{"id":133578,"date":"2019-02-13T11:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T16:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133578"},"modified":"2019-02-13T11:22:11","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T16:22:11","slug":"pandora-in-blue-jeans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/13\/pandora-in-blue-jeans\/","title":{"rendered":"Pandora in Blue Jeans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Grace Metalious. Photo: Larry Smith.<\/p><\/div>\n

The photograph captioned \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d is one of the most widely circulated portraits of a woman in history. Like most people, I first saw it on the back of a pulpy paperback book. A black-and-white fifties author photo that seems like a snapshot, it is a side view of a solidly built young woman in a prehipster buffalo plaid shirt and men\u2019s jeans, sitting at a table with a typewriter on it in what looks like a kitchen. She\u2019s not wearing makeup, her hair is pulled back in a lumpy ponytail, and she\u2019s leaning forward with her hands folded anxiously or pensively in front of her face, so we can\u2019t really see what she looks like. There\u2019s a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray next to her typewriter and a messy stack of papers behind it. She is staring at what she\u2019s writing, and she seems not to know or care that the photographer is there.<\/p>\n

Some author photos develop a life of their own, and those are often the ones that bend a gender or pose a challenge. Perhaps the first of these was the engraved daguerreotype of Walt Whitman from the 1855 edition of\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em>. The book didn\u2019t disclose Whitman\u2019s name on the title page, but it included his full-page frontispiece portrait as a personal welcome, his shirt unbuttoned and his undershirt showing, a hand on his hip, a hand in his pocket, his gaze direct, his head cocked. \u201cI look so damned flamboyant,\u201d he later said about this image, \u201cas if I was hurling bolts at somebody\u2014full of mad oaths\u2014saying defiantly, to hell with you!\u201d Flamboyant, yes, without a doubt, but the direction of the defiance is harder to read. Is he really saying to hell with us, or is he defying us to look away? Does he want his lightning bolt to fatally pierce us, or does he just want to electrify us?<\/p>\n

For his authorial debut almost a hundred years later, on the dust jacket of the 1947 first edition of Other Voices, Other Rooms<\/em>, Truman Capote went Whitman one better by draping himself on his back on a couch, one hand on his stomach and one on his crotch, and looking up at the viewer with a knowing gaze. Hilton Als reads this author photograph as both a metamorphosis and an expression of desire. The image turned Capote into \u201can American woman of style,\u201d Als writes in White Girls<\/em>, and \u201cthe woman he became in this photograph\u2014itself better written than Other Voices, Other Rooms<\/em>\u2014wanted to be fucked by you and by any idea of femininity that had fucked you up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The woman at the kitchen table in \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d has undoubtedly been fucked up by femininity, as all women have, but she does not appear to want to be fucked by it or by us. Indeed, she doesn\u2019t seem to want anything from us at all. If Capote\u2019s photo is famously seductive and come-hither, \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d is famously unsexy, telling us to go away. Circulating on the back of one of the most sexual and successful books of the decade, Grace Metalious\u2019s scandalous 1956 mega\u2013best seller Peyton Place<\/em>, \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d represents a white girl\u2019s rejection of white-girl conventions, an unprecedented opting out of mainstream commercial feminine iconography that still managed to be wildly popular (if rarely imitated) and made an unlikely icon of a woman whose life seemed to consist of unglamorous obliviousness, unremarkable domesticity, and totally depraved thoughts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an icon that doesn\u2019t quite fit with Als\u2019s compelling account of gender and author photos at midcentury, which focuses on a higher class of author. In contextualizing Capote\u2019s pose, Als tells the story of ambitious literary women performing a certain kind of anxious drag in order to be taken seriously: \u201cIn 1947, women did not publish books. So determined to be authors were they\u2014Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, Marguerite Young, say\u2014that they buttoned themselves up on dust jackets in some Hemingway-influenced image of a male American author.\u201d This gendered story of authorial aspiration might explain Capote\u2019s self-presentation\u2014Als suggests that as a man he ironically had more room to be womanly\u2014but it hardly explains that of Grace Metalious. She was aspiring to a very different kind of authorship than Stafford\u2019s, McCullers\u2019s, or Young\u2019s\u2014less glossy New Yorker<\/em>, more high-acid pulp paperback\u2014and her homely mise-en-sc\u00e8ne of cheerful curtains and pleasant potted plants is worlds away from Hemingway.<\/p>\n

Still, the woman in \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d is bending a gender and posing a challenge. But what is her angle, and what is her challenge?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn her blue jeans, sneakers, and flannel shirt,\u201d Ardis Cameron claims in Unbuttoning America: A Biography of \u201cPeyton Place<\/em>,\u201d<\/em> \u201cMetalious offered women a sartorial counterpart to the antiestablishment Beats.\u201d Cameron is right that Metalious\u2019s clothes overlapped with the Beats\u2019 (and, like theirs, prefigured grunge), but this account of what the image offered doesn\u2019t seem exactly right either. Like Jack Kerouac, Metalious was a Franco-American from a New England mill town whose literary persona depended on an outsider status. But her style seems less a woman\u2019s answer to the countercultural clothes of the self-consciously subversive male Beats, who bought their working-class castoffs in thrift stores on road trips, and more a reflection of what ordinary housewives actually wore\u2014at least the ones who weren\u2019t wearing pearls while vacuuming, as in Madison Avenue fantasies. In the fifties, blue jeans could reference Kerouac, James Dean, or Marilyn Monroe, but in this photograph they are something utterly uncinematic: the unfraught, unstudied, everyday drag of borrowing your husband\u2019s worn-in work clothes without bothering to ask, thus giving a literal meaning to the phrase \u201ceffortless style.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Cameron is alert to the image\u2019s countercultural undertones, she sees the primary appeal of the picture as the friction between Metalious\u2019s status as a humdrum wife and mother and her fiction\u2019s salacious focus on the abuse, abortion, incest, and murder thriving within quaint New England villages. Clearly that is a part of it. But I think what \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d offers women is something even more subversive than overt rebellion or explicit sex, or the frisson of a PTA mom who writes in the language of \u201ca bellicose longshoreman,\u201d to quote from a contemporary review. Instead, \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d illustrates the shocking combination of utter apathy and utter focus. This woman doesn\u2019t give a fuck about us and the kitchen, her husband and children are nowhere in sight, but she is riveted, thunderbolted to the chair, by the vision of her own words on the page. She is not herself an object of desire, but she has one, and she gazes at it steadily, seduced by the sight of her book in progress.<\/p>\n

