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Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com Revolutionary Road KEY FACTS INTR INTRODUCTION ODUCTION Full Title: Revolutionary Road BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD YATES When Written: 1955-1960 Richard Yates was the child of an unhappy marriage. His Where Written: Mahopac, New York parents were divorced by the time he was three. After the When Published: 1961 divorce, his mother moved to Paris to study sculpture. Yates flourished as a writer in high school, but had a difficult Literary Period: Contemporary Realism experience in the army, which he joined at age eighteen, during Genre: Novel the last year of the war. Yates volunteered for a dangerous Setting: Western Connecticut, New York City mission and permanently damaged his lungs. He did not go to Climax: Frank discovers a rubber syringe in the linen closet college, feeling that a writer didn’t need a traditional education, and confronts April, who declares that he cannot stop her a decision he would always regret. He married, had two from inducing an abortion. children, moved to Paris for a period, and divorced. Yates was Point of View: The novel has a third-person limited point of an alcoholic and a badly behaved drunk. After his divorce, he view which shifts from character to character. The bulk of lived in awful squalor, spending his time drinking, sobering up, the novel is told from the perspectives of Frank, Shep, and and writing. His lung troubles caused him to start every Helen, while April’s point of view is only given in a single morning by vomiting, but he remained a four-pack-a-day chapter near the novel’s end. smoker until a year before his death at sixty-six, despite once setting his apartment on fire. Yates wrote six other novels and EXTRA CREDIT two collections of short stories. Although his writing was Stage, Fil, Radio, TV, and Print. The Petrified Forest, the play put always praised by other writers, he never became a true on by The Laurel Players, was produced on stage, for radio, and success during his lifetime and supported himself at various as a film in the 1930s. It was also remade as a television movie times by teaching writing (although he did not believe it could in May of 1955. Revolutionary Road’s plot echoes the plot of The be taught), writing publicity materials for Remington Rand (a Petrified Forest, which is about a girl who dreams of escaping her company similar to Knox Business Machines), and writing dull life to a more artistic existence in France. speeches for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The Age of the Institution. 1955, the year during which the HISTORICAL CONTEXT action of the novel takes place, happens to have been the year The Wheelers’ generation grew up during The Great during which patients in American mental institutions peaked Depression, entered adulthood during the Second World War, at 560,000 people. Between 1955 and 1961, a federal and started families of their own during the 1950s, a time of committee studied what could be done to reduce the number unprecedented economic growth in America. The period was of people locked up in in state facilities like Green Acres, where characterized by expanded opportunities and rapid John Givings is being kept. technological innovation, but also widespread social conservatism. After the economic and social upheaval of the 1930s and 1940s, American society glorified the pursuit of PL PLO OT SUMMARY peaceful domesticity and had less tolerance for individuals who wanted to go their own way. The novel begins in western Connectictut, with an unsuccessful first performance by an amateur theater company, The Laurel Players. The lead actress, April Wheeler, begins with a strong RELATED LITERARY WORKS performance but eventually becomes embarrassed and stilted Yates saw F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The GrGreat eat Gatsby and Charles once it’s clear that the show is a flop. At the play’s end, her Flaubert’s Madame BovBovary ary as his novel’s models. He especially husband, Frank Wheeler, goes to console her, but instead they sought to emulate Flaubert’s unsentimental portrayal of Emma argue over whether to go out for cocktails with their friends Bovary and his use of telling details. Yates was an outspoken Shep and Milly Campbell. After a screaming match on the side critic of the “postrealist” or Postmodern movement in of the highway, Frank punches the roof of the car, injuring his literature, but he was a friend and admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. hand. April sleeps on the couch and Frank sits up drinking. The next day, with a horrible hangover and with April refusing ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 1  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com to speak to him, Frank sets himself to work on a stone path he is comes over to the Wheelers’ and asks them if they would they building in the yard. He struggles with the work as his children, be willing to meet her son John. She is mortified to see from Michael and Jennifer, watch. Frank remembers his own father their expressions that they have heard about John’s Earl’s disappointment in his seeming lack of aptitude for this hospitalization, but the Wheelers quickly agree to meet John. kind of practical labor. Frank mistakes the root of a tree for When they tell Helen of their plan to move to Paris, she is Michael’s foot carelessly stuck into the hole where he is disappointed because she had hoped that they could become digging, and Frank then spanks his son, shocking both children. long-term friends for John. The next evening, Shep and Milly Campbell come over to the Frank tells his best friend at work, Jack Ordway, about his plan Wheelers’ house for cocktails. The two couples usually enjoy to move. Frank feels a sense of relief from no longer keeping each other’s company, but now there is awkwardness between the move entirely a secret. That afternoon, however, he is them. Milly Campbell tells the group some gossip. Helen called over by his boss. Bart Pollock, a senior executive in the Givings, the local realtor, has a son John who has been placed in company was impressed by the brochure Frank wrote and a mental institution. Frank holds forth, denouncing the wants him to do a series of similar brochures. That night, Frank complacency of their community, which ignores the tragedies in is disappointed when April shows no interest in his meeting its midst. He expects the group to agree with him and chime in, with Pollock. but they all look embarrassed. Soon after, the Wheelers get into a fight over how Jennifer is The next day is Frank’s thirtieth birthday. He feels depressed as reacting to the upcoming move. When Frank expresses worry he goes into work at Knox Business Machines, where he works about their kids’ ability to adjust, April asks if he is trying to in Sales Promotion, but feels better once he sets in motion a back out of the move. Frank denies this. plan to seduce a secretary named Maureen Grube. When Frank The next day is their first visit with John Givings, so April sends arrives home, he is shocked to receive a warm reception from Michael and Jennifer to stay with the Campbells. John behaves April. She has prepared a birthday dinner for him and says she oddly and makes hostile remarks to his mother, but approves of has something important to tell him. April has conceived of a the Wheelers’ plan to move to Paris to escape the “hopeless plan to move to Europe. There, she says, Frank can figure out emptiness” of suburbia. Despite feeling that they handled the his true calling, and she will work as a secretary. She says that visit well, there is distance and constraint between Frank and she blocked him from finding himself when she got pregnant April again. with Jennifer and wanted to give herself an abortion. According That week, Bart Pollock takes Frank out to a fancy, booze- to April, to convince her not to have an abortion, Frank had had soaked lunch at a hotel. Frank confides in Pollock, telling him to assume total responsibility for their lives, sacrificing his own about his father’s history working for Knox. Pollock tells Frank fulfillment. Now, she wants to make it up to him. Frank initially that he would like to hire him to be a part of a new public resists this logic, but eventually agrees that they should carry relations venture he is putting together. Frank tells Pollock that out April’s plan. he is leaving the company in the fall, and Pollock replies that if For the next few weeks, the Wheelers are in harmony with one Frank he changes his mind, the offer stands. another. The next day at work, Frank tells Maureen they Later that week, in a state of despair, April tells Frank that she is shouldn’t sleep together again. In a whirl of activity, he quickly pregnant. Frank feels full of relief, thinking that this means they solves a pressing problem by writing a brochure for a sales will not have to move to France. Then he finds a rubber syringe conference. in the closet—which he knows April plans to use to abort the Over the weeks that follow, the Wheelers spend long hours pregnancy. He feels he must convince April to have the baby. talking about their plans, excluding everyone else, even their For the next few weeks, the Wheelers debate