Introduction
I began writing this thesis during the three months period that I spent in Elmsford, a wealthy
suburban area just near White Plains, New York. I had read Revolutionary Road two years before,
after having watched the movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio in the roles of April
and Frank Wheeler,and I had been impressed by the elegant lucidity of Richard Yates 's prose, by
the accurate description of the characters' psychological traits, and by the modernity of the plot.
Elmsford is a suburban area that rises in the middle of the woods, with beautiful gardens,
beautiful houses, beautiful cars in front of beautiful front-doors, just like Revolutionary Hill, the
suburb where Yates set his novel, was pictured in my mind. But it didn't seem real to me. The
general impression was that of a huge void hidden behind those doors and that apparent calm.
Nowadays things are pretty different from 1955 but, while I was there, I couldn't help myself
wandering how could have been life for women in those times, when they had to spend their days
at home, cooking dinner for their husbands and children, just waiting for something to happen.
Richard Yates has been one of the best recorder of those desperate lives.
Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926, Yates comes from a very unstable family. His parents
divorced when he was three years old, therefore he changed many towns and residences during his
childhood. This sense of instability will always be present in his novels and tales
.
. He joined the
Army during World War II, serving in France and Germany, and then returned to New York in
1946, where he worked as a journalist, then as ghost writer and publicity writer. He also wrote
writing speeches for attorney Robert Kennedy. He began his career as a novelist in 1961, when he
published Revolutionary Road. He taught creative writing in several universities, such as the
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Columbia University of New York, the New School for Social Research, the Boston University and
many others. In 1962 he also wrote a screenplay for a film adaptation of William Styron's Lie Down
in Darkness. Yates didn't have a happy family life. He was an alcoholic and divorced twice. From
his marriages he had three daughters, but he died alone and in poverty in 1992 of emphysema, in
Birmingham, Alabama
1
.
Revolutionary Road has been, as I previously said, his most successful novel, but it has
been acclaimed only in the literary world of writers and academics, while the public did not seem to
notice or give importance to it, considering the plot too depressing, too gray and realistic for the
golden America of the sixties. It is for this reason that Yates has always been considered a “writer's
writer” (Shinagel 50).
The life of April and Frank Wheeler is the prototype of all the American families who lived
in the bourgeois suburbs of New York during the fifties of great consumerism, baby boom and anti-
communism. Yates dealt with normal life and average characters that are “neither heroes, nor anti-
heroes; in a sense, they're unremarkable” (3), as Stewart O'Nan wrote in his essay “ The Lost World
of Richard Yates”. They move from innocence to disillusion in a very paralyzed way, so that all
their dreams of glory – as that portrayed by the amateur company “ The Laurel Players”at the
beginning of the novel – are actually nullified by their inability to act.
Revolutionary Road is a novel about failure, a theme that stays at the basis of the American
culture, as well as that of the dream of success
2
. Yates said:
Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity over this country, by no means only in the
suburbs – a kind of blind, desperate clinging safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the
Eisenhower administration and the McCarthy witch hunts […] I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary
road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.(qtd. in Wood 2)
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Time is a very meaningful aspect of the novel. The present time of April and Frank, that is
1955, is constantly trying to find a balance between past and future. The past is personified by the
parents of the two protagonists, while the future stays both in their children, Jennifer and Michael,
and in the dream of a new life in Paris. April and Frank have been damaged up by difficult
relationships with their parents,so they are not able to give strong values to their children. April has
been abandoned by her parents when she was very young, and the only memories of them are not
based on reality, but on the stereotyped fascinating images of the flapper and the playboy of the
roaring twenties. As Anthony Giardina wrote: “ the Lost Generation instilled in the sons of the
fifties the dream of escape”(2). I would add that it also instilled in them a deep sense of loss, frailty
and inadequacy.
Talking about Frank, we have to say that his sense of failure is much deep and desperate
than that of April. While she has a lot of fixed illusions against which to measure reality, Frank has
none. He's constantly looking for a self that doesn't exist. To him, the image of the past is embodied
by his father, who is described mostly through metonymies, as if each part of him could make Frank
feel smaller and weaker. He can't consider himself like a real man, but he actually reaches the point
on the social ladder that his father hadn't been able to reach.
