\u201cWouldn\u2019t You Like to be Loved by April Wheeler: Suburban and Feminine Containment in Revolutionary Road<\/i>\u201d is the culminating essay from my semester in EN 220: Postwar American Literature. This final assignment gave me free reign to examine any prominent postwar themes in any of the pieces I read in the course.<\/p>\n
From the moment I read Richard Yates\u2019 Revolutionary Road<\/i>, I knew I wanted to write about it. I was drawn in by Yates\u2019 writing style, his social commentary, and of course his flawed characters. Revolutionary Road<\/i> quickly became one of my favorite novels, and I was eager to explore what literary criticism surrounded it. To my surprise, I found that almost none existed. For a long time, scholars paid this novel no critical attention. One of the most difficult experiences I had in writing this paper was locating relevant research.<\/p>\n
After taking a step back and thinking about what really intrigued me in this novel, I realized that I wanted to understand better the entrapment April Wheeler, Yates\u2019 protagonist, experiences, and why breaking out of such a state proves almost impossible for her. I broadened my research to find discussions of these themes in the postwar era, and I found compelling theories in Alan Nadel\u2019s and Betty Friedan\u2019s work\u2014the former discussing suburbia, the latter feminism.<\/p>\n
Once I discovered sources with which I could engage, I genuinely enjoyed writing this essay. The lack of scholarship on Yates actually granted me a lot of freedom with which to express my own analysis of this novel. I also enjoyed being able to write about feminism in the 1950s through a critical lens. Most of all, however, I am ecstatic that Yates and Revolutionary Road<\/i> are finally receiving some well-deserved critical attention.<\/p>\n
SABRINA PATRIZIO<\/strong> is a member of the School of Management\u2019s class of 2016, intending to major in Business Administration as well as to minor in Italian. She is also a proud member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. Writing is her passion and to date she has written numerous short stories and plays, several of which have been published or performed. Sabrina enjoys performing in both dance and theatre productions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWouldn\u2019t You Like to be Loved by April Wheeler: Suburban and Feminine Containment in Revolutionary Road\u201d is the culminating essay from my semester in EN 220: Postwar American Literature. This final assignment gave me free reign to examine any prominent postwar themes in any of the pieces I read in the course. From the moment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":0,"parent":6726,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6827"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7560,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6827\/revisions\/7560"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}