what to do about children. Frank begins to realize that he is nervous to move to April’s pregnancy. Frank takes April out to fancy restaurants to Europe, especially when he sees how quickly April is preparing. demonstrate that their life can be more fulfilling in the suburbs She has assumed that they will move to Paris, because Frank with the extra money he will earn working for Bart Pollock. He gave her the mistaken impression that he learned French also cultivates a new persona, acting the part of a decisive, during World War II. responsible man. When April still wants to abort the baby, One weekend the Wheelers inform Helen Givings and the Frank suggests that this desire is the result of a psychological Campbells of their plan to move. Milly has been worried since abnormality caused by April’s unhappy, parentless childhood. the play that the Wheelers have become snobs, but Shep, who April relents, agreeing not to have an abortion. has a crush on April, brushes off her concerns. After hearing of The Wheelers tell their friends that they will not be moving to the Wheelers’ plans, however, he tells Milly he agrees with her Paris. Frank is disturbed to admit to himself that, although he is about the Wheelers and thinks that their plan sounds very glad not to be moving to Paris, he doesn’t actually want another immature. Milly is relieved, but Shep is left deeply envious that child. He resumes his affair with Maureen. Frank will get to live in Paris with April. The next night, Helen ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 2  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com One night the Wheelers and Campbells go dancing at a seedy over April. He sees her as exceptional, and thinks that this bar called Vito’s Log Cabin. Milly gets too drunk and they all reflects well on him, so he is keen to keep her under his control. plan to leave, but one of their cars is blocked in. April suggests From the beginning of their marriage he worries she will leave that Frank drive Milly home while she stays out with Shep. To him. Frank is not sure what profession to take, so he takes a job Shep’s joyful amazement, they have sex in the back of his car. in the New York City office of Knox Business Machines, the Several days later, Frank goes to Maureen’s house to break up company for which his father worked as a struggling traveling with her. He is caught off guard when Maureen emerges from salesman. He initially sees his job as a joke, but over the years, her room naked and dancing. Apologizing over and over, Frank and despite continuing to pretend to hate his work out of a fear breaks things off. that April will look down on him if he admits to liking it, Frank grows to find the routine at Knox comforting and later April has been sleeping on the couch since sleeping with Shep. discovers that he has real aptitude for public relations. That Sunday, immediately before a visit with the Givings, Frank tries to speak to her about how she is feeling. April declares April Wheeler – Independent-minded and passionate, but that she doesn’t love Frank. Frank speaks condescendingly to chronically unhappy, April Wheeler is miserable with her life as April, as if addressing a mentally ill person, then says he has also a suburban homemaker. Brought up in an affluent setting by been acting neurotically and tells April he had a brief affair. aunts, because her hard-partying parents did not want her, April says she doesn’t care. April wants to feel that she fits in among people who live a glamorous life like the one she imagined her parents led. When When the Givings arrive, they can tell that April and Frank have she first meets Frank, April believes that he is an intellectual been fighting. John asks why they aren’t moving to Paris, and who can introduce her to that world. She gives up her hopes of Frank points to April’s pregnant belly as an answer. John says becoming an actress to marry him. She does not want to have that isn’t the real reason. He guesses that Frank impregnated children until she is in her late-twenties, but is convinced by April because he was too scared to move. Helen apologizes, Frank not to abort an accidental pregnancy, going on to have saying they shouldn’t have come, and the Givingses leave. two children. April can come across as withdrawn and snobbish, Afterwards, the Wheelers have an enormous fight and Frank but she is also widely admired for her good taste, beauty, and drinks himself to sleep. elegance. Desperate to make a change to her life, April comes In the morning, Frank is surprised when April makes him up with a plan for her and Frank to move their family to Europe. breakfast and listens to him talk about the conference with Shep Campbell – Coddled by his wealthy divorced mother as a Bart Pollock that day and lets him kiss her goodbye. After Frank child, by adolescence Shep Campbell feels determined to grow leaves, April writes a brief note for Frank and prepares to up to be tough. He feels that his wealth will make people think attempt to give herself an abortion. She dies in the hospital that he is soft, and so he rejects all signs of it. After rising through day. the ranks of the army during the war, Shep goes to a technical Frank takes Michael and Jennifer to live with his older brother college to become a mechanical engineer. He meets Milly and and moves to New York City. Shep dislikes listening to Milly’s they marry, settling in Arizona. Several years later, Shep begins dramatic renditions of what happened to the Wheelers, but he to regret that he rejected the world he grew up in. After a appreciates her supportive presence. Helen Givings feels that period of confusion, he moves his family to New York City, and John played a role in April’s death; she tells his doctors he is too then eventually to Connecticut. Shep has become reconciled to destructive to leave the institution again, and she adopts a the compromises in his life, feeling grateful for experiences puppy. from his “tough guy period” and equal to people like Frank Wheeler who went to college in the East. Shep appreciates Milly for sticking with him when he went through a crisis, but CHARA CHARACTERS CTERS their marriage is not romantic, and he has a deep crush on April Wheeler, whom he sees as the embodiment of good taste and MAJOR CHARACTERS the East coast culture he turned his back on. Frank Wheeler – A vain, smooth-talking man of thirty, Frank Milly Campbell – Unlike April, Milly is happy with her life as a Wheeler is deeply concerned with seeming manly, likeable, wife to Shep and mother to four sons. Milly is agreeable, loyal, interesting, and exceptional to others. He worries that he is pragmatic and conventional. Raised in poverty, she proves able weak and sentimental, and makes a show of being hard-headed to change her tastes to suit Shep’s ideas of what is highbrow. and confident. The result of an accidental pregnancy, Frank She and Shep are good friends of Frank and April, but Milly feels that his older, worn-out parents never gave him the feels status anxiety around the Wheelers, especially when they attention he needed to thrive. Frank is self-conscious as a boy, start to become withdrawn in the friendship. but in the army and at Columbia College he discovers that he can win people’s respect by being articulate. He is insecure Helen Givings – A high-strung perfectionist, Helen Givings about the kind of women he attracts, until he manages to win escapes from the unfulfilling aspects of her life by throwing ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 3  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com herself into work as a realtor. She also expends her extra Aunt Claire – April’s aunt and guardian. energy by renovating houses and then reselling them for Oat Fields – A general sales manager at Knox Business greater value. Brought up in an affluent Philadelphia society, Machines in the 1930s. Earl is disappointed when he is not Helen looks down on many of the people she sells houses to. given a promotion to work as Oat’s assistant at the Home She has an air of trying too hard as she tries to make cheerful Office in New York City. Frank is repulsed by Oat’s large size conversation even in the most uncomfortable situations. She is and sloppy eating habits. married to the old and frail Howard and is disappointed in her son John, who has been hospitalized for mental illness. Warren Br Brace ace – Nancy Brace’s husband, Warren moves into the Wheelers’ house on Revolutionary Road after Frank sells it. John Givings – An intelligent non-conformist and former mathematics teacher, John Givings has been put into a state Nancy Br Brace ace – Warren Brace’s wife, Nancy moves into the mental institution and subjected to electrical shock therapy Wheelers’ house on Revolutionary Road after Frank sells it. after holding his parents hostage for a period of several days. Ste Stevve K Koovick – A mediocre drummer who plays at Vito’s Log His insistence on speaking the truth as he sees it makes his Cabin, the bar where the Wheelers and Campbells go to dance mother Helen very uncomfortable. He is the only person who and drink. understands the Wheelers’ desire to move to Europe. April especially feels that he understands her after he says that she is “female” instead of “feminine.” THEMES Howard Givings – A frail man who seems