Dark Past, White Lies: Reconsidering the Sources of Scandal in Peyton Place

Grace Metalious's Peyton Place is a novel most often read in dog-eared, juicy parts rather than from cover to cover. Though considered scandalous in its own time for its frank treatment of women and sexuality, my talk will discuss the possibility that Metalious's uses of race in the novel -- specifically discourses of whiteness and darkness -- may have had an equal share in unsettling a midcentury American readership.