Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers

by James W. Hall

  Allison’s mother, Constance, has never fully recovered from her affair with Allison’s father and has sublimated her sexual energy, redirecting it toward raising her daughter and running her dress shop. But she will eventually find release in the arms of the new high school principal, Tomas Makris. Overcoming her sexual inhibitions brings Constance to a moment of discovery that could stand as the final psychological offering of this novel.

  Makris and Constance are in bed together, engaging in some spirited back-and-forth. Constance first:

  “Do it to me then.”

  He raised his head and smiled down into her face. “Do what?” he teased. “Tell me.”

  “You know.”

  “No, tell me. What do you want me to do to you?”

  She looked up at him appealingly.

  “Say it,” he said. “Say it.”

  She whispered the words in his ear and his fingers dug into her shoulders.

  “Like this?”

  “Please,” she said. “Please.” And then, “Yes! Yes, yes, yes.”

  Later she lay with her head on his shoulder and one hand flat against his chest.

  “For the first time in my life I’m not ashamed afterward,” she said.

  What Constance accomplishes in this scene is echoed throughout. Conquering sexual repression. Breaking taboos. Speaking the forbidden words. Shrugging free of puritanical prohibitions. The aspirations of this novel are as American as Hawthorne, as warm and gooey as apple pie. (Her maiden name, after all, is Standish, an echo of Longfellow’s poem about an independent-minded woman being courted by an uncertain fellow named Miles.)

  This novel that shocked the nation and was banned in Boston and railed against from pulpits has a simple and pure-at-heart intention. To heal by revealing, to cure by exposing, to alleviate the pressure we all feel by unzipping the tight girdle of false piety and showing us how families truly operate.

  So from the porch of Peyton Place we peep on our neighbors’ shameful acts and are given a glimpse of the unashamed reality of love. While from the front porch of the Radley house, we look through the eyes of a damaged young man and glimpse his longing and isolation. Two different paths for reaching the same destination: discovering the shared bonds of the human family.

  LEGAL FAMILY

  A solid family life is a requirement for employment at the legal firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. It’s even part of the job interview, one of the first questions Mitch McDeere is tossed.

  “Tell us about your family.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “It’s very important to us, Mitch,” Royce McKnight said warmly.

  They all say that, thought McDeere. “Okay, my father was killed in the coal mines when I was seven years old. My mother remarried and lives in Florida. I had two brothers. Rusty was killed in Vietnam. I have a brother named Ray McDeere.”

  Subject: Mitch McDeere

  Death of a close family member: check, check (and a half check—brother Ray is in prison)

  That criminal brother, Ray, meets with Mitch in the prison visiting room, and how do they use this precious time together? The two of them try to recall better days of their family’s past. Once again we are reminded of the profound effects of fractured families—in this case fractured by madness.

  They paused and studied their fingers. They thought of their mother. Painful thoughts for the most part. There had been happier times, when they were small and their father was alive. She never recovered from his death, and after Rusty was killed the aunts and uncles put her in an institution.

  From the Don to Ramius to Scout to Allison and Mitch, the characters in these stories are struggling, first and foremost, with family issues. And no matter whether the novel is populated by submarines or sharks or mobsters or southern belles, the real focus is on healing the fractures, overcoming the loss, finding a way forward through family tragedies.

  These bestsellers don’t offer one pat answer to this recurring struggle. In some cases, as with Scout and Allison, healing means discovering empathy, or it can involve simply toughing it out in manly silence, as Jack Ryan, Robert Kincaid, and Mitch McDeere choose. Sometimes, for those like the Don and Scarlett and Anne Welles, it means simply saying fiddle-dee-dee and moving ahead ruthlessly into tomorrow.

  FEATURE #12

  The Juicy Parts

  When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.

  —MAE WEST

  In every novel on our list, one key sexual encounter plays a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and in the transformation of the protagonist.

  Sex sells, they say, and of course they’re right.

  Those in the business of quantifying such things have even nailed down the numbers, at least in a general sort of way. In their academic study on those bestselling novels that were published in the period between 1965 and 1985, Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley tabulated that “books about sex are second in frequency [of sales] only to historical novels and are about as frequent as tales of spies and intrigue” (American Bestsellers: A Reader’s Guide to Popular Fiction).

  For the purposes of their study, they defined “books about sex” this way: “The topic—whether an activity, a preoccupation, or a problem—forms a major theme or is described frequently enough to be important to the book … one scene of battle does not make a war novel, and one scene of sex sufficient for an R movie rating does not make a book about sex.”

  Using their classification, only two of the books on our list of twelve megasellers are “about sex.” Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls feature numerous sexual encounters from masturbation to oral sex to lesbian encounters to incest and rape.

  But numbering sexual acts tells us nothing about the role that sex actually plays in shaping the meaning of the novel. As my students and I discovered, in every novel we examined there was a striking repeating pattern: One key sexual encounter, no matter how slight it might have seemed or how euphemistically it was rendered, inevitably played a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and in the transformation of the main character.

