In “Revolutionary Road,” April and Frank Wheeler are a young married couple driven by ideas. The ideas they hold are of essence and forms, conceptions of things and states and realities that—for them—hold truth, greatness, and validity inherently within them. This essentialist thinking permeates the entire novel, as the couple desperately tries to avoid the opposite of their ideals — mundanity, normalcy, and mediocrity. While April and Frank are driven by ideas, they are also unable to think beyond them, unable to break through the cultural context of their time.
April and Frank do not identify with the suburban lifestyle of order and well-manicured lawns. They hail from a young adulthood of interesting bar room conversations, drinks, and social spheres where beauty, wit, and mobility reign. Their identity lies with the city hip, and together, they are trying (quite cognizant of their failing) to embody the ideal of the 1950’s family, and they miss their former lives of freedom and verve. Over drinks in the living room, they claim to want a life of intellect, of choice, of existential tension in the moment.
The book opens to a scene from a community theatre, where the reader may glimpse April Wheeler apart from reality, as she exists in the revealing stage light for the reader’s inspection. She is classically beautiful, and carries herself with dignity. But she is also fallible, and easily affected by her surroundings and interactions with others. The stage presence she opens with — one more than strong enough to launch a community theatre with pride — quickly descends into a terse, high shouldered, and tight-lipped performance that barely conceals her public terror as the play falls apart. Beyond her own performance, the success of the play was beyond her control — yet it becomes her. April cannot reconcile her identity with her circumstances, and so comes to have only a vaporous existence of self. April exists in a tension between practical circumstances she despises and absolute ideas that she desires, desperately, to realize.
Frank Wheeler is introduced as the husband, chewing on his fists in the front row, desperate to approach his wife after the show with just the right words. He also has little ability to maintain his sense of self and realism in the face of a social setting, and feels a tragic embarrassment for April’s stage experience. Frank is also driven by ideas that cannot have a sustained match in the world of the real.
Omniscient narration nimbly travels through the circumstances of their world to show the reader the complexity of the situations the couple faces. It is not just the opening play of a fledgling community theatre. The play itself represents the efforts of an entire social group, the performance becomes representative of the worth, or lack thereof, of an entire social trend. April and Frank are not simply two people with two children moving through the world, April and Frank are incarnations of a larger reality—they themselves are a performance which will make or break the ideas they are seen to embody. The entire validity of the bohemian intelligentsia, the whole of the city cool who trend toward the suburbs rests upon the Laurel Players, and the Laurel Players fail, bringing down the construction of the entire metaphorical house with them.
The car ride home explores the depths of April and Frank’s dysfunction. She might step into the path of an oncoming vehicle, he might hit her. And in this passion of a fight, they risk the worst — to be seen upon the shoulder of the road by those who constitute their social sphere. Frank still cares to mind, but April, wholly subsumed in her inner turmoil, exists only in the moment — her inner moment. April’s moments of realization are always internal to her self, a narrative tool that emphasizes the depths of her conflict between self and world, subjectivity and objectivity, between idea and actuality. She cannot bring herself present in a moment, she instead holds herself back, turns herself inward, and plans for a future moment that will be ideal in its time and space. She taunts Frank with a nihilistic passive aggression, and Frank’s sense of pride allows him to take the bait throughout the novel.
Though it is clear to the reader (and also to Frank) that the taproot of their connection to each other has rotted, April devises a platonic plan that will remedy the Wheelers from their miserable life in the midst of the vapid American suburbs. They will move to Paris, and she will support them by being a stenographer for a government agency. The plan is sold to Frank on the grounds that he has been trapped by an unfair seriousness since he took a job, and that he will be able to “find himself” when he is relieved of the necessity of having a day job.
Interestingly, the Wheelers never consider the possibility of finding April work outside of the home in their current life. Instead, the plot is a continuous cultivation of the most dissonant of realities, April working through the doldrums of home care and children while Frank frustrates himself with uninteresting magazines and preoccupies himself with brute-force labor building the stone path from the house (and an affair with the well-endowed secretary at the office).