“ The mid-century American suburban man is so maddening because he is both a rank escapist
and a conservative pragmatist, divided between the dream of escape and the dream of
stability”(Wood 2). Moreover, the traumatic relationships of April and Frank with their parents
could also be considered like a symbolical device to suggest the theme of America as a fatherless
society that had built everything on the idea of the family
3
.
But the families described in Revolutionary Road are all problematic, incomplete or totally
ruined. The Wheelers are simply not interested in their children, they see them as an annoying part
of their life,they don't feel any kind of responsibility in regard to them. The Campbells too have
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based their family life on a bunch of lies: Shep pretends to love his wife and children and Milly
pretends to be happy while her four kids spend most of their time watching television. Also the rosy
life of Helen Givings is hunted by the specter of failure, as her son John has been hospitalized for
schizophrenia and her husband simply pretends to listen to her and care for her.
Yates says out loud that the American family is a complete failure, and that there are no
possible ways out. The only positive exceptions to this suffocating reality are the children. They are
portrayed as victims of all their parents' neurosis, and the only bearers of some kind of truth
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. While
the idea of a life in Paris is just a pipe dream for April and Frank, their kids are the real future. The
greatest failure for them as woman and man is not being aware of that. The generation Michael and
Jennifer belong to will be the one which , in the late '60s, will carry new values and energies to
America.
Another question that is put into light in Revolutionary Road is certainly that of gender,
especially the weakness of the mid-century American masculinity. The virility of Frank is
constantly attacked by the new power of April, and the abortion can be seen as the strongest of
these attacks, because through it April takes away from her husband the right to be a father and to
carry on his offspring.
The fifties have seen the rise of feminism,and the change of the roles in the family. The
typical American mono-nuclear family of the fifties can be easily described in this way: a pragmatic
husband that goes to work everyday in the city in his fedora, who drinks and smokes too much and
who often has an extra-marital affair with his secretary; an unsatisfied wife who spends her time
cleaning, ironing, cooking, taking care of the children and waiting for her husband to come home in
her lipstick, perfect dress and high heels;a little garden with a white fence, a car in front of the
garage, a prefabricated house.
The woman was the perfect image of femininity, maternity and submission, but something
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changed during World War II: women were called to replace their men while they were fighting on
the European soil, and this experience gave to the female population a new sense of independence
and self reliance that could not be simply nullified when things returned to normality. Moreover, the
war gave to the men of this generation a general sense of inadequacy.
Yates underlines the brand new role that April has in the family: she has actually taken the
place of Frank, as he very well describes in the third chapter of the novel: “ It was April herself,
stolidly pushing and hauling the old machine, wearing a man's shirt and a pair of loose, flapping
slacks, while both children romped behind her with handful of cut grass” ( Yates 36). Again, in the
very first quarrel of the couple, April says to Frank:
'Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded – Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch – ' she
tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight 'by any stretch of the imagination
you can call yourself a man!' ( Yates 29).
The contradiction between the role that April wants to have in her family and the one
which she actually has in it, stays at the basis of her deep crisis. April is very rational when she
says to Shep, after having had sex with him: “ It's not that. Honestly. It's just that I don't know who
you are. […] An even if I did, I'm afraid it wouldn't help, because you see I don't know who I am,
either.” (Yates 276).
This admission makes clear that, if April knows what she wants and can find the courage to
fight for it – even if this courage will bring her to death – Frank does not. His discourses about the
cultural death of America, the stifling sentimentalism and the desperate void of people's lives could
make him seem a brilliant observer of the situation of his time, but he is actually the blindest of all
characters, because he doesn't understand that he is actually part of this world, or he understands it,
but he negates this reality. Frank is the desperate void. He uses words and manners to fill up the
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evenings with the Campbells, but there is no truth in them, they are only parts of the play that he's
constantly setting up.
The world of the theater is strongly present in the novel, and more in general the world of
appearance. The power of images increased enormously during the fifties, thanks to cinema,
television and most of all advertisement. Yates frequently uses the theater language to describe his
characters, in order to underline the fact that they are playing a role. It is not a case that the novel
begins with a theatrical scene, and that the name of April's company is “ The Laurel Players”: all
the characters are constantly looking for personal glory, they want to be fashionable and interesting
and fabulous like stars of the cinema.
