An Analysis On The Middle-class Anxiety In Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates(1926-1992),who was hailed as “a great writer of the Age of Anxiety” in America,created a story happened in a fictional middle-class community named Revolutionary Hill Estates in his first novel Revolutionary Road(1961).The plotline revolves around how the Wheelers,which are the protagonists,attempt to escape from Revolutionary Hill Estates and emigrate to Paris but end up in failure.By shaping different main characters including the Wheelers,the Campbells and the Givings' s Family,Yates reveals their problems of anxieties that attribute to family,career,sociality and time underlying the superficial comforts.First of all,The middle-class people prefer consumption of spiritual culture at leisure,as they've already gained superior material lives.However,as a status symbol,the leisure life can increase peer pressures when middle-class people are pursuing such an ideal lifestyle.In addition,middle-class people are capable of choosing diverse lifestyles because of their relatively adequate economic freedom.For most conservative middle-class people,to choose a lifestyle freely sometimes means to ruin the stable current life nevertheless.Meanwhile,putting too much emphasis on other people's judgements is also a reason why they can hardly make choices of free will.Last but not least,kitsch,which is a significant feature of middle-class aesthetic taste,can somehow lead to false consciousness in a political way.The false consciousness will not only present a false appearance of peace and prosperity but also make people become more and more insensitive to the real world.When confronting the problems of anxiety,different people take different measures,and this can be compared to different kinds of roles including revolutionaries,conservatives,and multitudes in a revolution.Accordingly,the ironic meaning of the word “revolutionary” in the novel's title shows up.The Wheelers tries to start a “revolution” but finally make it a tragedy because of their weakness and divergence of opinions.Mrs.Givings,who is conservative,realizes how anxious she really is though,she deceives herself and takes some distorted values as the criteria to tell whether a person is good or bad.The Campbells,who tried to make a “revolution” once but failed,have learned to compromise after getting through all the difficulties in the past.There's practical significance when it comes to the narratives of middle-class anxiety in Revolutionary Road.First,Yates reflects his anxiety rooted in childhood in the characters.By expressing his anxiety in the fiction,he is relieved in a way.Second,the characters created by Yates and based on ordinary people are typical.Therefore,when reading about the anxieties of the characters,the readers can easily be affected by the stories because of sympathies.Third,the 1950 s was a period full of deceit in American life.Yates shows the middle-class anxiety in Revolutionary Road in order that he can reveal the harms of such unthinking optimism.