The American Dream In Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road

When people think about America in the 1950’s, the common image that is expected to be seen is the nuclear family. That classic Americana look of a husband working, the wife cleaning the house to perfection, and the two kids outside playing in a green grass yard next to the shimmering white picket fence. This new style of living in the suburbs is what many held to be the American Dream. However, this also reinforced the foundation for gender roles in society, and Richard Yates captures the idea of gender roles and how many families were challenged with the pressure of society weighing so heavily on how people should act, it often caused major conflict that everyone seemed to just ignore. In Revolutionary Road Richard Yates uses two main characters Frank and April Wheeler a struggling husband and wife to expose the constant battle of gender roles and throughout the novel we see many instances where the norms of those roles in a 1950’s society are challenged yet in the end nothing changes and ultimately “society” wins.
Before we introduce the novel, a key idea that …show more content…
Richard Yates, recognized this and wrote Revolutionary Road a novel depicting what many husbands and wives where going through but refused to talk about because it was against what society said was right. The idea of gender roles is wrong, telling people they have a specific job to do because of their gender is always an occurring issue and in fact still happens today but in a new area, the work place. The question is when will we as a people finally understand and accept that we are all equals regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and everything else we use to define ourselves by standards created long ago that are now