She was working alone, and visibly weakening with every line. Before the end of the first act the audience could tell as well as the Players that she’d lost her grip, and soon they were all embarrassed for her. She had begun to alternate between false theatrical gestures and a white-knuckled immobility; she was carrying her shoulders high and square, and despite her heavy make-up you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck – Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Frank and April Wheeler have it all: young, bright, enthusiastic, the world is in their hands. They can do anything, be anything, dream anything – it’s all there, at their fingertips. Frank is brilliant; April is artistic. Together, they could conquer anything they wish to, for at their prime they are nothing short of free and unbounded.
Two years pass.
A lily white house, two charming children, Frank at a desk job, April as a domestic – circumstances are suffocating them, choking them from their once promising dream of a future. Perhaps they married too young, had kids too young, settled down too young: the real answer is never an easy one to guess. But what is true of Yates’ ironic morality play is that it is a brutal and unforgiving portrait of the classic American tragedy – that of suburbia.
The story opens with Frank biting his knuckles hard as he watches April’s skilled performance in The Petrified Forest get dragged down by her amateur co-actors and director: it’s a catastrophe. Frank conjures up ideas to comfort April, thinking of the best words he can offer to deliver his mournful wife from the slump. But he fails – and hard.
They fight: she tells him to stop, he insists further, she insists back, he yells that it’s not his goddamn fault she didn’t become an actress and that she has the nerve to blame it on him – Cut! Stop! Fin! The rabble ends as he stops the car and she drags herself out, unable to look at him as he badgers her with what he believes is true but otherwise isn’t. The match is set, the play is planned, and the tale begins of a man and a woman who lose themselves in the midst of multiple performances they can no longer maintain.
What’s so engrossing about Richard Yates’ story is that it not only addresses the psychological detriment of the American suburban life but also looks deeply into the performances and parts that each person, each character sets out to play in lieu of their watchful neighbors. And it’s these roles that each neighbor who credits into the American dream must eventually accept; if not, they ultimately reject their own investment and lie prey to the philosophical conundrums and pain they must endure in order to reestablish themselves in life.
Our lives are a performance: emotions and thoughts are diluted down into language, words and paper, and the eloquence of which we speak and act them out is left to the interpretation of others regardless of how we may actually feel. Only when the curtain falls, the death knoll tolls so that we are released from such a theatrical life, the life in which we use the shell of our bodies to mime and mimic actions that we hope to convey our truest selves.
Oftentimes our environment dictates what we are able to perform, whether we like it or not. The American suburbia is no different: in fact, in some ways it’s even worse. It’s pure standardization, a white bread mentality that indulges in urban sprawl, manicured streets, consumerist shopping plazas, cookie cutter houses, Stepford wives and commuting-to-work husbands. Worse yet, it is completely devoid of true, vibrantly artistic culture, culture which cannot exist in a environment insists so heavily on sterilizing anything that passes through it. So it’s no surprise that this alluring American dream draws in the gullible, only to crush those who do not abide by its stringent, unforgivably strict set of character roles it expects to be dutifully fulfilled. These prepositional roles are what Frank and April try so very hard to act out notwithstanding their truest natures that so very clash against the suburban siren of Revolutionary Road.
Let’s start with Frank. It’s 1950, he’s worked odd jobs in his youth, is a certified World War II veteran, works a stable desk job, and by all means that’s enough to declare his status as a true man in American society. But he’s a thinker too, a philosopher at best who wants to challenge the status quo; he hates these confinements, relishes in his own pride of individualism, and cherishes his wife’s compliment that he is the “most interesting man she’s ever met.” These two aspects already put Frank at odds with himself: to be accepted as man, he must subscribe to the very society that possesses qualities he finds so distasteful; to be a true thinker, he must completely reject the same society that would procure him the birthright of male superiority. The choice is difficult: for Frank, to think is to be a man, but his definition of manhood is also beginning to be shaped by American society, which discourages the progressive thoughts he tries to act upon.
Then there’s April. She’s classy, intelligent, independent, romantic, and crushed by the role of a perfect suburban mother. For this artist-by-nature to be confined by whitewashed windows, by perfectly laden aprons, by chirpy well-to-do neighbors – it’s completely unnatural, and staggeringly so. But she’s an excellent actress, too, and wants very much, too, to perfectly fulfill the obligation of the stay-at-home wife who awaits her husband everyday from work, pristinely and unfalteringly supportive of his endeavors regardless of mood or whim. This actor quality that defines April, this very quality is what puts her at odds with herself: to be herself, she must not act the part of the housewife, and forsake the pretenses that a suburban woman must act out; but to be a true actress she must bite the bullet, swallow her pride and play whatever roles are required without losing a sense of her true self. Yet the latter fold is that to be a true to herself, the actress April, the free April, she must completely forsake the role of a perfect suburban woman. To say the least, April Wheeler must make a difficult choice as well.
