52 pages • 1 hour read
Sloan WilsonThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Illusory Nature of the American Dream
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes mental health conditions, specifically connected to war trauma.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit explores the contours of the American Dream, a belief that anyone can succeed in America through hard work and dedication, and that each generation should expect greater material success and comfort than the last. Tom Rath is a protagonist whose relationship to the American Dream has always been fraught. He was born into a wealthy family whose fortunes have since diminished. He served his country during World War II, and since returning, has worked full time to support his growing family. He has a small house in suburbia, a wife, children, and a career, but this middle-class life is a far cry from the opulence he was born into, and as his bills pile up he feels himself in danger of losing even the modest comfort he has achieved. The vague memory of generational wealth makes his hard work and its modest rewards feel empty and futile.
As he struggles to get ahead, Tom becomes increasingly disillusioned. Westport, Connecticut is an affluent coastal community, and in many ways Tom’s life there is one of enormous privilege, but his frame of reference is local—he compares himself not to the country as a whole but to the more affluent people around him. He and his wife live in the kind of modest house often thought of as a “starter home,” on a street that is viewed in the neighborhood as “a stepping stone to the same kind of life on a bigger scale” (109). This, according to the novel, is the essence of the American Dream: It is always elsewhere, just out of reach, being lived by someone else. Tom and Betsy believe that all they need to enter (or return to) that glittering world is more money, so Tom enters the corporate world, donning the eponymous gray flannel suit, in pursuit of an elevated version of the American Dream. He wants more and he is prepared to work and sacrifice to achieve it. To address his alienation from American society, Tom repurposes his life around the expectations of the American Dream.
Tom’s change in career brings him into contact with Ralph Hopkins, a man famous in the business world for his wealth and success. He is the living, breathing embodiment of the American Dream. He has worked harder than anyone else and, as a result, he has been granted wealth, power, and status beyond all those around him. To Tom, Hopkins seems to have everything that he craves. The more Tom gets to know Hopkins, however, the more he comes to realize that Hopkins is not happy. Hopkins has chosen his career over his family. His hard work and charisma mask a pain which he reveals to Tom in fleeting moments of honesty. Hopkins has become estranged from his family because he cannot be there for them emotionally while also committing countless hours to his job that his success demands. In Hopkins, Tom witnesses the tragic endpoint of the idealized American Dream. Hard work and dedication have not made Hopkins happy. Instead, he is addicted to work at the expense of everything else. He is rich but has no time to spend his money, nor anything to spend it on. Hopkins’s victory is empty.
This experience prompts Tom to reconsider what he wants from life. Before entering the corporate world, he worked for a charity. The work was unexciting and held little potential for growth, but it gave Tom time to spend with his family and a feeling that he was doing good, necessary work. At the end of the novel, Tom takes up Hopkins’s offer of a full-time job with the mental health campaign. Though he is now paid more, Tom accepts the lifestyle that felt so limited and unsatisfying in the past. The true American Dream, he comes to realize, is not to be reached through the corporate world. Instead, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit functions as a cautionary tale about greed and ambition. Tom is taught that success can be dehumanizing. Hopkins, emotionally eviscerated by his own success, is turned from an enviable to a pitiable character. Rather than striving to be like Hopkins, Tom decides to give up his ambition to live the life that Hopkins has forsaken.
Suburbanization and Alienation
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit locates its exploration of the American Dream in the suburbs—a landscape that in the 1950s was rapidly becoming synonymous with that dream and with the pressures that came with it. Suburban living expanded rapidly in 1950s America, making homeownership accessible to a wider swathe of the US population than ever before while exacerbating the feelings of isolation and status competition that, in Sloane’s view, make the American Dream a trap for many people. In many new developments, houses were grouped by cost, with larger and more expensive houses on one street and smaller, cheaper houses on another, making a person’s address a highly legible indicator of their relative wealth and status, as seen in Betsy and Tom’s neighborhood, where their street is viewed as “a stepping stone to the same kind of life on a bigger scale” (109).
Betsy and Tom deeply resent their small, suburban home, and their complaints relate to the profound sense of alienation that sprung out of suburban living. Though the houses are individual, they are cramped together in a relatively compact space. The dominance of single-family homes, with apartments and places of business relegated to a different section of town, fosters a sense of alienation and loneliness. Despite the occasional parties in Betsy and Tom’s neighborhood, no one has fun. The one appearance of a neighbor in the opening chapters of the novel is an invitation to a cocktail party, one which Betsy is not pleased to receive. There are few friends in suburbia, as each household is locked in a competition of public performance. They string their neighbors along with elaborate displays of conspicuous consumption, not able to save anything or elevate their lives because they feel compelled to compete with one another over houses, cars, television sets, and other products which signal to the neighborhood that the family is thriving. Betsy and Tom hate their suburban house because of what it represents: the alienation of suburban living.
