Revolutionary Road Sparknotes

Misery Loves Company

Lights! Camera! Action! In the novel, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates’s suburbia transforms into a stage. The stars of Yates novel, April and Frank Wheeler, scrupulously write their own scripts, imagining grand yet nebulous roles for themselves. An unexpected pregnancy casts them in unsuitable and undesired roles, while those they wrote remain etched in their minds. The Wheelers move to the suburbs, driven by the deluded belief they will maintain their individuality behind the façade. The curtains rise and the grand performance begins, unveiling suburbia as it is, full of characters putting on failed performances. As time drifts by, the Wheelers find that they do not fit the grand roles they have written for themselves.

The culprit of the Wheelers miseries is the mask they wear, the act they put on for the public and for themselves –their denial.
The novel opens with a literal play, the Petrified Forest, a community theater performance starring April Wheeler. The play begins optimistically, as viewers grasp for some cultural variety within their rather simple lives. At first, April draws appreciation from the crowds, but quickly falters as an array of errors are made by fellow actors. Yates describes her sub-par performance, “She had begun to alternate between false theatrical gestures and a white-knuckled immobility” (9), as her acting quickly becomes forced and unbelievable to the audience. Despite graduating from one of the top acting schools in NYC, April fails to play her role both on stage and at home. She is left without an identity, neither suitable as an actress nor as a mother. April does occasionally transform into the perfect housewife, but it is nothing more than mere game of dress-up which quickly ends. In celebration for her husband’s birthday “(April) was wearing her black cocktail dress, ballet slippers, and a very small apron of crisp white gauze that he’d never seen before” (107). She speaks in an animated high pitched voice, serves Frank, and professes her love. Her performance is almost believable to readers, but Frank instantly comments on her action as having “quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity, a way of seeming to speak less to him than to some romantic abstraction” (108). April plays an obedient and submissive housewife, hoping that a convincing performance will fix her marriage. Despite her best efforts, April is unable to perform either role genuinely because it is against her very nature, one that is stubborn and unconformable to societal standards.
When actors cannot play their roles genuinely, the play falls apart.

The Laurel Players bow, the viewers pitifully clap, the curtains are closed, and so the play comes to an end –but the acting goes on. Helen Givings praises the performance over and over like a broken record player. Humiliated actors assure themselves that it was a good experience nonetheless. Most upset by this unforeseeable turn of events, is Frank Wheeler, who is humiliated to his core. He hoped to win appreciation from his friends and neighbors, vicariously through his wife’s successful performance. Now, rather than taking on a demeanor of congratulations as he previously intended, Frank is forced to think of a new set of phrases and facial expressions to create a persona that can effectively comfort his wife. There is no consoling April, for whom the show offered an opportunity to channel her aspiration as an actress, and decisively destroyed. The production in itself and the reactions that follow foreshadow the very tragedy that will unfold for the Wheelers. Their true identities come to light with every failed performance. To their own bewilderment, they reveal identities that do not fall in line with the extraordinary ones they imagined for

themselves.
In abjuration of their apparent mediocrity, the Wheelers convince themselves that they are superior to their suburbanite counterparts –as they are not suburbanites, but simply intellectuals residing in suburbia. They presumptuously believe that they will escape the conformity to which their neighbors and friends have fallen victim to. Still worse, April and Frank optimistically lead on readers to anticipate their escape from suburban fate, only to deceive them. Readers find themselves stuck in suburban mediocracy along with April and Frank, page after page filled with nauseating discussions of “hopeless emptiness”(200).
Frank Wheeler is the loudest to voice his disillusionment, persistently complaining to anyone who will listen.

The most frequent target of his grievances is his work at Knox Business Machines, “The only reason I’m here in this halfassed job is because—well, I suppose there’s a lot of reasons, but here’s the point. If I started making a list of all the reasons, the one reason I damn sure couldn’t put down is that I like it, because I don’t” (179). During this discussion with his coworkers, Frank is unable to justify why he continues to work at a job he makes out to despise so much –because he doesn’t. In fact, he finds a peculiar comfort in his daily routine. From his morning train rides into the city, to meaningless conversations with his coworkers, to the seemingly mundane work he does, Frank wholeheartedly enjoys it. Yet, he is repelled by the mediocrity it symbolizes. Thus, Frank puts on a mask of complaints and pseudo intellectual phrases to conceal his

happiness.
Frank denies himself the happiness he finds in an ordinary life, instead pursuing an extraordinary identity he does not want and cannot attain. This pursuit does not simply stem from Frank’s fear of being average, but rather of his fear of being average like his father. Frank receives the extraordinary start he desires, “WWII takes him on an exhilarating tour of Europe” and afterwards he studies at Columbia University. After graduation, rather than taking a mundane job like his father, he sets off to find himself. Looking to the future with optimism Frank prompts, “Weren’t the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful groping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their fathers’ ways?” (23). Frank imagines going into the humanities, living in Europe, doing anything as long as it is exceptional, seeing himself as, “an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.” Frank continues searching for himself, he marries, and he has children. He moves to the suburbs and takes an office job at Knox, the same company where his father worked. Finally with direction and purpose, Frank has the satisfaction of being his family’s breadwinner. And so, Frank finds his calling, in the unlikeliest of places –as a suburban father with an ordinary office job. He is torn; Frank cannot allow himself to live his father’s life, even if it is one that suits him.
The unhappy couple scapegoats the suburbs for their boredom, their utmost act of denial. They convince themselves that their unhappiness is directly linked to the environment in which they reside. It is a human susceptibility to believe that it’s always better somewhere else; and one that April naively falls for with her plan of moving to Paris. For April it’s a way to escape the constricted lifestyle she faces in 1950s America. She would have the opportunity to liberate herself from the shackles of her home, and become a working woman. However, the allure of a bohemian life and a plethora of culture that once seduced Frank are no longer of interest. He fears that the move will emasculate him when he loses his title of breadwinner. The couple’s discords are rooted in their personalities, abundant with insecurities, not in their place of residence. Regardless of where the Wheelers move, their troubles will come with them. Thus, by blaming the suburbs for their misery, the Wheelers blind themselves from the truth and render themselves incapable of bettering their situation.
The couple’s misery cannot be blamed on suburbia, but rather on themselves. April and Frank dream up unrealistic expectations for their futures, that are foreseeably destroyed by reality. Too cowardly to except their rather ordinary identities, they embark on a path of self-destruction through play-acting. They put on an act for the public, and worst of all, for themselves, blurring the lines between their true identities and their aspirations. Through incessant denial of the true causes of their suffering, the Wheelers are left in a state of paralysis, creating their own hellish existence.