Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America

5. Picture Windows and Peyton Place: Exposing Normality in Postwar Communities

118 5 Picture Windows and Peyton Place Exposing Normality in Postwar Communities In the 1956 blockbuster novel Peyton Place, the town itself becomes the central character: “Talk, talk, talk,” says the young protagonist Allison MacKenzie, impatiently. “Peyton Place is famous for its talk. Talk about everybody” (350). Peyton Place speaks in voices, it judges, it watches, it keeps track: “From the day Allison was born, [her grandmother] Elizabeth Standish lived with fear. She was afraid that she had not played her part well enough, that sooner or later someone would find out. . . . In her worst nightmares she heard the voices of Peyton Place.”1 Generalized, collectivized , and internalized, the town of Peyton Place forces its residents to “play [their] parts,” and to “live with fear.” In this way, Peyton Place represented the culture of normality that had taken hold in midcentury American communities : practices of surveillance and performance, self-scrutiny and the scrutinizing of others. Both the townsfolk and the town en masse engage in these practices. They were behaviors that the author, Grace Metalious, despised, but they resonated deeply with her readers. Surveillance and performance were central normalizing practices of postwar communities. As the quotations above suggest, surveillance allows for a multidirectional web of discipline, one that becomes most successful when it becomes internalized, when one feels observed whether or not one is in fact being observed. Michel Foucault has described “surveillance ” as a supremely effective disciplining behavior: “The system of surveillance . . . involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to 119 Picture Windows and Peyton Place the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising his surveillance over, and against, himself.”2 “Interiorizing” the gaze leads to a kind of voluntary self-disciplining, but it also leads to another practice, “performance”: a posturing, pretense of self, a projection through the veil of what one suspects others wish to see. This chapter focuses in on two geographies in which these normalizing practices played out: first, the “imagined community” of suburbia, the ground on which one-third of Americans lived by 1960; and second, the imaginary community of Peyton Place, setting for the era’s all-time best seller. While the history of the postwar suburb has been well documented, its demographic and geographic shifts take on new meaning in light of the normalizing practices they fostered. And while Peyton Place is well remembered as a postwar potboiler, few have taken seriously its far-reaching cultural critique of what one reviewer called the “false fronts and bourgeois pretensions” of American life. As Metalious demystified small-town life, critics of the suburbs began to trace what the social critic John Keats would later call the cracks in their picture windows, so that in both suburbia and Peyton Place, the homogenizing practices of “normal” midcentury communities were not just portrayed, they were exposed. Picture Windows: The Culture of Surveillance in Suburbia The collective impulse for a “return to normal” after World War II was met by both a national housing shortage and a continuing baby boom. The GI Bill and FHA loans were designed to remedy the crisis, by promoting and funding homeownership for millions of returning veterans and their families. Suburban “development housing” sprang up nationwide to meet the demand, so that postwar families were effectively offered “community” as a commodity. As John Keats describes them in his satirical 1962 work The Crack in the Picture Window, suburban developments easily recalled the wartime military in their regimentation: “Where there had been one bright sample house rising bravely from a sea of mud, there were now hundreds of houses, just as neat and small as the sampler. Squads and platoons of these little boxes marched in close order beside what seemed to be redclay canals. Each house was surrounded by a patch of bilious sod, and two rusty dwarf cedars struggled for life beside each identical doorstep.”3 This commodity was far from perfect, and it was not offered to all, yet families flocked to suburbia, often “for the children’s sake,” and put down roots.4 The postwar “return to normal” the suburbs helped to embody was, in fact, Chapter Five 120 not a “return” at all. It was the wholesale invention of a community that had never existed. In this way...