  What we also came to see was that sex scenes in bestsellers seem to be at the red-hot center of gender relations. The sweaty realities played out on fictional couches and beds and in the backseats of automobiles more often than not reenact one of America’s most dramatic social movements in the twentieth century, the struggle of women for empowerment, equality, and independence.

  GLORIED IN IT

  After nine hundred pages of enduring Scarlett’s childish fixation on the vapid Ashley Wilkes, Rhett Butler, the dark prince of Gone with the Wind, has had all he can take. Furious after witnessing an intimate encounter between his wife and Ashley, Rhett proceeds to get drunk and sweep Scarlett roughly into his arms. He hauls her up the stairs, and on the landing he kisses her savagely, and as she is about to faint away from his overwhelming passion, she realizes that Rhett is the first man she’s ever met who is stronger than she is, someone she cannot intimidate or control, someone who in fact is intimidating and controlling her.

  During the violent sex that follows, Rhett Butler “humbled her, hurt her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it.”

  Gloried in it?

  Well, yes. Because to Scarlett the quasi rape is evidence that she now has the one thing she craves most of all, control. Decades before the sexual revolution and the gender wars began to consume the American mass media’s attention, Scarlett was experimenting with a feminist vocabulary by casting the sexual dynamics between a man and a woman in the political lingo of power and exploitation.

  Scarlett glories in the thought that now Rhett is at her mercy. She knows the chinks in his armor. She has him exactly where she wants him and now “could make him jump through any hoops she cared to hold.”

  Oddly, the identical phrase appears in a crucial passage in Peyton Place, a postcoital moment after Allison MacKenzie has lost her virginity to Bradley Holmes, an experienced o
lder man. Allison also glories in the mistaken belief that she has gained power over her sexual partner. After a weekend of sex, Allison is a changed woman. She is able to strut naked in front of Brad, feeling his eyes on her body, without experiencing a trace of shame or a flicker of fear, because she “had arched her back, and lifted her heavy hair off her neck, and pressed her breasts against his face, and gloried in his swift reaction to her.”

  Allison and Scarlett will soon discover their celebration of control and power over their lover was premature. For Rhett and Brad, the sexual events that meant so much to Scarlett and Allison were far from life-altering.

  But these sexual episodes are watershed moments for the female characters. In the final pages of these two novels, after the heroines are rejected by the men they thought they controlled, each woman goes on to discover that true empowerment is far harder to achieve than the fleeting dominance they wielded in the bedroom.

  Shortly after her rejection by Rhett, in a rare moment of candid self-appraisal, Scarlett succinctly describes the limitations and immaturities that have characterized her for the thousand preceding pages. Scarlett admits to herself that she never fully understood the two men she’d loved. If she’d truly known Ashley, she wouldn’t have loved him. And if she’d truly understood Rhett, she’d never have lost him. For a moment, she wonders if she’s ever really known anyone.

  With almost any other literary character, this epiphany would stand as the climactic moment in an arc of development—a revelation about self that would propel that character to a new understanding in the final pages. But Scarlett O’Hara is so mired in her habits of mind, this moment of recognition is quickly shunted aside with her standard psychological dodge. Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. She’ll worry about all that tomorrow.

  In Frankly, My Dear, an analysis of both the film and the novel of Gone with the Wind, Molly Haskell argues that beneath her hoop skirts and petticoats, Scarlett is actually a revolutionary character for her era, a woman with some of the features of a modern feminist, “a predator who marries three men she doesn’t love,” “a rotten mother,” and “a successful business woman.”

  Ordinarily, Haskell observes, a female literary character behaving in these “inappropriate” ways would be made to suffer “one or more of the following: sexual and psychological humiliation, a barrage of self-satisfied diatribes and blandishments from the people she’s wounded; death, or, in its stead, an eleventh-hour reversal whereby she repents her wicked ways, is brought back to heel, and is transformed by love into a submissive female.”

  I beg to differ. While it’s true that Scarlett transformed herself in some fashion into a modern woman by becoming an independent business owner who is every bit as savvy, hard-nosed, and cynically aggressive in her financial dealings as any man, at her core she failed to evolve, and we leave her in the last scene pretty much as we found her at the opening, just as silly and man-dependent.

  In this respect, Scarlett is unique among the major female characters on our list of bestsellers. Most of the heroines break with gender stereotypes in a way that’s more in line with modern feminism—they become stronger, more independent, more rigorously self-aware, and less deluded by the fantasies and fairy tales they believed in earlier. In terms of my study, what’s truly striking about these gender transformations is that almost always the radical change of perspective is triggered by a single intense sexual encounter.

  Allison MacKenzie’s first sexual fling ends with the discovery that Brad Holmes, her lover, is married. He deceived her and exploited her innocence. When Allison “gloried in his swift reaction to her,” she was clearly mistaking the rush of blood for something more lasting and real.