Such are the dilemmas that these two characters must deal for themselves, and together they resonate and clash so frequently that the dissonance and synchrony of their flaring passions and temperaments reveal one thing, and one thing only: they are not happy, and they are trying to save not only themselves but each other from drowning in the sea of suburbia.
Frank loses it first: frustrated at April’s unwillingness to cooperate by his terms, he succumbs to temptation and has an affair with the office secretary, Maureen. Herein is Frank’s first crumbling fall from his own self, driven by no other force except his own pride – in his manhood and his thought. The irony, though, is that if he were a true progressive, he wouldn’t impose his self-righteousness upon April in the first place; that instead he would listen to the subtleties of her body language, instead of placating her with an overbearing pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis that is far from true or grounded. No, instead Frank begins the freefall from progressivism in lieu of maintaining his masculine status within society, indulging in what is otherwise one of the biggest double-standards to this day: the unspoken acceptability of a husband straying from his wife, while the unspoken reverse is unacceptable. This is his masculine right.
Is he proud of this? Initially, no; it is a great weakness on his part, but it is a deep drive to prove his own manhood that he starts breaking at the very foundation of his original, progressive philosophy. It’s the beginning of a slow, degenerating process that eventually erodes at the very foundation of who Frank Wheeler is.
Back to April: she is suffocating, and through her lonely disillusion an idea springs up – France! Paris je’Taime! The European epicenter of culture! Freedom! This, she believes, is the last chance for her, for Frank, for them to get away from the asphyxiating grasp of suburban America that clearly they cannot conform to without financing their true selves. She’s seen how Frank is beginning to deteriorate – how insensitive he’d been, how he’d yelled at her, how he’d almost hit her! – and she knows that the true Frank, Frank the philosopher, the thinker, the brilliant, will never grow to his full potential if he remains any longer at the company Knox. She’ll do whatever she can to make it happen: secretary job, passports, airplane tickets, moving boxes, selling houses – April Wheeler will make this happen.
But it’s already too late. Frank has already succumbed to the lust of masculine right, and the prospect of moving to Paris frightens him. April to be the income earner, while he finds time to figure out his life – is this possible? Of course, but more pressingly, is this acceptable?
Sadly, the answer is no. While the original Frank would’ve likely embarked immediately on such a prospect, the current Frank – the changing, compromising Frank Wheeler – is in limbo, drawn by his own pride to the allure of celebrated manhood, and to suddenly take off to a society with different standards, different values and be supported by his wife so he can revert back to his default self – no, no this is not possible for Frank Wheeler. He enjoys the flattery of American society, the praise of his superiors at the dull company Knox, the flings with the secretary Maureen: he enjoys it all. No, this Frank Wheeler does not want to let go of his comfort. He cannot forsake it, not even for April.
His saving grace is that April becomes pregnant with their third child, forcing them to call off all their initial moving plans. The days of whimsy in the office are gone, the glee of his temporary existence in the office Knox is now replaced by a big, sighing relief of comfort: he is still in charge, the man of the house, the income bringer, the sole dependent of the pristinely white Wheeler house. He’ll get a promotion, this is certain, but when he realizes April may attempt to perform a self-abortion he flies in a flurry of rage. How dare she! How dare she risk their – no, his comfort! How dare she try to assert such feminine independence when he is the still the man in charge! The nerve of it all – how can she not see what a selfish action it is! It is his child, his bloodline, and yet she still dared to even contemplate early termination! How could she, how could she?! No, Frank Wheeler will not have any of that in household. This is his dominion, and he will have his say.
And so he does, but at a fatal cost: his final assertion in the name of manhood, his final fall from true progressivism destroys April – in heart and soul. She sees now that this is not the Frank she fell in love with, the man who first treated her as his equal; this Frank, this transformed Frank, is a different man, the kind of man that the society she suffocates in celebrates with the vigor of cigars, whiskey, blondes and brunettes. He no longer performs the original Frank, the man of thought and brilliance; he now acts out the acceptable Frank, the man who only believes he is one of thought and brilliance while in reality he is no better or different than his chauvinistic contemporaries. The original Frank is lost, and April is alone to decide for herself what role she will ultimately transcend into – April the wife or April the true.
