How do you solve a problem like Betty?

Shoot
 One of the interesting things about Betty Draper is both those who criticize her character and those who defend her agree for the most part about her flaws. The only difference is in explaining how they got there. People who don't like her credit Betty Draper with having created her own moral character. People who do like her explain away her flaws as a product of her being a victim of the time and of Don.

If the defenders were right—fortunately they are not—we'd have a huge storytelling problem.

One of John Gardner's more notoriously bad bits of advice was that you should never write a story in which the protagonist is someone that things primarily happen to. Gardner felt that characters should do something to be interesting. There are hundreds of examples to prove Gardner wrong. However, there is a modified version of the Gardner thesis that is correct and that is that you should never create a character whose moral character is chiefly the result of what others do to her.

Fortunately, Betty Draper is very much responsible for her own moral character. And that is why we have to dislike her even if we pity her.

Betty's character
Let's start with one of the most often cited (some would say hackneyed) quotes about character.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. 

Nick is talking about Gatsby here but he might just as easily have been discussing Betty Draper. She is very much like Gatsby and there is a scene early in this episode that recalls Gatsby. Betty is sitting around with Francine talking about the night before when a man named Jim Hobart attempting to recruit Don to work at another firm offered her his card and discussed her returning to work as a model.

Now one important thing to notice right away is that Betty is aware of all the facts. She knows, or should know, that Hobart wants to recruit Don and should be asking herself to what degree this attention is motivated by that other goal.

If she is aware of it, however, any realism is promptly washed away by romantic dreams.

And so Betty leads Francine upstairs to show her a huge collection of dresses that a designer named Giovanni made for her back when she was a model. The dresses all sit in garment bags unused. This is just like the scene where Gatsby woos Daisy Buchanan by showing her all of his shirts.

Francine asks, and who could blame her, just how platonic this relationship was. Even if we do believe Betty that it was, what was Giovanni's motive for this extraordinary generosity.

We get more of Betty's character when she talks to doctor Wayne about the incident. Fascinatingly, her real interest seems more motivated by the freedom that comes from the recent death of her mother. This is not, of course, an uncommon reaction—lots of people find their grief at the death of a parent tempered by a sudden freedom to assess that parent honestly for the first time. Unfortunately, Betty isn't quite willing to follow her own thoughts through to their obvious conclusion.

 My mother was always very concerned about looks and weight. And I've always eaten a lot. And I like hot dogs. Mother used to say, "You're going to get stout." And then I became a model. And she hated it. Even though Suzy Parker made a hundred thousand dollars that year. My mother hated it. Manhattan. She called me a prostitute.

You have to love the Suzy Parker reference  and the quaint belief that being paid a whole lot of money makes prostitution more acceptable. I also have to agree with Betty's mother. "Prostitute" may be hyperbole but there is something pathetic about a woman like Betty with a degree in anthropology aspiring to some fairytale existence as a model.

The Suzy Parker reference, BTW, is apropos as Parker only got hired in the first place because the agency was hoping to woo her older sister.

When Dr. Wayne suggests that she is angry at her mother, Betty responds by getting angry at him. She accuses him of not listening to her and then provoking her. But read the paragraph above for yourself—she is angry with her mother.

The interview with Dr. Wayne ends with Betty saying, "I don't care why he gave me his card." This does not suggest a lot of emotional maturity.

Roger Sterling Esq.
Roger makes an appearance to try and dissuade Don from succumbing to Jim Hobart's advances. It's interesting to compare the style of the two men—Hobart and Sterling—and also that of Betty Draper. Hobart offered glamour and big accounts. Sterling's pitch is to ask Don to consider what he has and to ask if he wants to risk losing it. He then says he is taking it personally. This is not a matter of just business, he values the relationship.

Again, the important thing here is that Don has real value to Sterling Cooper. What is Betty's real value? She certainly wants to have real value but what does she offer?

At this moment all she wants is recognition and she doesn't particularly care why she is getting it. As the Giovanni dresses also suggest, she does not seem to have ever cared much why she was getting recognition.

Living a lie
In any case, Betty gets the job and she is so happy that Don gets to have sex with the light on.

Don promises that he won't spoil it for her.

Okay, I have previously claimed that this series is unintentionally subversive. That is to say it ends up proving the opposite of what it intends. If we take the show seriously, Don's greatest offence against Betty—his greatest failing as a human being—is in living a lie by not being the person he truly is. He is hiding his real self from her.

But here is the (rhetorical) question. Who is really living the lie here? Episode after episode, we see Don Draper successfully being Don Draper. He doesn't need to be Dick Whitman.

But who is Betty Draper successfully being? She isn't good at anything and she isn't mature enough to be self critical. At the same time, she takes it for granted that others will take her seriously. (This is not an attractive personality but no one could honestly claim it is a product of her times. There are plenty of women and men just like her today.)


In the end it is Jim Hobart who spoils it for her by making it a little too obvious that he hired Betty only to get Don.

What actually happens?
That is my favourite question and one that will become even more relevant  in upcoming episodes. In this episode, we have an interesting example of a character providing moral advice to Draper that he follows while they do precisely the sort of thing they warn him not to do.

The Draper family dog injures one of the neighbour's homing pgeons. he threatens to shoot the dog if it happens again. The kids are terrified. When Don and Betty find out what happened, Don wants to confront the neighbour right away. Betty, says, "He's our neighbour, he'll only make it worse." Don follows this good advice. Betty, meanwhile, ends the episode out with her son's BB gun shooting at the birds. Not exactly the way to make good neighbours.

And she lies to Don. She doesn't lie about who she was in the past, she lies about who she is right now to everyone including herself.

Oh yeah, Gatsby
Although lots of people quote Fitzgerald, very few seem to notice that the whole thing starts with a conditional phrase:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him ...

But if there is more to his personality, stuff that isn't so gorgeous. Gatsby has his past involvements with gangsters, Betty has Giovanni. Gatsby is blind about Daisy. Betty is blind about Betty.

If Hamlet was his own Falstaff, Betty Draper is her own Daisy Buchanan. She lives a lie everyday because she is so heavily invested in a fairytale understanding of herself just as Gatsby was so invested in a  fairytale image of Daisy. Will Betty ever grow up? If she does, will she manage it before we all stop caring and give up on her?


If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.