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1 4 The Good Rapist, the Bad Rapist, and the Abortionist Peyton Place’s Crisis of Masculinity Tom Makris’s rape of Constance MacKenzie in Peyton Place is singular within their relationship in its show of sexual force. It is not singular, however, in Tom’s experience. His sexual initiation, we later learn, demonstrates a similar strain of aggression. As in the first sex scene with Constance , the issue of consent is made to seem ambiguous: Tom“took”a girl whose name he cannot quite remember in the bathroom of a tenement building. Her desires and reactions are never mentioned, only his revelry in the experience. This vignette is presented in a discussion with Constance on adolescent sexuality in which Tom works, unsuccessfully at the time, to persuade Constance that it is perfectly natural for teenagers not just to think about sex, but to try it out. From the night of the midnight swim onward, Tom emerges as the voice of reason on many matters, most importantly on the matter of libidinal health. His program of rehabilitation enables Constance to integrate her estranged sexuality into her identity and, in the end, to have a more honest relationship with her daughter. This chapter shifts the focus from Constance to Tom in order to investigate racialized constructions of masculinity within Peyton Place. I begin with Tom Makris—the novel’s dark hero, its rapist/redeemer figure—and end with Doc Swain, its white, southernized moral center. This inquiry moves from an analysis of the novel’s uses of dark masculinity into its critique of white male sexuality by way of the novel that Peyton Place dethroned as the top-ranked best seller: Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic is useful to this discussion for many reasons. Like Peyton Place, it is a female-authored text with a strong-willed heroine at its center. Furthermore, Gone with the Wind contains a very famous rape scene that resolves into a seduction. And in both novels, the rapists 100 D I R T Y W H I T E S A N D D A R K S E C R E T S are darkly drawn strangers-to-town that the narratives develop into heroes of a sort. Perhaps most important, in both works, white masculinity is taken to task. As I will show, in Peyton Place, the idiosyncratic dysfunctions and perversions that Metalious catalogues among the male members of the community are symptomatic of the pathological investment in whiteness that structures the town. Tough Love: Tom Makris and the Right Kind of Rape I have maintained that although Metalious’s sexual politics might have seemed progressive at the time, they also trade on a timeworn masculinist ideology that articulates a discourse of rape fantasy in the same moment that her novel seeks to give voice and vitality to the fact of female sexual agency. In a similar vein, Peyton Place’s endorsement of Tom’s role as the agent of Constance’s liberation is troubling because of the manner through which the conversion from “ice maiden” to erotic helpmeet is effected. On the one hand, Metalious’s installment of the town’s newly arrived dark other as the bedrock for Constance’s domestic stability and as an important figure in the community as the schools’ new principal is a progressive gesture, particularly in 1956. However, her attempt at balancing Tom’s logic, rationality, and occasional tender gesture toward Constance with a sexually violent tendency undermines her critique of race by repeating the terms of the self-same discourse of bigotry. The scenes at the lake and in her bedroom stand alone in their violence against Constance. The romantic interludes between the lovers that follow their first encounter are peppered with nuzzles and sweet nothings as if to justify the stormy initial contact by way of demonstrating the committed coupling it produces. Constance herself is occasionally mystified by the anomaly of Tom’s tenderness: He could do little things like kissing her finger tips or the inside of her wrist with a complete naturalness and sincerity that kept them from seeming planned or contrived. Once, he had kissed the sole of her bare foot and she had been aroused to the point of powerful and immediate desire. At first, she had been embarrassed by his unorthodox expressions of tenderness, for they had reminded her of love scenes in rather effete novels. They seemed incongruous coming, as they did, from a...

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