THE AMERICAN DREAM OF SELF-RELIANCE:AVATARS OF THE ANTI-HEROIC COUPLE
THE AMERICAN DREAM OF SELF-RELIANCE:AVATARS OF THE ANTI-HEROIC COUPLE

Summary/Abstract: Self-Reliance is perhaps the most powerful American myth. It precedes Ralph Waldo Emerson himself in a vision that Benjamin Franklin called The American Dream: the availability of success to anyone who is ready to surpass one’s own limits. This classic American heritage of thought has been questioned again and again by writers who put their national culture icons and their (sense of) history on the map of world literature. And further on, high up there, on the screen of really memorable movies. My case in point here is Richard Yates’s 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road. Its outstanding 2008 film version, achieved by Sam Mendes, who directed a cast of actors starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, is much more than a fortunate coincidence. Ironic distortion and doom interweave as echoes of one of the few books which William Faulkner wrote out of Yoknapatwpha County: The Wild Palms (1939). Whether modern or post-modern, the two realistic novels share a focus on the anti-heroic couple. Their main delusions stem from the deepest memory of American culture: the (revolutionary) myth of self-reliance.

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