Revolutionary Road

April Wheeler née Johnson is a stunningly beautiful young woman who had a tough and transitory childhood. Her parents were hardly in the picture, and she grew up living with various aunts. She was studying theater before she met Frank, became pregnant, and married him. Much like Frank, April desires a life that does not conform to the social mores and norms pressed upon her by society.

April is the novel’s other important protagonist. Her story and outcome are no less important than Frank’s, but the narrator tells the story much more from his point of view than hers. However, her decisions and fate are strictly intertwined with Frank’s. Like Frank, she fills the antiheroine trope. There is much to admire and revere in April, but her human limitations bring about her death at the end of the novel. April’s tragic flaw is not so easy to identify. In essence, it is her inability to reconcile her desire for personal freedom and self-determination with motherhood, coupled with societal pressures and definitions of a mother’s role inside and outside the home. The expectation that a woman should remain home and tend to the household chores and children while the man works is a key element to the 1950s ideal of the American Dream. This is something wholly unacceptable for April, and it makes her miserable.

Unlike Frank, however, April is willing to forego the safety and security of their suburban life to pursue her desired lifestyle. She has no less to lose than Frank. She is willing to accept the role of breadwinner in France so that Frank can find himself. Nevertheless, fear is involved in her reluctance to push forward with the plan when she becomes pregnant. Though she attempts to hold on to the idea that she can give birth while they are in Europe, Frank’s counterarguments quickly undermine her self-assurance, and she spirals. Unable to achieve escape with Frank, April takes one last risk to achieve her dream. This ends tragically with her dying of a self-managed abortion.

Sheppard Sears Campbell is a secondary character in the novel, but he plays an important role as Frank’s foil. The two men have a lot in common, but their key difference is how they handle their lives. Frank grew up in a lower-middle-class family, and, most importantly, with a father he both admired and despised. Because of his father, Frank was able to form a concept of masculinity without going through the extreme measures Shep did. Shep, by contrast, was raised by a single mother who wanted to raise him as an intellectual. He fought against this by forcing himself to become a typical tough guy.

His need to define his masculinity plays a major role in how he remembers his soldier days (elite paratrooper, Silver Star recipient, field commission), all of which is, as he argues, proof enough of his masculinity. It also explains why he became a mechanical engineer: He found the job to be “unquestionably masculine” (139). Nevertheless, Shep feels a desire for the bohemian life of an intellectual, something he missed out on because he fought against his mother. Unlike Frank, however, he did not dwell on it for long, and when it failed to correspond to his and his family’s needs, he gave it up: “without regret” (142).

For all intents and purposes, for better or worse, Shep has found contentment with his life. That does not mean he is without weakness or doesn’t long for something else. He is madly in love with April and imagines being with her in Paris. Nevertheless, his dreams never carry him away; he never acts on any of those fantasies or desires and remains a paragon of 1950s American masculinity.

Milly Campbell is a tertiary and flat character. She provides the novel with the quintessential, quiet, exemplary American wife and mother, and is therefore a foil for April. She is not unattractive, nor is she beautiful, especially when compared to April. However, she is true to Shep, takes care of the children and the house, and appears perfectly content to do so. Milly is Shep’s anchor to a stable and secure life. Like Frank, Shep has a wild streak in him that yearns for a certain freedom, but the instability Shep witnesses in April leaves him, at the end of the novel, cleaving more to Milly than ever before.

Helen Givings is a working woman, a real estate agent who provides another example of a character looking for safety and security from a troubled world within the confines of American suburbia. Helen buries much of her fear and troubles in her work. She was raised under the motto of the protestant work ethic by a father who taught her that “hard work […] is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man — and of woman” (155). Therefore, as the joy of married life waned, she dove into work as a means of diversion from her troubles.

Furthermore, she works hard to appear forever happy and smiling in public because it is important for her that others see only that aspect of her. She hides her frailties from everyone. If something bothers her, she cries alone in her room before quickly swallowing it all down. Helen is a character that fits the theatrical metaphor that plays throughout the novel. Her outer appearance is like a costume and a mask. This is one of the major points of antagonism between her and her son. John knows it’s all an act, and he loathes it. Furthermore, her relationship with work offers the reader a hypothetical question regarding April and whether she could have been happy working in Europe, or even nearby.

John Givings served in the navy before going to MIT. After he finished his studies, he became a professor of mathematics. He was on the path to achieving the American Dream, but something happened to him to cause him to be institutionalized, though the reader never discovers what it was. Because he is an “irrational” character who speaks truths, John is a jester or fool figure.

John is another secondary character like his mom, but his influence over the protagonists is much greater than hers. If any character could be deemed the novel’s antagonist, it is John, though he is only antagonistic in Part 3, Chapter 5. One of John’s primary roles in the novel is to illustrate the irrationality of nonconformity. His hostility toward the system landed him in a psychiatric hospital.

It is in this role of social outcast that he meets April and Frank. At first, he echoes and agrees with their plans to move to Europe, and he and Frank find common ground in their critiques of modern American culture. However, when it is revealed that the Wheeler’s plans have fallen through, John quickly ascertains the reasons why. The confrontation between John and Frank not only illustrates John’s perceptiveness but his animosity toward those who surrender their dreams for the security and safety of conformity—in this case, the stable but dull job and the house in the suburbs. His parting remark to April about her unborn child is arguably the point that pushes April over the edge.