of love" (Peyton Place 369). Allison's very "grown-up" view of sex at such a young age could be deemed cynical. However, it puts into perspective the social reality of women in the '50s. A woman having sex outside of marriage could be labeled a torrent of degrading terms; therefore there was a need to protect one's self from an onslaught of guilt and shame. Equating sex with love makes the act of sex seem less scandalous, less whorish. Sex for sex's sake was an act that was simply unacceptable for women to partake. Grace Metalious, a woman writing of women's sexual desires, acceptable or not, was blazing a trail that was unheard of in 1950s pop-culture. She caused a whirlwind of controversy and scandal, but she brought forth to American men and women the truth behind the cloaked desires of housewives, mothers, single and working girls everywhere. She let women know they were not alone in their desires, passions, and "shameful" secrets.

The movie Pleasantville represents visually the sexual or other such awakenings in its characters by turning each person who has found a new sort of self-knowledge into color. People begin to realize that they are not alone in their discoveries as they can see physically the changes in others. However, many are uncomfortable with the blatant changes in the world around them. Some people's awakening is a threat to others. It threatens to upset the entire order of the world that the citizens of Pleasantville, especially the older generation, have taken for granted. It makes things a little uncomfortable and new, something that they cannot control. When people are afraid they tend over react, to try and eliminate the source of their fear.

This is precisely what happens in Pleasantville when people's children, wives, mothers, and brothers start seeing the world in color, when they start asking what is outside of Pleasantville, and when they start experimenting sexually. The people in black and white refuse to allow their "pleasant" town to touch with reality so they practice censorship and discrimination. This mimics the way that Peyton Place was received by the public in 1956. People were afraid that their own secrets would be betrayed by the contents of the book. They were afraid that perhaps people would start locking their doors and closing their curtains, admitting that they have something to hide. Open dialogue about sexuality, child abuse, incest, rape, fantasies, and reality was something people were simply not ready for. Blasting wide open the hypocrisies people had constructed to judge other and to protect themselves was something that understandably made people uncomfortable. Clayton Frazier put it simply, "Didn't you ever notice how its always people who wish they had somethin' or had done somethin' that hate the hardest?" (Peyton Place 345).

Using sex as a tool to release oneself from a lifetime of guilt or repression, or using sex as a weapon to manipulate the power relationship between a man and a woman was simply uncouth; yet Metalious not only admitted that it happened, but she admitted it to the world in writing. In Pleasantville, Betty Parker is released from an existence of colorless monotony by discovering her body, her sexuality, and her desire for something more than a life of playing bridge and cooking meatloaf, by masturbating in a bathtub. Betty Parker leaves her husbands and risks humiliating her family in search of personal satisfaction and experience. This movie upends the myth of the happy and content '50s housewife, as did Peyton Place 40 years earlier. Constance MacKenzie is at many times put out by her daughter and cannot understand her. When Allison is in the hospital due to shock, Constance's main concern is not the well-being of her daughter but if she is going to lose Tomas Makris. Her wants and needs are self-involved, but Metalious does not apologize for them. Just because a woman is a mother, does not mean she ceases to be an individual. If she puts herself first once in a while, it does not make her a bad mother, but a normal human being. By protecting this myth of motherhood, people were protecting the status quo, the functioning of the nuclear family, and the keeping up of appearances. It served well the men in charge to have their wives at home, making dinner, raising children, and keeping the house.

Both Pleasantville and Peyton Place as towns have been personified, so that the community itself is another character in the story. Pleasantville's name was the mandate of the town -all things at all times are pleasant and shall remain so. The community, headed by the white men in charge (or black and white for that matter), spoke out against the coloreds. There was a community standard, not an individual one; therefore acts of individuality, such as the painting of murals, were crimes against the community. Similarly, Peyton Place was treated as simply another character in the novel. A character would wonder what "Peyton Place" would say, or Metalious would write of Peyton Place as if it was engaged in a dialogue. In the end, both of these fictional communities were confronted with individualism and defiance that not only changed the ideals of a community, but of the individuals within them. Pleasantville became a colored community and Allison MacKenzie and Constance Makris, along with Doc Swain and Selena, stopped caring what Peyton Place would say and did what was in there hearts and minds. Pleasantville's commentary on the myth of the American small-town in the 1950s does much to shed light on the iconic social constructs that Metalious was set to uncover and communities resistance to this uncovering. The drive to preserve the "innocent" and the "pleasant" was stifling, but the truth lay boiling underneath the surface. Pleasantville rendered a highly idealized, fictional account of the real social revolutions inched along by bold social movements, artists, voices, and works such as Grace Metalious and Peyton Place