The picture is perverse in its refusal to perform for the viewer\u2019s expectations, not just because \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d is an ordinary housewife who wrote dirty books, but because she is an unkempt woman who doesn\u2019t seem to care what we think of her, and who cares intensely about something else. What could be more disturbing, after all, than the possibility that unremarkable, unenviable, uninviting women might have searing stories burning inside them? Maybe only the possibility that a woman might not need to try to please us; that she might not ever choose to look up from her page.<\/p>\n

Almost immediately, pulp fan fiction began to be written in response to this unsettling new author persona and the threat it posed. One notable novel inspired by Metalious\u2019s life and image was The Girl on the Best Seller List<\/em>, by Vin Packer, published four years after Peyton Place<\/em>, which told the story of a small-town housewife who wrote an unexpected and lurid best seller. (Packer was the pseudonym of Patricia Highsmith\u2019s girlfriend Marijane Meaker. Highsmith wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em> and The Price of Salt<\/em>, which was recently adapted for the screen as Carol<\/em>, and Meaker wrote groundbreaking young adult fiction and lesbian pulp in addition to whodunits like The Girl on the Best Seller List<\/em>.) In a pinup-style riff on \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d for the cover of Packer\u2019s book, the illustrator tried to pretty Pandora back up, putting her on a diet, shrinking and cropping her jeans, unbuttoning her plaid shirt and tying it tight above the waist, and sliding some\u00a0bracelets over her bare wrist. This made-over authoress ignores her typewriter and looks straight at the viewer, holding a pencil close to her parted lips and languidly stretching her other arm over the back of the chair so her body is open to us. It\u2019s an infinitely sexier image, but it looks like a million pictures we\u2019ve seen before.<\/p>\n

In Packer\u2019s book, the Metalious character, renamed Gloria, is universally loathed, and (spoiler alert!) has possibly been poisoned by her agent, who finds her exceedingly difficult to edit. (\u201cI remember how hard it was to get Gloria to make a change,\u201d he muses somewhat menacingly to a new client.) Meanwhile the real-life Metalious struggled to reconcile the roles of \u201cbland housewife,\u201d as she was dismissively labeled, and best-selling superstar. What made it especially hard for her is that she was never actually able to be the woman in the picture, self-sufficiently sitting at her typewriter. Her writing life was troubled from the start.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the long year of editorial revisions,\u201d Cameron writes, \u201cGrace turned into a difficult author, insecure, needy, and emotionally unstable.\u201d After the book came out she had an affair with a DJ, divorced her husband, broke up with the DJ, remarried her husband, and squandered a staggering amount of cash. She was Grace Metalious, not Pandora, and she wanted sex, liquor, love, and money, not just writing and more writing and yet more writing. In the end, she dissolved in alcohol, disintegrating like the picture of Dorian Gray, and dying at thirty-nine, only seven years older than her most famous portrait.<\/p>\n

It would be nice if immersive work were a way to experience the drive of desire without its difficulty, and if writing were a way to escape the demand to be vulnerable, available, and easy to love. But unfortunately it\u2019s apparently impossible to stare into typewritten sentences forever and keep the world at bay. Still, for me this photograph offers an image of existence that\u2019s every bit as thrilling as lounging suggestively on chaises longues, or hurling thunderbolts, or buttoning up your shirt and channeling Hemingway, or unbuttoning your shirt and slowly lifting a phallic pencil to your parted lips. Peyton Place<\/em> is an American cult classic that sold twelve million copies and is finding new life as a feminist text, but \u201cPandora in Blue Jeans\u201d is the part of the Metalious legacy I prize the most: a rare iconic image of a woman dressed to unimpress, oblivious to viewers\u2019 expectations, deep in her work, absorbed in a world of her own making.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Briallen Hopper\u00a0has written about books, pop culture, religion, politics, friends, family, and herself for the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>New York m<\/em>agazine, <\/em>The Cut, <\/em>The New Republic, <\/em>The New Inquiry, and <\/em>Avidly, among other publications. Her essays have been recommend by the <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>The Rumpus, <\/em>Flavorwire, <\/em>Longreads, and others. Hopper grew up in Tacoma, got a Ph.D. in American literature from Princeton, and attended divinity school and taught writing at Yale. She is now an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY<\/small>. She lives in New York City.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions<\/a>, by Briallen Hopper, with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing. \u00a9 Briallen Hopper, 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What can an author photo tell 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