On this season, we'll explore our most ingrained beliefs, delusions, and archetypes, the ways that cognitive dissonance shapes our culture and how our reality is created by the stories we tell.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

The attractive home of John and Margaret Bryant, the home they've always dreamed of,

the happiest investment they have ever made.

So many people these days, we live in the suburbs.

I was practically a prisoner in my own home.

Well, I just could not live beside them.

I moved here because it was a white community.

Stop and listen to me.

Listen, listen to me.

Listen to me! They're not killing!

The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.

Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light.

I enter the lit house.

Like so many gloomy teenagers growing up in the suburbs, I was obsessed with Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet writing through the most quintessentially suburban of decades, the 1950s.

If you aren't a fan of poetry, you may still know Plath,

as most people do, for her famous suicide, her head in one of the most domestic of symbols,

the oven, breathing in the gas until she fell asleep and died. Sylvia Plath has become something of a relic now, a symbol of the

oppression of the domestic, of motherhood, of suburbia, how it takes away the real and replaces

it with a repressive and almost horrifying boredom and uniformity. Always the brutal dramatic,

she wrote, there's a hex on the cradle and death in the pot. There's a hypnotic notion created by both the duplicate houses and their lawns, as well

as popular cultures spin. A hint that these suburbanites are nothing more than sentient zombies. Their days manufactured

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