At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home: Domesticity and the Early Short Stories of Richard Yates

Abstract

Richard Yates is best known for his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, which speaks clearly and powerfully to questions of home, escape and ultimate entrapment in the suburban idyll of Eisenhower-era middle-class white America, a bleak examination of an ideal that promised safety, community, and belonging (to those allowed to belong). As fine a novel as Revolutionary Road may be, Yates' short fiction is in ways more compelling and poignant. In pieces that focus on unremarkable, ordinary individuals, it addresses a considerably broader range of experiences of home, isolation and loneliness in the 1950s in dialog with the postwar hegemonic ideal of white suburban middle-class domesticity. The intent of this paper is to critically examine themes of home and alienation in selections from Yates' short story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) – stories written from 1951-1961 and published in various periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, in order to explore the complexity of 1950s American discourse surrounding home and domesticity, perhaps surprisingly from the pen of a mainstream white male author.