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1 5 Home Is Where the Haunt Is Domestic Space, Race, and the Uncanny Samuel Peyton’s castle is a haunting home. Structured by the racism that forced Peyton to flee Boston, it relocates and reiterates the history of white racial domination in America upon a New Hampshire hilltop. Although the castle has been uninhabited since the deaths of Peyton and his wife and shows the signs of neglect, it remains very much on the minds of those who live nearby. It is a memorial in stone to racial repression, a solidly constructed monument to a national program of disavowal. As such, it is a paradox: a record of erasure. The erasure is, therefore, never complete: Peyton’s story can never be fully untold. Part of the reason the town’s foundational narrative is so threatening is because it was conditioned by legal noncitizenship and nonidentity, a status that destabilizes the citizenship and identity of those against whom this legal nonexistence is constructed . Writing of Native Americans and the national project of legislating them into civic nonentities, Renée Bergland has remarked, “When America denied the civil existence of the disenfranchised without denying their actual existence, it constructed them as simultaneously there and not there, and it confined them to a spectral role in American politics.” Through this denial, these populations are rendered “uncanny figures, made ghostly by their oppression and their repression” (18). This chapter will explore the uncanny in Peyton Place by revisiting the figure of the house, what Anthony Vidler has called “the locus suspectus of the uncanny” (“Architecture,” 12). Houses, and their affective manifestations , homes, are sometimes spaces of sanctuary and retreat, while at other times they are the keepers and cloisters of secrets. Sometimes they are both at once. The secrets within the private dwellings in the town of Peyton Place are informed by American projects of domestic disavowals, what Bergland calls the “national uncanny.”1 Building on this and Homi Bhabha’s work on what he calls “the unhomely,” I will look at the ways 132 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 in which the boundaries of the houses and homes in Peyton Place trace and restage national secrets and anxieties about sexuality, race, and the atomic bomb. I contend that in the end, by incorporating Selena Cross into the town’s future and by installing Tom Makris as a permanent fixture within Constance MacKenzie’s home, Peyton Place works against containment culture’s attempts to “normalize” the American citizenry by denying difference. Having exploited the fears affiliated with domestic trespasses of both the home and the home front, and in suggesting the limits of the home’s ability to keep its secrets contained, the narrative moves toward a model of integration, suggesting that acknowledging and incorporating racial difference—not denying or repressing it—is the route to civic renewal. It is also how to make a home, and a hometown, habitable . Yet despite an apparently upbeat ending that resolves the conflicts of its three female protagonists, by concluding in 1944, the novel remains haunted by an uncertain future, one in which the United States has not yet emerged victorious from World War ii. In 1956, atomic anxiety articulated the agitated uncertainty of a national future. This chapter investigates how Peyton Place registers these anxieties simultaneously and within the structure of the house and the domestic space of the American home. Lost in the Fun House Late in Book Two, following Nellie’s suicide and Constance’s abrupt revelation of her past to Tom and Allison, against the blazing backdrop of drought-related wildfires that are encroaching on Peyton Place, Metalious stages a rather grisly scene in an unlikely location: the amputation of a young girl’s arm in a carnival fun house. Though it is startling in its grotesquerie , it is not only this: the scene presents us with yet another example of a house with poorly concealed secrets and the high cost of not dealing with them. The Labor Day carnival’s fun house is a garden-variety “building of horrors” with all the requisite elements: “evil faces which jumped up in front of the patrons at unexpected moments, distorting mirrors, slanted floors, intricate mazes of dimly lit passages, and a laughgetting , blush-producing wind machine” (260–61). While playing in front of the mirrors, Allison’s friend Kathy Ellsworth notices a hole...

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