Warning: Massive fucking spoilage.
I haven’t seen the movie “Revolutionary Road” yet (I don’t think it’s even opened in Austin), but I have recently finished the book, figuring I’d want to see and probably review the movie when it came out. So I was intrigued to read this piece at the Bitch blog about the differences between the movie and the book, which are numerous, and seem to be oriented mainly around making the Wheelers a slightly more tolerable pair of people than they were in the book. This is, as the reviewer says, an especially problematic choice when it comes to Frank Wheeler, who is---I think---the villain of his own story, a petty, stupid man who throws his wife’s very life away in service of his own bullshit, even though it’s obviously an accident. As Tammy says, it’s a clear-cut critique of 1950s masculinity. Frank is a joke, ranting about the suburban lifestyle he’s loathe to abandon, fancying himself as an emotional libertine and yet unable to take the basic step of realizing that his wife’s pregnancies aren’t a comment on his manhood, a cheater who is more concerned with being cool than the feelings of others, and prone to psychoanalyzing his wife to shut down her criticisms of him, an open display of masculine power. It’s not just a little hinted at, either, that he’s one step shy of toying with the idea of institutionalizing a sane if sad April if that’s what it will take to force her not to have an abortion. He sucks.
But I was surprised to see Tammy’s assessment of Yates’ portrayal of April.
In the novel, April has a devastating childhood lacking any positive parental figures, a psychological dimension that enables Yates to paint her as a woman too neurotic and emotionally disabled to accept her role as wife and mother. If Yates seems to capture some of malaise Betty Friedan articulated in The Feminine Mystique, which was published two years after the novel, it was certainly not in the service of social criticism about women’s oppression. Instead, Yates is more concerned with depicting April’s disappointment that her self-deluded fantasies about adult life did not come true. She is by no means a feminist character, but she is a coherent one.