Despite the fact that April is clearly capable of navigating the city, shopping, and applying for jobs, she does not look for a job in a place she may likely find it. She is not seeking practical applications to free herself from her frustrations, she is enchanting herself with a far off ideal — a reality that can only be had though the most difficult series of events. While Frank and April toy with the far-off notion of switching up the gendered roles of provider and provided for, they are not ready or willing to engage in the actuality of this switch, they can only imagine those roles within a different cultural context — one where that shift seems more socially appropriate.
Neither Frank nor April is true to their marriage vows, but neither give any thought as to what it would truly be like if they were to end their relationship and seek another. It is as if the practical world of realities is unmovable, and that the power of choice exists only in superfluous actions and the constructing of impossible ideas.
As Frank begins to realize the potential of “finding himself” within the job he currently has, through his “speaking of” series of pamphlets and a new position, April finds she is pregnant and prepares for the path she intended to take the first time- to abort the fetus. And as Frank was sold the bill of Paris, April is now sold the bill of Baby and of the good life on Revolutionary Road. It is in this turn of the novel that Franks fallibility and lack of ethic becomes poignantly clear to the reader.
Frank is unable to stomach the idea of an abortion, a “violence to one’s own substance.” He commits himself to a cultivated campaign of sweet earnestness, where every thought and action he makes within the family is chosen very carefully to support the notion of the good life on Revolutionary Road. He powers over April in these way for weeks, spiteful of the calendar that marks the days he must continue—the window of opportunity for April to make the choice.
April, for reasons undisclosed to the reader (as Frank’s thinking has nearly overcome the narration), does not go through with the abortion. At the last possible moment, Frank hesitantly notes the closing window to April, at which she scoffs at him for bringing it up again, asserting that she has chosen and he best not bother a done deal. But really, April chose not to choose, which is quite different than affirming a choice to have a child. But Frank, busy fulfilling his needs at work and through his ongoing affair, is oblivious to her now. His work is done, as he was successful at averting her ambitions to abort during the window of opportunity. He is immediately distant, and somewhat proud of being free from the yoke of proving.
A counterpoint to the idealism of April and Frank lies in the Givings family. In social circumstances, Mrs. Givings is all a-flutter, a seemingly vapid display of social candor that is meaningless. At home, we glimpse her reveling in the particular simple joys of an applied life, but we find she also lacks a strong enough sense of self to actually be herself in various social situations. To the Wheelers, she represents artifice, but she is also a self-made professional — a woman professional in the 1950′s, no less.
Her odd social mannerisms — chattering meaningless things, needlessly bracing herself as a passenger seat driver — conceal the fact that, of all the characters the reader enters the mind of for any length of time, Mrs. Givings has the most peace of mind. This female-feminine persona of the applied life of simple pleasures and a career of one’s own stands in stark contrast to April Wheeler. Despite the chattering, and despite her husband’s tendency to turn his hearing aid off without mentioning it, Mrs. Givings is a self. She takes her own pleasures from the world (gardening, home-keeping, the buying and selling of houses) and enjoys her practical existence.
John Givings, her mathematician son, enters the story as a deranged and potentially dangerous wild card at the time of April and Frank’s decision to move to Paris. John Givings represents a man in the world who, perhaps by losing his ideals or perhaps by fully embodying them, no longer is welcome by society. John Givings represents the counter philosophical reality to that espoused by April and Frank.
The Wheelers seek a life where their society matches their ideas, not a society that is utterly mundane. John Givings represents a man who is anything but mediocrity, a man who was somehow changed—perhaps even by his ideas—who now has no place in society. April can only conceive herself as a Parisian, in a society that is different. Frank revels in himself in any social situation. So here we see the spectrum of individual and collective: in John, the person out of place, in April, the person desiring a different place, and in Frank, despite his rhetoric, the person who is in place.
Beneath the spoken desires of April and Frank there is a need to belong and a need for personal identity. The tone of the novel explores the realist idea that there is an essence of universal things, and it can only be found in certain places, at certain times. It was easy for April and Frank to indulge in idealistic dreaming that cultivates — or taps into — a certain reality (like a Parisian existence), but they were unable, or unwilling, to cultivate that reality out of the real world in which they found themselves. William James once said, “the greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” Author Richard Yates might have had those words on his mind when he chose to name the place where the big white house with black windows sat “Revolutionary Road,” which calls into question the very notion of American society as progress.
Tags: choice, identity, narrative, self representation