The greatest tragedy of April and Frank's life is that they live in a dream that cannot survive
under the heavy burden of reality. The contradiction between high hopes and reality gives life to a
kind of schizophrenia, that is possible to notice in April, but most of all in John Givings. Yates
shows the delicate problem of the psychological treatment of women: Frank proposes to April to
see a psychiatrist because she doesn't want to have another baby, saying that this thought is
probably linked to her traumatic childhood, and that abortion is against the inner nature of women.
He speaks about Freud without really knowing much about him, so the feeling that he ultimately
expresses through his speech is fear. Fear of loosing control over his family, and most of all of
loosing any possibility of being considered a man. Revolutionary Road's overwhelming theme is, I
would say, the total absence of communication between man and woman. April and Frank don't
really know or understand each other, as well as Helen Givings is almost never listened to by her
husband. There are no real relationships among the characters, everyone is basically alone.
Yeats 's point of view on his time was quite depressing and pessimistic, but he surely gave
to his readers a complete and smart critique of the fabulous fifties, underlying all the black aspects
that America didn't like to show to the rest of the world, and neither to itself. Revolutionary Road
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becomes, in this way, a novel that talks about general issues through the description of the everyday
life of the suburbs. It acquires a universal meaning, and this is the element that made it so strong
and valuable.
Starting from a general portrait of the historical context in which the novel is set, I will then
analyze all the issues that I have presented in this introduction through a more literary approach. It
could also be interesting to see how far into Realism Yates has gone, and if the genre of this novel
has effectively to be considered Realism, or not. I will also try to analyze the cinematographic
version of Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes, because I think that it offers an interesting
point of view on Yates 's novel and on the ways in which it is possible to translate literature into
cinema.
Tennessee Williams said about this novel: “ Here is more than fine writing; here is what,
added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is
needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is.”
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The aim of this thesis is to find what is the element that made Revolutionary Road such a
literary masterpiece and, if possible, to give it the consideration that it deserves.
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The Fifties: Historical Context of the “Age of Anxiety”
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
1.1 Social Changes
Before 1950, the United States had lived nearly 20 years of economic stagnation, caused by
the Depression and WWII. Lifestyles had been circumscribed and social changes were made in
response to the difficult conditions of the past years. When the war ended, and the veterans
returned, America was finally ready to enjoy life.
When all these soldiers returned home to their sweethearts and started families there was a
huge housing crisis in America, because no new houses had been built in 20 years or so. The cities
were crowded, there were no apartments left, so many families were forced to move on the edges of
towns, marking the very beginning of Suburbia as we know it nowadays
6
.
Thanks to the job boom and cheap mortgages for the veterans, by 1960 there were over 10
million new homeowners in America (Edey 156). William Levitt was the first of many suburban
pioneers to come; he constructed Levittown on Long Island using the idea of mass production
techniques in construction, in order to build houses in a faster and cheaper way. This is the reason
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why the suburbs spread so quickly during the fifties. In 1950 there were 1.396 million new houses
in the United States (Edey 156).
But the suburbs were not only a structural reality of the American towns; they were a social
and cultural expression of the people's need for a community sense. They were attractive because
they offered many possibilities to the brand new nuclear families, they were close to job
opportunities, not crowded, they had beautiful houses with real gardens in front of them and, most
of all, they were inhabited by the white part of the American population, because the immigrants
and the African Americans could not afford the prices of the houses
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.
The population of the suburbs created, moreover, branches of nation institutions – such as
the Little League, the Girl Scouts, the PTA – and many occasions of meeting at neighborly
barbecues
and cocktail parties. In fact, hotdog production rose from 750 million lbs in 1950 to 1050 million
lbs by 1960 (Edey 163). Being part of a suburban community was seen as a sign of social
acceptance and social climbing.
The suburbs also benefited the automobile business – during 1950s General Motors
produced roughly 8 million new cars per year – (Edey 158), and the car became a real status
symbol. Stores began to grow around the suburbs in groups, the so-called shopping centers ( or
malls), with huge parking lots in front of them. This was the first real sign of the rise of mass
consumerism
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.
In the post-war years, with families settling down and making lives for themselves, there
was a population explosion. In 1950, there were 24.3 million children between the ages of 5 and 14,
and by 1960, there were 35.5 million (Edey 167). The dramatic increase, commonly known as the
baby boom, had ramifications throughout the country, some good, some bad. Family life in the
1950’s was focused on the children, and on giving them the best possibilities. Schools had to be
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