Suburbia and the American Dream: Myth vs. Reality
This response paper examines postwar American suburbia as portrayed in D.J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, Lynn Spigel's Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and the 1968 film The Swimmer. Drawing on these works, the paper argues that suburbia—far from embodying the American Dream—was often a problematic and even dangerous environment. Themes of racial segregation, social conformity, media-driven illusion, financial ruin, and psychological despair are traced through each text, culminating in a conclusion that the gap between the idealized suburban image and lived reality drove many Americans to disillusionment and, in some cases, self-destruction.
- Introduction: The Promised Land of Suburbia: Thesis and overview of four primary sources
- Postwar White Flight and the Making of Suburban Space: Racial segregation and suburban demographic formation
- The Swimmer: A Dangerous Journey Home: Ned Merrill's symbolic descent into suburban despair
- Holy Land and Revolutionary Road: Violence and Despair: Crime and suicide in Waldie and Yates
- Media, Television, and the Suburban Illusion: Television's role in shaping unattainable suburban ideals
- Conclusion: Suburbia's promise versus its painful lived reality
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What makes this paper effective
- Synthesizes four distinct primary sources — three books and a film — into a coherent comparative argument about suburbia's dark underside.
- Uses direct, well-chosen quotations from each source to ground claims in textual evidence rather than assertion alone.
- Moves fluidly between sociological analysis (Spigel's demographic data) and literary/cinematic close reading (Ned Merrill's pool journey, April Wheeler's suicide), showing range across genres.
- The extended reading of "The Swimmer" as metaphor for suburban delusion is particularly effective, tracing Merrill's psychological descent pool by pool.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis across mixed media (memoir, novel, academic nonfiction, and film), using each source to reinforce a single thesis. Rather than treating the works in isolation, the author draws explicit parallels — Merrill's river journey mirroring the San Gabriel River incident in Waldie, or the Hallorans echoing Frank Wheeler's contempt for suburbanites — to build a cumulative argumentative picture.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis-driven introduction naming all four sources and the central claim. A unified "Review and Discussion" section moves through the sources in sequence, weaving in sociological context from Spigel before turning to the film, then Waldie, then Yates, and back to Spigel's media analysis. A brief conclusion synthesizes findings and reasserts the thesis with measured qualification. The structure is straightforward and appropriate for a response paper at the undergraduate level.
Introduction: The Promised Land of Suburbia
The fulfillment of the American Dream was supposed to be found in the suburbs, and millions of Americans certainly tried to find it there. Like participants in a gold rush, however, although some Americans managed to realize their dream in suburbia, many others ended up disillusioned, deceived, divorced, and broke — or worse. In not a few cases, suburbanites living lives of quiet desperation ended up taking their own lives, as well as the lives of others in the process.
In the readings — Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D.J. Waldie, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, and Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs by Lynn Spigel, as well as the classic motion picture The Swimmer directed by Frank Perry — suburbia is often portrayed as a problematic, even dangerous environment for American men. This paper provides a review of these works and an analysis of the film to determine whether this was in fact the case, along with supporting rationale.
Postwar White Flight and the Making of Suburban Space
Following the end of World War II, millions of Americans flocked to the suburbs in an attempt to secure their piece of the American pie, as well as to escape the influx of African Americans into northern cities — a process that has been termed "white flight." Consequently, the suburbia of the postwar era was characterized by certain segments of the population seeking to sequester themselves away from other segments, in what were intended to be utopian pockets of existence. According to Spigel, "Despite the Civil Rights movement and fair housing legislation of the 1960s, from 1960 to 1977, 4 million whites moved out of central cities, while the number of whites living in suburbs increased by twenty-two million. During the same years, the inner city black population grew by 6 million" (2001, p. 16). It seems reasonable, then, to characterize the suburbia of the latter half of the twentieth century as primarily a white American experience that was profoundly different from life in the big city. In this regard, Spigel adds that "Postwar America witnessed a significant shift in traditional notions of neighborhood. Mass-produced suburbs such as Levittown, New York, and Park Forest, Illinois, replaced previous forms of public space with a newly defined aesthetic of prefabrication" (2001, p. 33).
These mass-produced suburbs welcomed everyone — so long as they fit the intended American Dream mold. "At the center of the suburban space," Spigel writes, "was the young, upwardly mobile middle-class family; the suburban community was designed to correspond with and reproduce patterns of nuclear family life" (p. 33). Other Americans who failed to meet these criteria — including "older people, gay and lesbian people, homeless people, unmarried people, and people of color" — were simply not welcome and were "relegated back to the cities" (2001, p. 33). This is not to say that the suburbs were entirely without diversity, but rather that the suburban experience was largely confined to white Americans. According to Spigel, "Although the attempt to zone out 'undesirables' was never totally successful, this antiseptic model of space was the reigning aesthetic at the heart of the postwar suburb" (p. 34).
In the course of this suburbanization, some young, upwardly mobile, middle-class white families managed to overcome suburbia's ugly downsides and build new lives for themselves, typified by a happy family life and meaningful professional careers. Many others, however — who likely outnumbered the successful and happy ones by far — found that the move to the suburbs was a definite mistake, and their lives ended up far different from what the American Dream had promised.
References
Cheever, John and Eleanor Perry. 1968. "The Swimmer." Columbia Tristar Home Video.
Spigel, Lynn. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press.
Waldie, D.J. 2005. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Yates, Richard. 1962. Revolutionary Road. Boston: Bantam Books.
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