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Cameron Brings New Honor to USM

USM’s first Guggenheim Fellowship has been awarded to Ardis Cameron, director and associate professor of American and New England Studies. She also has received a prestigious senior research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Both grants support her study of the popular 1950s book, “Peyton Place.” She had already decided to use the NEH award of $35,000 to take a year off from the university, August 2001 to August 2002, to advance her research on “Peyton Place” when she learned of her success with the Guggenheim Fellowship. This may allow her additional time off from teaching and departmental responsibilities; the Guggenheim appointments are ordinarily made for one year.

The combined awards will enable her to write a book-length manuscript, she says, that “explores ‘Peyton Place’ as a major social and cultural artifact of America in the last half of the twentieth century.”

Though immensely successful at the time, the book and author Grace Metalious have faded from memory and have not attracted scholarly attention, even from feminist scholars, according to Cameron. But, she says, it not only established a benchmark in publishing history, but remains in the public consciousness for its sexual frankness. Her study, “’In Search of ‘Peyton Place’” will place the book in its historical context and follow it through its career as it was published and marketed and adapted for other media.

Cameron published an essay on the book as an introduction to a new edition published by Northeastern Press in 1999. Cameron had convinced Northeastern University Press in Boston to publish a new edition of the book, which she used in her course, "Creating New England,” but which had gone out of print (see Currents, April/May 1999). In that introduction, she argued that the book helped create the "modern reading public."

Cameron makes the point in her NEH proposal that despite the book’s success at the time it was published, a time that is considered to be an era of sexual repression, “social conformity and domestic conventionality,” it has remained “curiously unexamined” by literature scholars, feminist historians and cultural critics. “Peyton Place” was a best seller and its working-class author Grace Metalious “the most talked about woman in America,” according to a Life Magazine article of the time.
In addition to delineating the book’s impact on American culture, her research plan also seeks to follow, in Cameron’s words, the book’s “publishing history --its acceptance by a firm headed by a woman, its gendered marketing strategies, its censorship, its careful packaging of Metalious” to explore the book’s role in “helping to define a new mass market and a new literary genre of ‘women’s ‘ books....”

Cameron also suggests that the book had a place in contemporary sexual politics. “By unbuttoning New England,” she writes, Metalious “hoped to expose as well the national hypocrisies that made abortion unlawful, incest a silent problem, and female sexual autonomy a sign of gender deviancy.”

Cameron herself read the book for the first time in 1990 to prepare for a class she’d be teaching. She found from older students that Peyton Place had had an impact on their lives, “Everyone had a story about “Peyton Place.... All could vividly recall scenes from the book as well as from their own experiences as covert readers.”

Cameron’s Guggenheim award, unique in USM’s history, is one of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships to Assist Research and Artistic Creation. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to their son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers fellowships to further the development of scholars and artist. The fellowships are open to advanced professionals, “men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” in all fields (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, creative arts) except the performing arts.
Last year, 2000, the Foundation awarded 182 United States and Canadian Fellowships for a total of $6,345,000; the average amount of a Fellowship grant in 2000 was $34,884. There were 2,927 applicants. The Foundation also made 33 awards last year in the Latin America and Caribbean competition for a total of $1,155,000.

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