The two favorite novels of Richard Yates were Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. You now can guess what bovarysme means. An A. I. bot, cribbing from the 2008 New Yorker article Like Men Betrayed by James Wood explains the term and Yates’s use of it in Revolutionary Road.
Richard Yates utilized the concept of bovarysme—the delusional desire to escape one’s reality through romantic fantasy, derived from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—as a central critique of mid-century American masculinity and suburban life. In his novel Revolutionary Road, the protagonist Frank Wheeler exhibits this trait by clinging to the dream of a creative life in Paris while remaining trapped in a mundane job and domestic routine.
The narrative serves as a “savage inversion” of Flaubert’s work: whereas Emma Bovary’s delusions lead to her suicide, April Wheeler dies trying to break free from suburban stagnation, while Frank ultimately “wins” by retreating into the safe, conformist stability she despised. Yates portrays Frank as a “rank escapist” who arrogantly claims the right to dream of adventure while secretly craving the timidity and security of the status quo.
This theme extends beyond Revolutionary Road to Yates’s broader body of work, where male characters are depicted as anxious, hysterical, and easily provoked by female resistance. Their bovarysme functions as a defense mechanism against feelings of inadequacy, often exacerbated by their perceived failures to live up to patriarchal or wartime expectations. Critics note that this obsessive focus on male anxiety and the failure of romantic delusions makes Yates’s work a radical, albeit traditional, indictment of the “American solitude” found in post-war suburbia.
Some years back an Irish friend who had made it in America asked me to house and dog sit for her in Baltimore. I thought it was a great opportunity to see the ‘real’ America so accepted. On the first morning when I was alone with the dogs I walked down the drive and looked up and down the empty street with its lovely houses and manicured lawns. It was a beautiful, perfectly silent morning. Maybe too silent. “This is exactly like Revolutionary Road,” I thought….