older than his sixty- In LitCharts literature guides, each theme gets its own color- eight years, Howard Givings leads a relaxed, unstimulating life. coded icon. These icons make it easy to track where the themes He is able to exert control over John when he becomes agitated occur most prominently throughout the work. If you don't have and can calm Helen, but he often turns off his hearing aid to a color printer, you can still use the icons to track themes in block them out when he feels like listening is unnecessary. black and white. Earl Wheeler – A hardworking man who is good with his hands, Earl Wheeler doesn’t understand or approve of his son Frank. MARRIAGE AND SELFHOOD He manages to keep a job as a regional manager for Knox Revolutionary Road examines the way Business Machines through many rounds of layoffs during The codependence can turn a disappointing marriage Depression, but his hopes for further career advancement are into a life-destroying one. For Frank and April dashed. When Frank gets a job in Knox’s New York City office, Wheeler, the novel’s protagonists, the way their spouse Earl is proud. reflects on them and reflects them back to themselves defines how they understand themselves. For April, feeling that an MINOR CHARACTERS exceptionally intelligent and promising man loves her is Jennifer Wheeler – The Wheelers’ six-year-old daughter, essential to her sense of self. She sees Frank less as an Jennifer is a sweet, anxious child. She hopes to gain her individual, and more as an archetype—the kind of person whose parents’ attention by imitating them, but suffers from a sense love makes her feel validated. Unfortunately, since she idealizes that her life could be turned upside down at any moment. Frank, her image of him is easily compromised by the reality of Michael Wheeler – The Wheelers’ four-year-old son, Michael who he is. April wants to have the love of a man with an is playful and loving. independent identity, but Frank’s self-esteem likewise depends on April’s approval and his sense of control over her. To control Ted Bandy – Frank’s boss at Knox Business Machines. April, Frank pretends to be the kind of man she admires. For Bart PPollock ollock – An executive at Knox Business Machines, instance, when his boring job, which April despises, begins to Pollock is a physically huge man who is passionate about selling show signs of developing into an interesting career, his first computers. He recognizes Frank’s talent and recruits him to impulse is to imagine how he will denigrate the job to maintain join his new public relations arm of the company. April’s approval. Jack Ordwa Ordwayy – An alcoholic who treats his life as a joke, As the novel tracks Frank’s effort to maintain control over Ordway is Frank’s best friend at Knox. April’s view of him, it’s slowly revealed that April is actually the Maureen Grube – A twenty-two-year-old secretary at Knox stronger, more independent of the two. The bulk of the novel is Business Machines with whom Frank has an affair. Maureen told from Frank’s point of view, but his fears that he cannot seeks to seem sexy and sophisticated, but she is actually control April’s perception of him are largely borne out at the confused about who she is and what she wants. novel’s end, when the narration shifts to April’s point of view in the moments before she gives herself an abortion. At this Norma – Maureen’s older, more experienced, twice-divorced moment, it becomes clear that April feels she made a mistake roommate. ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 4  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com by marrying Frank and having his children. She sees through his lives they don’t want and are cruel to women to bolster their attempts to pretend to be the kind of man she admires, and she own self-esteem. And while Yates shows the tragedy of male looks down on him for his lack of independence. April reclaims gender roles, his portrait of gender expectations for women is her independence by attempting to abort Frank’s child, much more dire. The range of acceptable roles for women in although this leads to her death. Her abortion shows that she Revolutionary Road is narrow, and women deny themselves to fit believes she cannot wrest control over her life from Frank into stereotypes meant to repress and control them. While except by endangering it—a damning portrayal of the confines some women may flourish in these roles, others have no way to of marriage. live a fulfilling life while meeting society’s demands, and it ruins Although the novel centers on the Wheelers, it also gives their lives. Thus, Yates shows how rigid gender expectations access to the points of view of Helen Givings and Shep write a tragic and mutually destructive script for men and Campbell, exploring the dynamics of their marriages as well. women, undermining their abilities to be themselves and have Shep’s and Helen’s ability to cope with disappointment in their fulfilling relationships. own marriages provides a counterexample to the Wheelers’ The novel explores the desire of boys to grow up to become toxic codependence. Helen Givings is unhappy with her older, “real men.” Although this desire is motivated by a societal disengaged husband Howard, and she considers herself to be pressure to conform, Revolutionary Road’s male characters find “constantly veering towards the brink of divorce.” While that there is some flexibility when it comes to enacting Howard can exert a stabilizing influence on Helen in her masculinity while holding on to what makes them individuals. frenzied and compulsive moments, the differences in their Frank Wheeler wishes to be respected by other men and temperaments leave them incapable of drawing enjoyment desired by women. As a boy, he is acutely aware that his father from one another’s company. But Howard does not stop Helen sees him as insufficiently handy with tools and his peers find from working. Frenzied eighteen-hour days fill her life and him overly dramatic. When he grows up, he is surprised and allow her to cope with her marital disappointment by pleased to find that he can earn the approval of others by maintaining her own, separate interests. showing off his intellect. Although Frank is reassured that his The Campbells’ marriage has also been through many ups-and- eloquence has earned him respect, he still struggles to feel that downs, particularly after Shep’s mid-life decision to upend their he is truly manly in the way he hoped to be as a boy. By life in Arizona and move to New York. Shep is not sexually projecting confidence through his manner, clothing and attracted to Milly and has a deep crush on April Wheeler. He expressions, by taking on home improvement projects and, copes with his marriage, however, by focusing on his gratitude most importantly, by manipulating and controlling April and for all Milly has done to support him, and this trumps his desire other women, Frank makes himself feel adequately masculine. for more romance and excitement than she provides. While Shep Campbell, meanwhile, feels that his upper-class Shep focuses on the good elements of his marriage so he can upbringing might stifle his masculinity. He abandons the accept the bad, Helen finds fulfillment outside of her marriage moneyed life his mother wants for him, choosing instead to go so she can accept its drawbacks. to a technical college, become a mechanical engineer, and marry a woman from a different class. He realizes at a certain Each of the marriages Yates examines provides a different point, however, that he has given up too much of himself in the critique of the institution, resulting in a cynical, pessimistic pursuit of being what he considers a “real man.” portrait of marriage as a whole. Even in marriages that do not lead to either individuals’ destruction, the compromises that While the novel’s male characters struggle internally to are demanded are painful and the disappointments acute. become “real men,” the women in the novel are expected to be Although the Wheelers’ marriage is held up as a particularly either cheerful, nurturing homemakers, attractive sex objects, toxic one, the Givingses and Campbells seem to have accepted or both. Both of these roles are strictly defined by society, a life of mediocrity, constant annoyance, and imperfect leaving little room for individual expression. April Wheeler pleasures. The novel suggests that all marriages, even those in never wanted to settle down into a suburban life, seeing herself which each partner maintains some independence, require more as a bohemian living in New York City than a mother and compromise. It does not suggest, however, that this housewife, but when she gets pregnant, Frank convinces her to compromise is usually worth it. keep the baby. For Frank, having April keep his house and bear his children testifies to his manliness more than anything else. And he further believes that she should be happy to be MANHOOD AND WOMANHOOD dominated by his wishes, because they are wishes sanctioned Rigid 1950s gender expectations threaten the by society. Frank’s mistress, Maureen Grube, tries to live up to happiness of all the characters in Revolutionary a different female archetype: the ideal young, single woman Road, both male and female. The pressures and living in New York City. Insecure that she can live up to the role stereotypes of masculinity instill insecurities in men that lead to of the sophisticated, sexy, fun woman, Maureen begins an affair empty posturing, manipulation, and self-denial. These men live ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 5  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com with Frank in the hope that his admiration for her will affirm her suddenly realizes he is unhappy with his life, does he regret his femininity. rebellion against his mother’s lifestyle. He then moves back to Female gender roles are not only restrictive, they also give men New York and cultivates the life of a man of good taste. Neither like Frank Wheeler mechanisms for controlling the women Frank nor Shep feels sure that he has chosen the right path in around them. Frank suggests that April’s desire to have a life life once he begins to emulate his parents, but both find that outside of bearing and raising children is perverse, not because they are more at peace than they were while trying to shape he wants to have more children, but because he recognizes that their lives entirely in rebellion against their parents. her pregnancies allow him to control her. By stopping April Yet these characters have little ability to treat their children in from aborting her pregnancies, Frank saddles her with the way that they wish their parents had treated them. Instead, responsibility for children, diminishing the possibility that she they often feel aggrieved by the way their children will be able to pursue a life outside of their home and outside of inconvenience and fail to gratify them. The Wheeler children, his control. When Maureen’s roommate Norma tries to defend Jennifer and Michael, fail to stir much interest in their parents, Maureen from being preyed on by Frank, Frank deploys gender who hardly consider how their decisions impact their children. roles to defeat her arguments. He accuses Norma of being a On the one occasion when Frank suggests to April that their “latent lesbian,” suggesting that a “real woman” would not step planned move to Paris might be disruptive for the children, he is in to protect another woman from male domination. more interested in assuaging his own fear of moving to Paris The novel’s critique of traditional gender roles is best voiced by than sparing Jennifer from the fears she has expressed. Shep the mentally ill John Givings. John says approvingly that April is Campbell likewise feels little connection to his four sons, different from other women who seek to conform to traditional looking down at them for seeming “middle-class.” And while ideas of “femininity.” He also puts his finger on Frank’s reliance there is no detail given about John Givings’s upbringing, when on gender roles as a tool of control, saying that Frank probably his mother ceases to visit him and instead adopts a puppy, she impregnated April on purpose to sabotage their plan to move finds great satisfaction in training it. This suggests that in to Paris, and so he can “hide behind her maternity dress.” John raising her son, she saw him as a project, like a house that needs is the only one who sees the way conformity to gender roles redecoration, something she could control and perfect. can destroy lives. The fact that he is considered crazy, though, Even as adults with children of their own, the characters in tragically suggests how rigorously this society enforces a Revolutionary Road continue to react to the facts of their specific set of ideas about gender. childhoods, remaining preoccupied with their upbringings rather than with bringing their own children up. As April PARENTS AND CHILDREN Wheeler prepares to give herself a dangerous late-term abortion, she realizes that she may die in the process. Indeed, it Revolutionary Road portrays parents and children as is left somewhat unclear whether she intends to die in the locked in an imbalanced and damaging relationship. course of this abortion. At this moment she does not reflect on Adult characters spend their lives alternately the possibility that she will soon abandon her children, but rebelling against and seeking to fulfill their parents’ wishes for instead considers her abandonment by her own parents when them. On the other hand, these same characters feel she was a child. She thinks back on a visit with her father, which disappointment and disconnection when it comes to their own the novel hints was the last time she saw him before his suicide. children. Parents, in Yates’s portrayal, are not as deeply April now seems to be emulating her father, either in suicide, if impacted by their children as their children are by them, and that is what she intends, or by refusing to care for a child she they generally either neglect or try to change their offspring. does not want, as her parents did by giving up her care to her For all the characters, relationships with their parents are aunts. The children April already has hardly broach her crucial, and the feelings of anger or love that motivate the thoughts. And for Frank, after April’s death, his own fulfillment desire to emulate or rebel against one’s parents are portrayed is far more important than his childrens’. When he visits the as illogical, but visceral. The novel focuses on two adult Campbells, he tells them about his work and about how he is characters whose youthful rebellions are slowly replaced with exploring his feelings about his father in psychoanalysis, but he the desire to live lives similar to their parents’. Although Frank hardly mentions Michael and Jennifer. Further, although Frank sees himself as a rebel and intellectual, when it comes time to abhorred April’s parents’ decision to allow her to be raised by get a job, he gets exactly the one his father always wanted: a aunts and resented his own middle-aged parents for having desk job in Knox’s home office in New York City. Initially, Frank been so tired out by life by the time they had him, he takes tells himself that he has taken this job ironically, but eventually Jennifer and Michael to be raised by his own much older he finds that doing it well gives him satisfaction and pride. Shep brother after April’s death. In this way, he provides his children Campbell rebels against his wealthy mother’s coddling, with a life that combines the worst of both his and his deceased deciding to renounce his upper-class roots and pursue the wife’s upbringings. middle-class track of mechanical engineer. Only later, when he ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 6  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com As in its portrayal of marriage, Revolutionary Road presents friends, which doesn’t make him ecstatically happy, but does childhood and parenthood in a bitter, pessimistic light. The eliminate his previous woes. Shep’s ability to change his life for novel suggests that most childhoods are painful and most the better while still respecting social norms suggests that the adults are haunted by their childhoods. Children generally ability to overcome dissatisfaction is more readily available to sense that they disappoint or fail to interest their parents, and men who fit into traditional gender roles, because they are will likely go on to repeat the same cycles of rebellion driven by rewarded for showing initiative and ambition. By contrast, resentment of their parents, or emulation out of a desire to feel April’s dissatisfaction cannot be resolved in a socially they have finally earned parental approval. The novel rejects acceptable way, since her bohemian desires are seen as the possibility that having children will be redemptive or unbefitting of a woman. Thus, April is left mired in her fulfilling, suggesting that what we all want is our parents’ love, dissatisfaction, her distress escalating until she dies in a not to provide a parents’ love to our own children. desperate attempt to control her life. John Givings, the novel’s sole certified “insane” person, is an CONFORMITY, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND intelligent, intuitive non-conformist. The degree to which he is PSYCHOLOGY actually “psychotic” is left unclear. What is clear is that he is determined to rebel against a society that seeks to enforce Revolutionary Road is set during an era when an conformity, especially when it comes to the proper roles for intense pressure to conform caused many people men and women. He sees his mother as the embodiment of this to feel depressed and inadequate. Instead of helping the spirit of conformity, mocking her efforts to remain bright and mentally ill cope with a conformist society, however, the cheerful in the face of his brutal truth-telling and derisively profession of psychology was often used to pressure people to calling her “feminine” instead of “female.” When he holds his stifle their individual desires and submit to social norms. The parents hostage in their home – an act that could be a true sign novel suggests that the fear of being stigmatized for being of insanity – society strikes back, sending him to a mental different often stops people – particularly women – from institution, keeping him from seeing a lawyer, and subjecting pursuing the lives they would like to lead. The novel portrays him to painful electrical shock treatments. But it is when he this as a tragic state of affairs, because it is personal maliciously but accurately describes the Wheelers’ freedom—not conformity to a socially approved ideal—that marriage—specifically, Frank’s desire to assert his masculinity allows individuals to come as close as possible to a happy life. by controlling April—that his fate is sealed. After this, his The lives of the novel’s central characters suggest that it is a mother decides that he is too destructive to be around other lack of personal freedom that makes them unhappy. Rather people. The price for telling the truth about the conformity he than childhood trauma or incurable mental illness, society’s sees and the unhappiness it causes is an indefinite stay in a conformist strictures limit these individuals to unfulfilling lives. mental institution. For April Wheeler, her husband is the primary obstacle to her Overall, then, the novel presents a bleak picture of the pursuing a fulfilling life. She wants to live abroad and pursue possibilities for those who want something other than a home, new experiences, but Frank is determined to keep her under his a spouse, and children, as society says they are supposed to. In thumb. When April wants to abort her child so that she might a rigidly conformist society that has commandeered still achieve the life she wants, Frank suggests that this is a sign psychology to back up its claims about the only good way to of mental illness. Abortion might be an emotionally healthy live, especially as these claims apply to gender roles, the decision for April, who doesn’t want to repeat her parents’ pressure to conform is given scientific backing by the discipline mistake of having unwanted children and failing to care for of psychology. Those who fail to conform may be subjected to them. However, Frank parrots society’s view that all sane psychological treatment that is more a punishment for bad women want children, and suggests that April’s childhood has behavior than a treatment for illness. Meanwhile, the threat of left her emotionally scarred. Ironically, Frank doesn’t want this treatment regimen only adds to the pressure to conform, another child, either. He and April have the same desire, but increasing the prevalence of mental illness and making the only in April—a woman—does this desire seem “insane.” conundrum of the dissatisfied non-conformist all the more Shep Campbell’s story demonstrates that the ability to hopeless. overcome depression in this conformist society is only open to those who can be happy with a life society approves of. Shep CLASS, TASTE, AND STATUS grows depressed when he comes to the realization that the life Revolutionary Road takes place during a period after he has chosen is not the one he wants, but because he is a man, World War II when the American economy was and because the life he wants is one that society embraces, he booming and millions of Americans who grew up in is able to overcome his unhappiness by making socially poverty during the Depression were joining the middle class. acceptable changes. He moves, switches jobs, and makes new Yet even with money-making opportunities being so plentiful, ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 7  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com the novel’s characters are not content with run-of-the-mill symbol, but an aesthetic experience which makes her feel truly success, and they seek other ways to prove their worth and herself. Those around April can sense that she has real taste, cement their status. For many, this status became dependent not the kind of taste that they feign for status. Shep aspires to on showing “good taste.” Having a creative or intellectual have April praise Milly’s design of the Campbell house, while profession could compensate for a moderate income, and a Frank sees her as a trophy wife because she is “first-rate.” Yet tastefully decorated home—even if modest—connoted more Frank also finds her expressions of taste infuriating, because intellect and sophistication than an extravagantly decorated they are a sign of April’s continued existence as an independent one. In a counterpoint to the characters’ fear of being labelled thinker. He gets angry at her for her snobbishness, and fears psychologically abnormal, they also fear being exactly like that she will escape his attempts to control her with her ability everyone else. In order to prove to themselves that they are to continue to speak independently. While Frank’s fluent “exceptional,” all the characters seek to demonstrate their good speech wins most people over, he can never keep April from taste, but the significance of good taste varies depending on reserving judgment until she has truly considered what he is the characters’ class background. saying. Despite her environment, and despite Frank’s attempts The characters in Revolutionary Road were born into different to control her, taste sets April apart. backgrounds, but all inhabit the same economic station during In a world in which taste differentiates the banal middle-class the events of the novel. Still, the social class of each character’s from those who are seen as “exceptional,” April Wheeler stands parents remains the primary influence on what they see as a above and apart from the other characters. Born into a wealthy desirable way to spend their lives. Frank and Milly, who grew up background, she is not concerned with proving that she comes poor or lower-middle-class, pretend to shun conventional, from the upper class. Further, she is not interested in defining materialist values to fit in with their partners. They do this to herself by signaling that she has a higher status than those cement their status as “exceptional” people by proving that they around her. She feels utterly sure that she is better than those have refined taste. In reality, however, both draw happiness around her because of her capacity to think independently, and from the comfort and security of their material success. Frank she sees no need to prove it to others. For her, neither class nor believes he wants a creative career unlike his father’s out of a status are as important as the freedom of thought that she is mistaken belief that his father was ordinary while he is denied in her suburban world. exceptional. He sees himself as a rebel, giving long, impassioned speeches denouncing the sentimentality and conformity of his neighbors and coworkers. But Frank is a born salesman, and he SYMBOLS eventually finds that his skills suit him to working, as his father Symbols appear in teal text throughout the Summary and did, explaining complicated products in simple terms. He also Analysis sections of this LitChart. finds that he enjoys the very normal pleasures of relaxing at home in the suburbs, sipping brandy and reading comic books to his children. Similarly Milly, who was raised in poverty, THE RUBBER SYRINGE adapts attitudes that convey wealth and unsentimental “good” April heard from a friend in drama school that a taste because she sees that this is important to Shep. But deep rubber syringe can be used to induce a miscarriage. down, Milly wants to be a homemaker and raise children. Their Twice, April plans to use the syringe to end her pregnancy. For house has a “spare, stripped-down, intellectual” look that Milly April, the syringe is a vehicle of taking control over her own cultivates to impress others. Only in their bedroom does Milly destiny. But for Frank, who derives confidence in his own status allow her décor to reveal her true feelings: she is happy to be a as a man by convincing April to submit to his will, the syringe is homemaker living in the suburbs. a direct threat to his control over her. Frank sees April’s Those characters who came from wealthier backgrounds, like pregnancies as a way for him to prevent her from leaving him. Shep and Helen Givings, see themselves as more refined and He also sees April’s bearing of his children as an affirmation of interesting than the other people living in their suburban his masculinity. Added to this, the syringe is shaped like a penis, community. Helen has found an occupation that expresses her and April intends to insert it into her vagina to induce a belief in her own superior taste. When she renovates homes miscarriage. For this reason it not only symbolizes a threat to and then resells them at a higher price, she finds proof that her Frank’s ability to assert his right as a man to control April’s taste is superior to the taste of those around her. Shep is destiny, but it actually resembles a penis that is not Frank’s, and satisfied to have befriended the Wheelers, who make him feel that will do the opposite of impregnate her. like he is connecting to a world of monied, East-coast elites. But while Helen and Shep have made their peace with their surroundings (all the while still signaling that they look down on HOWARD’S HEARING AID their community), for April taste is more than a hollow status Howard often turns his hearing aid off to avoid ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 8  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com listening to his wife Helen talk. Although this can seem like a Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes callous gesture, the novel suggests that it is emblematic of the "It strikes me," he said at last, "that there's a considerable kind of self-protection necessary to a working marriage. Unlike amount of bullshit going on here. I mean you seem to be doing a the Wheelers, who fight bitterly over everything, the Givingses pretty good imitation of Madame Bovary here, and there's one live their lives in close proximity but without sharing much. or two points I'd like to clear up. Number one, it's not my fault Helen works eighteen-hour days to avoid too much coexistence the play was lousy. Number two, it's sure as hell not my fault with her husband, and during much of the time they are you didn’t turn out to be an actress, and the sooner you get together, Howard is not listening. While this arrangement over that little piece of soap opera the better off we're all going doesn’t seem to make either of them very happy or fulfilled, the novel suggests that this kind of peaceful, separate coexistence to be. Number three, I don’t happen to fit the role of dumb, may be the best that can be hoped for in a marriage. insensitive suburban husband; you've been trying to hang that one on me ever since we moved out here, and I'm damned if I'll wear it. Number four—” SEDUM PLANT She was out of the car and running away in the headlights, Helen takes great pride and pleasure in quick and graceful, a little too wide in the hips. For a second, as undertaking home improvement projects, which he clambered out and started after her, he thought she meant solidify her feeling of superiority to those in her suburban to kill herself—she was capable of damn near anything at times community who come from lower class backgrounds. When she like this—but she stopped in the dark roadside weeds thirty brings Frank and April a gift of a sedum plant (a kind of yards ahead, beside a luminous sign that read NO PASSING. He succulent) to improve their lawn, she is signaling that she sees came up behind her and stood uncertainly, breathing hard, them as her equals in terms of class and education. She expects keeping his distance. She wasn’t crying; she was only standing that they will take the same care with the plant that she would, there, with her back to him. because she sees gardening and beautifying one’s property as "What the hell," he said. "What the hell's this all about? Come the kind of virtuous activity that well-adjusted, well-off people on back to the car." enjoy. Frank and April are irritated by the plant, "No. I will in a minute. Just let me stand here a minute.” however—reflecting their general dislike of the Givingses—and immediately put it in the basement. Related Characters: Frank Wheeler , April Wheeler (speaker) STONE PATH Related Themes: Frank is building a stone path in the yard, but for very different reasons than Helen undertakes her Page Number: 26 home improvement projects (see the sedum plant). For Frank, Explanation and Analysis the hard labor of digging up stones from the woods and transferring them to holes he digs in the lawn is a way to assert Frank and April are driving home after The Laurel Players’ his skill and ability as a man. He feels that he is proving himself unsuccessful debut performance of The Petrified Forest, in to be a tough man, as his father never thought he was. At the which April starred. April has said she doesn’t feel like same time, he reenacts his own father’s disappointment talking, and Frank has agreed to give her space, but then, towards him by lashing out unfairly at Michael, spanking him caught up in his own thoughts about their lives, he begins to when Frank mistakes the root of a tree for his son’s foot and talk again. Frank can’t help but take it personally that the thinks the boy is getting in his way. In the end, Frank fails to play failed and that April doesn’t want him to console her complete the stone path, thereby proving that he has never about its failure. When April doesn’t react to Frank the way become competent in this kind of “manly” work. he wants her to, he lashes out. Frank defends himself as being culturally superior to his neighbors in the suburbs, saying he isn’t a “dumb, insensitive suburban husband.” At QUO QUOTES TES the same time, he accuses April of being a snob who blames others for saddling her with a boring life. Note: all page numbers for the quotes below refer to the Frank’s main source of frustration is April’s insistence on Vintage edition of Revolutionary Road published in 2000. her independence. April doesn’t want to listen to Frank’s explanation of the play’s failure; she wants to experience her disappointment on her own. But Frank feels too bound ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 9  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com up in April to allow her this independent experience. At the on her marriage comes to light. Usually, April either same time, he knows from the past how desperately she pretends to respect and admire Frank, probably in the wants to escape his emotional control and can even imagine hopes that by doing so she can convince him to make a her killing herself in a moment of pique (a foreshadowing of change to their life, or she settles into a tense and unhappy the novel’s tragic climax). When Frank does not give April silence. But in this moment, she expresses her the space she wants, she tries physically to separate herself dissatisfaction and lashes out at him for causing it. She says from him, if only for a minute. that he has trapped her, which seems to be a reference to Notably, Yates saw Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the her isolated life in the suburbs. Although this has not yet 19th century Realist novel about a bored housewife living in been explored in the novel, it will later become clear that the French provinces, as a stylistic and thematic inspiration April also feels Frank trapped her by pushing her not to for Revolutionary Road. abort an unintended pregnancy soon after their marriage. She asserts that she – not him – is the one with a strong character (“his conscience and his guts”), and she mocks him for needing her approval so much that he once hit her Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms because she wouldn’t forgive him. Frank needs to believe and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it that he is the stronger one in the relationship, and usually urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest April finds it easier to let him think she too believes this. But points, showing them cunning ways around each other's this early fight shows that he knows that these kinds of strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and thoughts could always be going through April’s mind, no strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their matter how she treats him in the moment. April also lashes memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the out at Frank by saying he is not a man, something she clearly scabs off old wounds; it went on and on. knows to be an insecurity of his. "Oh, you've never fooled me, Frank, never once. All your precious moral maxims and your 'love' and your mealy- mouthed little—do you think I've forgotten the time you hit me Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes in the face because I said I wouldn’t forgive you? Oh, I've always known I had to be your conscience and your guts—and your She'd decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? punching bag. Just because you've got me safely in a trap you Wasn't it the first love of any kind she'd ever known? Even on think you—" the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable "You in a trap! You in a trap! Jesus, don’t make me laugh!" appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of disappointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly "Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded—Look at attractively through a part-time office job ("just until my you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch"—she tossed husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do") while her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and moonlight—"by any stretch of the imagination you can call pictures and the shortcomings of other people's personalities, yourself a man!" for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes ("Do you really like the sandals, or are they Related Characters: Frank Wheeler , April Wheeler too Villager?") and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in (speaker) their double bed. But even in those days she'd held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take Related Themes: off the minute she happened to feel like it ("Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it") or the minute anything Page Number: 28-29 went wrong. Explanation and Analysis April had gotten out of the car to get space from Frank, who Related Characters: Frank Wheeler , April Wheeler refused to stop talking to her about the play as they drove home after her performance in The Petrified Forest. Frank Related Themes: followed her, and now they are standing on the side of the highway in the middle of a vicious fight. This fight is one of Page Number: 50 the few points in the novel when April’s honest perspective ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 10  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com And the fight went on all night. It caused them to hiss and Explanation and Analysis grapple and knock over a chair, it spilled outside and downstairs and into the street ("Get away from me! Get away The day after their fight coming home from The Petrified from me!")