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1 2 The Color of Incest Sexual Abuse, Racial Anxiety, and the 1950s Family in Peyton Place Peyton Place refers to three things at once: the blockbuster best-selling novel with the racy reputation, the town in which that novel is set, and the castle (“the Peyton place”) that gives the town its name. Though the full telling of the story of the latter is held in abeyance until very near the novel’s conclusion, the English castle erected on a New England hilltop by the escaped slave who founds the town haunts the narrative from beginning to end. As a permanent fixture of the town’s landscape, Peyton’s castle is the town’s collective secret hiding in plain sight. The Peyton place memorializes the dark history, literal and figurative, that marks the town’s origins. Castles, despite their size and architectural flourishes, are at heart family homes, and the Peyton place is no different. It was within the walls of this fortification that Samuel Peyton defensively established himself and his European wife after having been prevented from buying into the Boston housing market because of his race. Like the castles of gothic literature , Peyton’s dwelling is indicative of a “failed” family (Ellis, ix); indeed , there are no Peyton offspring to inherit the castle following his death. As a result, it is willed to the state of New Hampshire and becomes a mighty husk of a home on the town’s horizon. As the beneficiary of Peyton’s property, the state becomes a legal surrogate for next of kin. In the absence of a next generation of Peytons, the families that propagate in the shadow of the looming gray edifice inherit the founding family’s secret and find themselves troubled by all manner of their own. Scandalized by its own origins, the town collectively seeks to stanch the storytelling the castle threatens to inspire. Unable to do this, it betrays its own anxieties about civic ancestry and family relationships by similarly “failing ” in the way of its families. 48 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 Samuel Peyton’s castle acts as a floating signifier, registering the town’s anxiety about the community’s nonwhite history, threatening to speak the secrets of its failed families, refracting the idiosyncratic dysfunctions of individual Peyton Place residents. Though the repression that characterizes responses to the castle’s enduring presence is produced by white racial anxiety to a black civic history, the structure itself is a product of the very anxiety it provokes within the community. Samuel Peyton, his story, and his castle are all products of the logic of a national program of white hegemony, as is the town’s compulsion to maintain the fiction of its own whiteness by evading questions about its long-ago past. Peyton Place restages the racism that produced the story of Samuel Peyton in the first place by repressing that very narrative. The community of Peyton Place works to keep up appearances of a racially pure history by not acknowledging its progenitor, by eliding the details of his history and its own. The nature of this disavowal, the community’s refusal to admit into public discourse what it knows to be true about itself, is of a piece with its unwillingness to address the familial dysfunction in town. Peyton Place’s commitment to its white mythos is coextensive with its commitment to its domestic mythos. Although we are told that there are no heirs to the Peyton estate, no reason for Peyton’s lack of progeny is offered. We learn only that the state of New Hampshire inherits his property upon his death. Samuel and Violette Peyton’s childlessness sets the stage for subsequent generations of Peyton Place residents for whom reproduction seems to have been hampered . Despite being a product of the 1950s, Peyton Place presents no examples of the iconic white nuclear American family of the decade. Instead , its small-town world offers an unsettling critique of the nuclear family ideal, what Stacey Stanfield Anderson has called “toxic togetherness ,” in which Metalious suggests that neither happiness nor safety nor security is ensured by the structure of the family or the space of the home. Considering Peyton Place within this context, I examine in this chapter the relationship between the racial anxiety motivating the town’s repression of its foundational narrative and a reading of the...

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