  Like her mother before her, Allison flees the arms of her deceitful lover and returns home to Peyton Place. But Allison is from a new, more liberal generation. Unlike Constance, Allison does not allow her disillusionment with one man to fester into suspicion and bitterness toward them all. Instead, her own erotic discoveries help Allison come to peace with the crude sexuality that’s always galled her in the affairs of Peyton Place.

  In a final scene, Allison stands on a hillside with the toylike town spread before her, and in language she might use to address her ex-lover, Brad, she expresses sympathy and forgiveness for Peyton Place. Accepting its meanness, its generosity, its cruelty. Now that she truly knows the town, truly understands the complex emotions at work in its narrow streets, Peyton Place no longer frightens her.

  Her encounter with Brad Holmes makes this final reconciliation with her hometown possible. Wiser in the ways of sex, Allison now sees the behavior she’d once taken as lewd and sordid to be a natural and vital part of the human story. This discovery is crucial in her growth as an independent woman, and it’s essential to her evolution as a fiction writer. For we know Allison MacKenzie now will be able to revise her manuscript with a greater understanding of her subject and create a full and mature portrait of Peyton Place. The tangible result of her journey of sexual discovery is a novel very much like the one we’ve been reading.

  RUTTING

  Sex is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind when considering To Kill a Mockingbird. Most readers would probably label the book as a young adult novel about racial tensions in a small southern town. But the fact is, the novel’s plot as well as Scout’s personal transformation are driven chiefly by a single sexual event.

  Though the encounter between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson is a total fabrication devised by the Ewells, their lie radically changes numerous lives, spawning a lynching attempt, an explosive rape trial, the death of an innocent man, the attempted murder of two children, and the violent death of Robert Ewell. And on the psychological level, that same sexual accusation fuels Scout Finch’s change from an innocent child to a young woman with a more mature understanding of the intimate relations between men and women.

  If eight-year-old Scout at first doesn’t understand what rape is, the courtroom testimony by Bob Ewell and Mayella removes any doubt. Speaking before an overflow crowd that includes the Finch children, Robert Ewell recounts his version of events of a recent November evening when he was bringing a load of firewood home and heard his daughter, Mayella, screaming. He dropped his load and ran to the window of his house and saw Tom Robinson “ruttin’ on my Mayella.”

  As the trial continues, Atticus Finch questions Mayella about the details of the night in question, and Scout is exposed to two additional facts of life most girls her age and class would be shielded from—that daughters can sometimes be the victims of sexual and physical abuse from their fathers and that sexual desire can be driven by needs far more perverse than love.

  Though Scout and the reader can only guess what really happened in the Ewells’ shack that November evening, the novel strongly suggests Mayella made a pass at Tom, a provocative come-on that he was in the process of rejecting when Mayella’s father arrived on the scene.

  Tom ran. And Mayella was beaten by her father for her crime of interracial lust. To cover his shame and vent his anger, Bob Ewell summoned the sheriff and claimed Tom raped his daughter. All this Scout manages to infer from the Ewells’ evasive court testimony.

  Scout’s training in gender politics actually begins long before the trial starts when Miss Maudie, who has been the target of religious zealots, explains to Scout that these “foot-washers think women are a sin by definition.” Scout hears the same sexist message again in a sermon given at a black church when the preacher inveighs against the whole female race as impure and the root of all temptation.

  Like Scarlett O’Hara, Scout is bombarded with messages about proper female behavior. Calpurnia chides her constantly about her tomboy antics. Her own brother, Jem, is increasingly uncomfortable with her gender.

  As much as Scout would like to avoid the whole subject of sex and gender, she can’t. By the end of the novel, the carnal desire Mayella felt for Tom warps into violence that overtakes Scout and her brother in the form of a knife-wielding Bob Ewell.
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  In the scene that follows, Scout meets Boo Radley face-to-face for the first time in a bedroom at the Finches’ house.

  At the moment when Scout and Boo touch, there is something electric, even sensuous, in their exploratory give-and-take and the gentle coaching that passes between them, as if this scene might be the innocent mirror image of the coarse encounter between Mayella and Tom Robinson.

  In a reversal of traditional male and female roles, Scout leads Boo back to his house and drops him at his door. They part wordlessly, like lovers who’ve exhausted the possibilities between them. After this moment Scout will never see Boo again, but she is changed by the encounter, just as Allison is forever altered by her first intimate contact with a man. Both young women are stronger and more independent at the conclusions of their stories, budding feminists who are seemingly on their way to escaping the gender stereotypes that trap the other female characters in these novels.

  WATERSHED SEX

  In The Dead Zone, John Smith and Sarah Bracknell are about to have sex for the first time when fate intervenes. A violent car crash sends Johnny into a coma for four and a half years, and when he wakes, Sarah has moved on. She’s married Walt Hazlett, and the couple has a child. But Sarah’s not over Johnny, and he’s definitely not over her.

  For starters, Sarah can’t help comparing her cynical husband with the good-hearted Johnny, a comparison that undermines her fidelity to Walt.

  In that moment she hated [Walt], loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor—just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket.