Revolutionary Road: A Crack in the Mirror. Analysis of Richard Yates's Novel and its Time

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”.

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands for dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.

They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or president. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. (Friedan) This is the beginning of The Feminine Mystique, a book that changed the minds of many American women during the sixties.

In 1957 Betty Friedan spent, as she wrote in the preface, “ a great deal of time doing an intensive questionnaire of my college classmates” (Friedan), and her book is the consequence of this long and passionate journey through the lives and troubles of 200 American housewives. This study made clear that something terribly wrong was happening to those women, something that “had no name”, and that was destroying the identity of the American female population. Friedan took into consideration many aspects of the housewife's life, from the role she had in the family, to her sexual problems, to her anxieties as mother and wife, and the influence that magazines and advertisements had in the rising of the so-called “feminine mystique”.

She based her research on interviews, women's magazines, essays written by sexologists, psychologists and expert pediatrics, trying to find a reason WHY American women, after years of struggle to reach equality and freedom, just decided to come back to their kitchens, devoting their lives entirely to the family. I think that this book is extremely useful to clarify the character of April Wheeler. Many parts of it were, to me, a perfect description of her troubled inner life, as well as of her relationship with Frank and her children. April Wheeler is a nice woman in her thirties, with a husband and two children.

The soft shape of her face and her gray eyes still can tell something of her beauty when she was a young girl, “ exceptionally first-rate girl whose shining hair and splendid legs had drawn him – Frank – halfway across a roomful of strangers” (Yates), but two children and the passing of time have weighed down her body and those splendid legs. Since the beginning of the novel, April is portrayed as a deeply unsatisfied woman. She is frustrated because her dreams – becoming an actress, being “special”, out of the ordinary – haven't been fulfilled. She got pregnant, so she had to be a mother and a good wife for Frank.