Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Abstract

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.

Keywords:

• Peyton Place
• Grace Metalious
• Valley of the Dolls
• Jacqueline Susann
• representations of post-war femininity
• feminism and popular fiction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alison Huber, Peter Otto, Ingrid Horrocks and my colleagues in the English and Creative Arts Writing Group at La Trobe University for their attentive reading of various early versions of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹According to Amy Fine Collins, Valley of the Dolls is registered in The Guinness Book of Records in the 1970s as the bestselling novel of all time (30 million copies sold). ‘She also became, with her next two novels, The Love Machine (1969) and Once Is Not Enough (1973), the first author ever to have three consecutive books catapult to the No. 1 spot on The New York Times's bestseller list’ (Collins 2000). In comparison, Peyton Place had sold 10,070,000 copies by 1975 (Cameron 2002: xxxii), but had become a phenomenon due to the astonishing success of the film and the television series based on the novel.

²In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan describes the ‘strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States’ (Friedan 2010: 5) as the ‘problem that has no name’. Focusing on the plight of the middle-class housewife, Friedan uncovered the dissatisfaction many women felt at their virtual ‘entrapment’ in domestic duties. Friedan was to go on to become a prominent figure in second-wave feminism, co-founding the National Organization for Women in 1966.

³For the definitive account of the function of the panopticon, see Foucault (1991).

⁴First published in Paris in 1959, Anger's book did not receive an authorized release in the United States until 1975, although a ‘bootleg’ edition of the book appeared there in 1965 (Gelder 2004: 130).

⁵The ‘dolls’ of the novel's title are the many prescription and non-prescription pills (stimulants, depressants and sleeping pills) that come to dominate the lives of the three women. Of course, Anne, Neely and Jennifer also become dolls of a sort once they enter the entertainment industry, who are played with by the Hollywood power brokers who control their lives.