How do you solve a problem like Betty?

The virtues of mad men
"Like some hissable Barbie with the most cake"
What's up with Betty? She is a failing character in the moral sense of the word. (In the dramatic sense, she has steadily gotten better, having gone from a character you dreaded to see because the show just died when she was on screen to a character you look forward to seeing because she is so much fun to sneer at.)

One of Betty's defenders, Emily Nussbaum at New York Magazine's Vulture site, nails Betty's character type:

And then there’s Betty. While the ladies around her bloom, Betty hardens. Her character (in both senses) gets ever icier, vainer, more alien — nearly camp at times, like some hissable Barbie with the most cake.

What troubles Nussbaum is not that Betty is like this, no reasonable person could deny that she is. (Although Nussbaum deserves kudos for the brilliant simile "like some hissable Barbie with the most cake.") What troubles her is the way Betty has developed. Again, I can't describe it any better than Nussbaum can so I'll just quote her:

Maybe Betty wasn’t exactly likable [in the beginning], but she’d been kept in the dark for so long, it made sense she had little insight.  

But Betty doesn't develop. She has, as Nussbaum puts it, "opened her eyes" but:

... in the process, she’s also gone blind — morphing from a mere neurotic into a full-on textbook narcissist, and not incidentally, the worst mother on television since Livia Soprano kicked off in 2001.

And there is the crux of the thing. The people who are angry about Betty are perfectly willing to accept morally weak or morally bad female characters because we all know that both women and men are capable of being like that. What they hate is that she has been given opportunities to grow and yet she has failed.

Why is this happening? Nussbaum blames the writers. I'm not so sure.

Mad Men is a show about virtue. It is about moral development and how incredibly difficult it is for us to grow our character. There was a great Nike magazine ad many years ago it was a runner's interior monologue about the guy catching up to him. This other runner was inferior to the man the first runner wanted to be in every way and yet he kept gaining. At the end we realize that the weaker man chasing us is us. Read that and you can identify Don Draper's character right away.

That isn't the only way to portray virtue but it is the oldest. Virtue is the process whereby we try to become more like our heroes and less like the weakling we know we could lapse into. You can see a version of that story in both Joan and Peggy, for example. You can see it in Roger Sterling's romanticism. You can't see it in Betty.

The difficult thing, and the thing that keeps Betty defenders, even brilliant Betty defenders like Emily Nussbaum, in the dark, is seeing that it is Betty's fault that she is this way.

Here is why: think of Don and Betty, they are both liars, but, with Betty, the worst lies aren't the ones she tells to other people. Betty actually has the flaw that Don haters accuse him of having, she is completely incapable of self criticism. Virtue is open to almost anybody. The sole exception is the person who lacks self awareness, that person can never develop character.

Flash back to Season One, Episode Nine, "The Shoot". There is a wonderful pastiche on a scene from The Great Gatsby in which Betty plays the role of Gatsby pulls out not shirts but all these wonderful dresses that a designer she used to model for made for her. Francine, in the role of Daisy* can't help but ask how Betty got all this without having sex with this designer. The inescapable truth is that she didn't and the problem isn't that Betty is lying to Francine about this but that she is lying to herself. The problem is not that she had sex with Gianni but that she has convinced herself that his generosity to her has nothing to do with this.

Betty, in short, doesn't have a weaker version of herself that she is running away from. Betty is absolutely convinced of her intrinsic worth and no amount of surface evidence to the contrary will ever shake her in that belief. There is no Fanny (in the British sense) Whitman inside her who'll revert to the woman she doesn't want to be because Betty never sees that there is anything wrong with herself. She has flaws but she, and, very tellingly, her defenders remain convinced that these faults all come from outside sources. Nothing Betty does is ever really her fault.

And we see this in her falling for Henry. Henry thinks he sees something "in her"; he is infatuated with the child inside her both literally and figuratively speaking. Betty has every right to be pleased but she should know better than to believe the same fantasy that has caught him up.

And here we might allow that Emily Nussbaum has been more profound than she realizes. For her description of Betty is not some obscure thing that we don't know but rather what was oft though but ne'er so well expressed. When you read the words "some hissable barbie with the most cake" you don't have to struggle for the meaning do you?  Of course you don't because you know a woman whom that simile describes. We have all had to deal with women** like this.

If you live or work in an urban neighbourhood or on a university campus you'll see examples of her every day.


*It's a very telling thing that Betty is so eager to impress other women and eager to impress any other woman.

** It's not an exclusively female type. There are men like that: Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, Mel "I deserve to be blown before the jacuzzi" Gibson, Tony Robbins, Tom Cruise and Glen who was in my year at high school. But just as tailgaters are more likely to be male, so to the hissable Barbie with the most cake is more likely to be female.