Explore the significance and presentation of emotional pain in one prose text we have studied, and one other text you have read as wider reading.

In Revolutionary Road, Yates presents emotional pain as a person’s weakness, rather than a justifiable reaction to a situation; the dismissive attitude towards the characters’ emotional pain epitomises the importance of how people presented themselves in the increasingly commercialised and materialistic society of 1950s America, and renders one’s emotional pain of secondary significance to the impression they give. The Wheelers’ neighbours, Shep and Milly Campbell, are forced to conceal their emotional pain in favour of presenting themselves with a stiff-upper-lip attitude conventional to 1950s American society. Following their estate’s failed performance of The Petrified Forest, Frank and April Wheeler cannot bear the thought of spending the evening with the Campbells, so cancel their plans; this news upsets the Campbells so deeply that their faces ‘sag in hurt and disappointment’. The nouns ‘hurt’ and ‘disappointment’ carry a large emotional weight and suggest that the Campbells feel let down by the Wheelers, yet the verb ‘sag’ suggests lifelessness, as if they expected this outcome, and have almost resigned themselves to feeling this way. The consonance of this verb further ridicules the Campbells, exemplifying their appearance as weak and somewhat pathetic in the public eye; this view may have been perpetuated had Milly not later ‘drawn a section of her lower lip between her teeth and slowly released it’, before conforming to comment that April must ‘feel awful about the whole thing… poor kid’. This acquiescence illustrates the drastic lengths people would go to present themselves as strong and stoic individuals in 1950s America – the Campbells are clearly disappointed that the Wheelers rejected their company, yet are subservient to this notion; instead of expressing their emotional pain they resort to presenting the façade of a unified and resolved friendship with the Wheelers. This neglect of emotional pain corresponds to the overwhelming regret Willy Noman experiences, but is afraid to express, in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman: the protagonist eventually comes to recognise that his façade of being an excellent salesman is transparent and unsubstantial – and ultimately much of the plot’s denial and mistrust emanate from this. Both Miller’s and Yates’ intentions in these texts is to expose the obscenely heightened value of materialistic and artificial experience in 1950s American society; how corrosive it is that not even true human nature, in the form of emotional pain, can be expressed without it being stigmatised. Emotional pain in Revolutionary Road is presented as something that faces significant censorship; it is highly important and authentic to the individual characters, but forced to be subjugated in order for these characters to continue to uphold a strong presentation of their lives, and gain social mobility: the intrinsic goal of 1950s American society, and one that Yates overtly opposes.