The family moves to a bigger house when Tom’s grandmother dies. In this move, the family seemingly gets everything they want. They move to a real community and a much larger house. In fact, Tom is able to provide his family with something resembling the luxury of his own youth for the first time in their lives. He grew up in this house, and he resents that he is not able to provide his children with similar comforts and opportunities. Nevertheless, the bigger house does nothing to address Tom and Betsy’s unhappiness. They are not alone in this respect. Helen Hopkins moved to an even larger house in South Bay. Every person who sees the mansion is impressed by its scale and grandeur, yet Helen is not happy. She is alienated from society because her husband has been consumed by the corporate world. Once Susan leaves, Helen is alone in a vast, empty house, a reminder of her emotional alienation from anyone who might have loved her. Helen’s melancholy shows that the grander life Tom and Betsy envy is just as empty as their suburban dream.
The opulence that once belonged to Tom’s grandmother is not sustainable for his family in the present, and in trying to hold onto their American dream, they are forced to participate in the suburbanization of Tom’s hometown. Unable to afford to live on such a vast plot of land, they hatch a plan to divide the plot into much smaller subplots, building up to 80 new houses on the land once occupied by one. This venture will be very profitable for Tom, but it will change the community in South Bay forever. As the locals predict, Tom’s plans will dramatically increase the population of the town without necessarily increasing the public facilities that such an increase would demand. Despite the outcry from some of the town’s residents, some version of this change is inevitable. Post-war population growth and the rapid expansion of the middle class mean that far more people need houses—and can afford to buy them—than ever before. There are too many potential homeowners in Connecticut for everyone to have their own 20-acre estate. For all the alienation and dissatisfaction that they experienced in the suburbs, Tom and Betsy find themselves recreating just such a neighborhood, as the American Dream gets carved into smaller and smaller pieces.
The Burden of Hidden Trauma
Throughout The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, characters experience alienation and anxiety as a result of hidden trauma. Protagonist Tom Rath has many traumatic memories, which he is prompted to revisit as he encounters people and places from his past. When he first drives out to see his grandmother in South Bay, for example, he must drive past the corner where his father died many years earlier in a tragic car crash. Tom must then drive past this same corner every day when he moves into his grandmother’s house following her death. Meanwhile, he is continually haunted by his memories of the war, during which he killed 17 men. The killing of a young German soldier stands out particularly in his mind, as does the accidental killing of his friend, Hank Mahoney. Tom carries these traumas with him into his post-war life—his workplace and the home he shares with his family.
Tom’s trauma is compounded by the fact that he cannot share his traumatic experiences with anyone. Though Betsy is desperate for openness and honesty, Tom feels too ashamed of his actions to tell her about them. He cannot tell her about the men he killed as he does not want to relive this experience. He cannot tell her about his father’s death, as the rest of his family kept many details of the tragedy a secret from him. He cannot tell Betsy about his affair in Rome because he fears that she will leave him. Society, Tom believes, has taught him to suppress these emotions. In the competitive atmosphere of post-war suburbia, only success and happiness are accepted, and pain must be hidden away. He bottles up his frustrations until he becomes unable to speak openly about anything at all. He is cut adrift from the world, including his wife. His loveless, uncommunicative marriage is a direct product of his repression of his traumatic memories. Extrapolated to society as a whole, and the millions of others traumatized by the horrific events of the 1930s and 40s, Tom’s suffering is suggestive of a broader social malaise caused by unspoken, unaddressed trauma.
Tom wrestles with the idea of telling his wife about his past for many years. Only when Betsy encourages Tom to take a more honest approach to his life is he able to reveal his hidden traumas. By telling Betsy about his affair, he eases the burden of secrecy. In the future, he promises, he will be able to share with her his memories of killing other men, a promise which he is only able to make because of their new policy of open, honest, direct communication. Tom hurts Betsy by telling her about his past, but his trauma—and his honest discussion of his trauma—allows her to contextualize his mistakes. Trauma informs Tom’s character, and by understanding the role trauma has played in his life, Betsy is able to understand her husband better. She may not excuse Tom’s actions, nor does she necessarily forgive him, but she does come to understand him.