…All that saved him, all that enabled him now to Forest, Frank is reflecting on his marriage. April had said the crouch and lift a new stone from its socket and follow its night before that he “had her in a trap,” and now Frank rumbling fall with the steady and dignified tread of self-respect, reflects on how she had never seemed fully dedicated to was that the next day he had won. The next day, weeping in his their marriage. Instead, before he had “trapped her,” she arms, she had allowed herself to be dissuaded. always seemed ready to leave him. For Frank, April’s "Oh, I know, I know," she had whispered against his shirt, "I apparent readiness to leave him creates both an insecurity know you're right. I'm sorry. I love you. We'll name it Frank and about himself and a criticism of her. He relies on her we'll send it to college and everything. I promise, promise." admiration for his own sense of self, so the threat of her And it seemed to him now that no single moment of his life had leaving is a devastating one to him. He also believes, in ever contained a better proof of manhood than that, if any keeping with stereotypes about men and women, that a man proof were needed: holding that tamed, submissive girl and ought to be the one in a relationship to feel more saying, "Oh, my lovely; oh, my lovely," while she promised she independent from a woman. The fact that he depends on would bear his child. Lurching and swaying under the weight of April more than she does on him makes him feel insufficient the stone in the sun, dropping it at last and wiping his sore as a man. But he also turns this around on April. To his mind, hands, he picked up the shovel and went to work again, while the fact that she is not submissive to him and fully dedicated the children's voices fluted and chirped around him, as to their marriage, children, and home is a sign that she is insidiously torturing as the gnats. insufficient as a woman. April’s intellectual interests and opinions seem like another encroachment on Frank’s masculine territory. In the early days of their marriage, Related Characters: April Wheeler, Frank Wheeler Frank worried that April loved to spend her time thinking (speaker), Michael Wheeler, Jennifer Wheeler about art, culture, and self-presentation, but did not really love him. And, feeling emasculated by April’s independence, Related Themes: Frank portrays her interest in matters of taste as signs that she is inadequate as a woman. April’s taste, just like her Related Symbols: emotional independence, makes Frank feel insecure. To cope with this insecurity, he belittles her interests as signs Page Number: 52-53 that April is cold, snobbish, and lacking in the womanly Explanation and Analysis softness, tenderness, and agreeableness that he expects her to possess. The day after the debut of The Petrified Forest is a Saturday. April and Frank are not speaking after their fight the night before, and Frank is working on the stone path he is building in the backyard. As he works, with his children playing nearby and watching him, he remembers the terrible fight he and April had over whether she would abort an unintended pregnancy soon after their marriage. Although Frank fought April with all his might, it was not because he wanted to have a child himself or had strong qualms about the morality of abortion. Indeed, to this day Frank is not particularly interested in his children, as demonstrated by the comparison of them to irritating gnats at the end of the quote. Instead, Frank felt hurt and emasculated that April had not included him in her deliberations about what to do about her pregnancy. He had resented her ability to think independently about her future, because he got so much of his own sense of self-worth from being married to her. He also sensed that by getting April to bear his child, he would be able to bind her to him and reduce her independence. Just as April had run out of the apartment and Frank had pursued her to the waterfront during their fight over her ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 11  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com pregnancy, April had run away from the car and stood on and Michael ask Frank to read the comics in the newspaper the highway in a similarly desperate attempt to get space aloud to them, he feels grateful that his young children seem from Frank the night before. But now, because they have to have forgiven him for the incident and want to spend children, Frank does not fear that April will leave him in the time with him. He then compares their forgiveness to their same way. mother’s continued anger, since Frank’s tender feeling It is no coincidence that Frank remembers a moment in the towards his children has little to do with them and more to past that reassured him of his masculinity as he works on a do with April. His children’s love is no substitute for his stone path in their lawn. This home improvement project wife’s, and he feels irritated by their childish inability to requires hard labor and technical skill, which Frank feels understand the difference between an advertisement and a demonstrates his masculinity. During the fight the night comic (although this also becomes a commentary on the before, April had questioned his manhood. Now, working on materialism and shallowness of American suburban life, in the path, he reasserts his manhood by trying to show which “art” and consumerism are indistinguishable). While mastery of the kind of hands-on work his father always Jennifer and Michael love to be around their father, he is thought he was unskilled at when he was young. impatient to finish the task he agreed to and to do something more interesting. Part 1, Chapter 4 Quotes Part 1, Chapter 5 Quotes He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two By the end of the first year the joke had worn thin, and the heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs inability of others to see the humor of it had become lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own. depressing. "Oh, you mean your father worked there," they They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him would say when he tried to explain it, and their eyes, as often as for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn’t April realize not, would then begin to film over with the look that people how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to reserve for earnest, obedient, unadventurous young men. complicate everything? Before long (and particularly after the second year, with both The only trouble was that the funnies seemed to go on his parents dead) he had stopped trying to explain that part of forever… it, and begun to dwell instead on other comic aspects of the job: "Daddy, we skipped a funny." the absurd discrepancy between his own ideals and those of "No we didn't, sweetie. That's just an advertisement. You don’t Knox Business Machines; the gulf between the amount of want to read that." energy he was supposed to give the company and the amount "Yes I do." he actually gave. "I mean the great advantage of a place like "I do too." Knox is that you can sort of turn off your mind every morning at "But it isn't a funny. It's just made to look like one. It's an nine and leave it off all day, and nobody knows the difference." advertisement for some kind of toothpaste." "Read us it anyway." Related Characters: Earl Wheeler, Frank Wheeler Related Themes: Related Characters: Michael Wheeler, Jennifer Wheeler, Frank Wheeler (speaker), April Wheeler Page Number: 81 Related Themes: Explanation and Analysis Page Number: 58 After April gets pregnant with Jennifer, Frank needs to get a high-paying job to support his family. He gets a job at Knox Explanation and Analysis Business Machines, the company where his father Earl Two days after Frank and April’s fight on the night of the worked his entire life, without mentioning that his father performance of The Petrified Forest, April is still refusing to worked there. For Earl, keeping a job at Knox and the dream speak to Frank. The day before, while building his stone of promotion had been immensely important. Frank sees path, Frank had mistaken a root for Michael’s foot and, himself as a much less conventional figure, who could not be fearing that Michael had carelessly put himself in danger, satisfied with a corporate job. So, when he takes the job at had spanked his son. Frank had been wrong, but had not Knox, he sees it as an ironic joke. He is snubbing his father admitted it or apologized to his son. Now, when Jennifer by getting the job his father always wanted and not feeling ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 12  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com proud or gratified in that job. This is too subtle a joke for Maureen has shaped her persona after a roommate, who, in most people to understand, since it depends on an turn, has shaped her own persona after the women understanding of Frank’s cruelly dismissive attitude portrayed in Hollywood movies about young women living towards his father and his father’s values. Frank is thus