A troubled past: reconfiguring postwar suburban American identity in revolutionary road, 1961 and mad men, 2007-2012

This thesis takes a cultural studies approach to representations of post-war U.S.
suburbia in Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, as well as in the
contemporary AMC television series Mad Men. These texts explore the postwar time
period, which holds a persistently prominent and idealized space in the collective cultural
imagination of America, despite the fact that it was a period troubled by isolationism,
containment culture, rampant consumerism, and extreme pressure to conform to social
roles. This project disrupts the romantic narrative of postwar America by focusing on the
latent anxiety within the suburban landscape—by interrogating the performative nature of
the planned communities of the 1950s and 1960s and exposing the tensions that were
borne out of the rise of domesticity and consumerism. This project explores the descent
into a society obsessed with consumerism and conformity, and seeks to interrogate the
culture’s false nostalgia for the time period.