She chooses April the true, the real April Wheeler, the one who wants to feel something substantial and in passion, more so than the packaged emotions and expectations that the suburban housewife must agree to. And in her desperation she consummates with her neighbor Shep Campbell, a man that she is easily repulsed by but does so anyway because it is a testament to see whether or not she can truly act as freely as before – and yes, she still can. Which leads her to her last and final attempt to assert her female independence in the Wheeler household: she performs a self-inflicted abortion, and ultimately dies from blood loss.
April’s theatrical moment has ceased, the curtains folded, and gone she is from the center stage of her life as we now know it. At the very end, she maintained her true self amidst the ocean of oppressive suburbia, the poise of her essence and existence despite what else others might quip about thereafter. This is her dying grace, her retained dignity.
And what of Frank? Why he’s completely destroyed by April’s final performance: all in an instant he realizes the mistakes he made, the pride of manhood that blinded him from reality, the stupidity of succumbing into mental stagnation – for a moment the original Frank is back in full force, grasping to bring back April into his embrace, to repent for all his inanity and insanity and insufferable ignorance, to move to Paris with her for their hopeful future… but it’s too late.
April, beautiful and romantic and dreamer April, is gone. And with this final realization the real Frank Wheeler dies as well, his performance now an empty shell on the stage of a lifeless theater – the perfect masculine role of American society, devoid of thought, philosophy, hope, or dreams.
There’s an interesting character named John Givings, who befriends the Wheelers before their untimely and ultimate downfall. His mother, Mrs. Helen Givings, is the perfect model of a peppy suburban woman, playing the role with such enthusiasm and vigor and self-righteousness and it’s almost sickening to see how utterly theatrical her socializing is; his father, Mr. Howard Givings, is apathetic, empty of care or thought and only so much inclined to turn on or off his hearing aid when he feels like it, and even then he is only half-listening and half-engaged in what is happening immediately. So for John to clash so vehemently and jarringly against his parents’ model behaviors, that he spits in the face of normality and the expectations of suburban character roles – it’s all a very revealing portrait of someone who is considered mentally sick, unstable and insane by 1950s American standards.
Maybe John really is mentally sick, we may never know. But what we do know is that he doesn’t give a damn about pretenses, social etiquette, or any of the frivolous and frilly nature of human interaction: he is honest, straightforward, unflinching and blunt, unwilling to compromise his behavior into another performance that is otherwise acceptable to most. No, John absolutely refuses this, and for this same reason he is drawn to Frank and April Wheeler, both whom possess John’s rebellious qualities deep down inside. He likes that Frank acknowledges that there is a hopeless emptiness to the American dream, and likes it even more that April is a true female – not a woman, but a female. A unbounded, independence female entity, the equal of a male entity and devoid of social restrictions or circumstance that chain down women into women.
So when he later hears the Frank and April have relinquished their last chance of freedom, John is of course disgusted, and knows immediately that Frank is the weak point: April, as female as she may be, cannot overcome the overbearing male dominance that is accepted by American society, and John understands that very well, though he does not completely ignore her faults either; John shoots his venom in the right direction, right at the core and pride of the compromised Frank Wheeler, right where it hurts and sores the most. John Givings is sickened by Frank’s hypocrisy, letting him know it immediately; and for that he is diagnosed far too unstable by his own mother, thus condemned to a longer life filled with more infrequency of visitations.
John Givings is the classic jester figure of King Lear, the unfaltering consciousness that we wished for Frank, April and everyone to suddenly wake up to and to see as clearly as day. Passionate and logical, John is us – the reader, the viewer, the audience. John is us. Yet ironically he is considered insane by the very setting he occupies, and by extension we are also mad by the suburban standards of Revolutionary Road.
But what is madness? Is it definitive, or is it relative to the societies in which we reside in? Is it so mad to dream of something greater, something better in the scheme of time? Is it so mad to hope for change that one may benefit from? And is it so mad to believe that there is always the possibility of freedom, which one may escape from the chaining confines of the current circumstances?
Herein lies the greatest irony of Revolutionary Road: for if Frank and April Wheeler had stayed true to themselves, they would’ve been deemed mad yet become true revolutionaries. But in mortgaging their hopes and dreams they invariably festered into the stagnant sea of suburbia, betraying not only their best selves but each other while attempting to compromise and choose between their own roles and performances in life; and ultimately, both the real Frank and the real April die all together in the bitter, bitter end.
This is the tragedy of Frank and April Wheeler. This is the tragedy of the American suburban dream. This is Revolutionary Road.