in New York City. Although Frank is critical of April’s forced to enjoy the part of the joke that is about his father independence of thought, seeing it as a mark that she is cold on his own. Instead, he uses the job as fodder for humorous or unwomanly, it may be what really attracts him to her. commentary on the boring corporations that dominate Maureen, on the other hand, tries to conform as closely as America in the 1950s. It does not occur to Frank that some possible to a model of femininity popular at the time, but small part of him has always wanted to get a job that would ends up seeming irritatingly artificial to Frank. make his father proud. Beginning with a quick, audacious dismantling of the Knox Part 1, Chapter 6 Quotes Business Machines Corporation, which made her laugh, he All this was pleasing, and so was the way she had shyly moved out confidently onto broader fields of damnation until slipped into calling him “Frank,” and so was the news that she he had laid the punctured myth of Free Enterprise at her feet; did indeed have an apartment with another girl—a “perfectly then, just at the point where any further talk of economics adorable” apartment right here in the Village—but after a while might have threatened to bore her, he swept her away into he found he had to keep reminding himself to be pleased. The cloudy realms of philosophy and brought her lightly back to trouble, he guessed, was mainly that she talked too much. It earth with a wise-crack. was also that so much of her talk rang false, that so many of its And how did she feel about the death of Dylan Thomas? And possibilities for charm were blocked and buried under the didn’t she agree that this generation was the least vital and stylized ceremony of its cuteness. Soon he was able to guess most terrified in modern times? He was at the top of his form. that most if not all of her inanity could be blamed on her He was making use of material that had caused Milly Campbell roommate…The more she told him about this other girl…the to say "Oh that's so true, Frank!" and of older, richer stuff that more annoyingly clear it became that she and Norma enjoyed had once helped to make him the most interesting person April classic roles of mentor and novice in an all-girl orthodoxy of fun. Johnson had ever met. He even touched on his having been a There were signs of this tutelage in Maureen's too-heavy make- longshoreman. Through it all, though, ran a bright and skillfully up and too-careful hairdo, as well as in her every studied woven thread that was just for Maureen: a portrait of himself mannerism and prattling phrase…and her endless supply of as decent but disillusioned young family man, sadly and bravely anecdotes involving sweet little Italian grocers and sweet little at war with his environment. Chinese laundrymen and gruff but lovable cops on the beat, all of whom, in the telling, became the stock supporting actors in a Related Characters: April Wheeler, Milly Campbell, confectionery Hollywood romance of bachelor-girls in Maureen Grube, Frank Wheeler Manhattan. Related Themes: Related Characters: Norma, Maureen Grube, Frank Wheeler Page Number: 100-101 Explanation and Analysis Related Themes: During his lunch with Maureen, Frank has listened to her Page Number: 99-100 talk about herself with growing annoyance and now launches into his own monologue. As much as he wants to Explanation and Analysis sleep with Maureen, he may want even more to talk to her Frank, who is still fighting with April, has taken a secretary and be found interesting and sexy by her. When Frank was from his office named Maureen out to lunch, intending to in college, his ability to talk engagingly about a variety of seduce her. Everything is going according to plan, and Frank topics earned him the respect he had felt he was denied as is already getting a boost to his confidence from Maureen’s an unathletic, sensitive boy. His ability to talk had also made obvious attraction to him. But Frank is turned off by the April interested in him. Now, he wants to reassure himself sense that Maureen is trying too hard to fill the role of a that he is still an interesting, exceptional man capable of typical young woman living in New York. Frank feels that attracting a woman. Self-indulgently, Frank talks about topics that he assumes Maureen will find boring, just to see ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 13  Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com if he can make her find them interesting through the force support them by working as a secretary while Frank takes of his personality. Finally, he paints a picture of himself as time off from working to discover his true calling. Frank, not only original and interesting, but moral and instantly made uncomfortable by this idea, tries to laugh it conscientious. Maureen, who is also seemingly more off and tell April that it is unrealistic. April then turns Frank’s interested in the impression she makes on Frank than she is own arguments—made during his many speeches to her, to in Frank himself, expresses her admiration just as he hopes the Campbells, and to others—to her own purposes. In she will. effect, she is calling his bluff. If Frank doesn’t agree to her plan, then he will show that he does not really believe his denunciations of the tedium of suburbia and corporate life, Part 1, Chapter 7 Quotes but only makes grand speeches to inflate his own importance. "In order to agree with that," she said, "I'd have to have a very strange and very low opinion of reality. Because you see I Frank is caught off guard. He had made another similar happen to think this is unrealistic. I think it's unrealistic for a speech earlier that day during his lunch with Maureen. But man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year the only reason he had wanted to take Maureen out and at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a house he can’t stand in seduce her in the first place was because he felt depressed a place he can’t stand either, to a wife who's equally unable to that April no longer paid attention to his speeches and stand the same things, living among a bunch of frightened admired his thoughts. Now, as it turns out, she can quote all little—my God, Frank, I don’t have to tell you what's wrong with his points back to him. But this is not wholly reassuring. this environment—I’m practically quoting you. Just last night April was listening to Frank and believed everything he said, when the Campbells were here, remember what you said about but she no longer admires him for expressing true thoughts. the whole idea of suburbia being to keep reality at bay? You said She wants him to take action. If he does not agree to make a everybody wanted to bring up their children in a bath of change to their life, she is suggesting that this means she sentimentality. You said—” was right when she listened to him with contempt the night "I know what I said. I didn’t think you were listening, though. before. Although April is apologizing to Frank, she is also You looked sort of bored." threatening him with her continued disillusionment. "I was bored. That's part of what I'm trying to say. I don't think I've ever been more bored and depressed and fed up in my life than I was last night. All that business about Helen Givings's Part 2, Chapter 1 Quotes son on top of everything else, and the way we all grabbed at it And Frank was modestly aware that something of the like dogs after meat; I remember looking at you and thinking same kind of change was taking place in himself. He knew for 'God, if only he'd stop talking.' Because everything you said was one thing that he had developed a new way of talking, slower based on this great premise of ours that we're somehow very and more deliberate than usual, deeper in tone and more special and superior to the whole thing, and I wanted to say fluent: he almost never had to recourse to the stammering, 'But we're not! Look at us! We're just like the people you're apologetic little bridges…that normally laced his speech, nor did talking about! We are the people you're talking about!' I sort of his head duck and weave in the familiar nervous effort to make had—I don’t know, contempt for you, because you couldn't see himself clear. Catching sight of his walking reflection in the the terrific fallacy of the thing.” black picture window, he had to admit that his appearance was not yet as accomplished as hers…but sometimes late at night Related Characters: Frank Wheeler , April Wheeler when his throat had gone sore and his eyes hot from talking, (speaker), John Givings, Helen Givings, Milly Campbell, when he hunched his shoulders and set his jaw and pulled his Shep Campbell necktie loose and let it hang like a rope, he could glare at the window and see the brave beginnings of a personage. Related Themes: Related Characters: Frank Wheeler Page Number: 115-116 Explanation and Analysis Related Themes: April has prepared an elaborate birthday dinner for Frank, Page Number: 133-134 apologized to him for holding a grudge after the play, and told him she has a plan for how they can change their life. Explanation and Analysis She wants the family to move to Europe, where she will Frank has agreed to April’s plan to move to Europe, and the ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 14