Betty, Sally, and Existential Womanhood in Mad Men

Sasha Kohan

A thesis submitted to the Department of English at Clark University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts
in
English and Screen Studies

Betsy P. Huang, Ph.D., Honors Project Advisor

1
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to gratefully and respectfully acknowledge everyone who has contributed in some way
to the completion of this project. To begin at the beginning, thank you to Michael Siegel for
introducing me to Italian cinema and, primarily, the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose stories
and characters brought me into the mindset where I first conceived this project. Within Clark’s
Department of Screen Studies, I’d like to thank Hugh Manon for four years of enthusiastic advising,
(senior year) crisis support, and nihilistic life advice. Thank you to Wes DeMarco for teaching me
existentialism, and for breaking your anti-TV streak to watch the first few episodes of Mad Men.
Thank you to Matthew Weiner for creating such a rich and affecting series, and to the family and
friends who didn’t mind watching (and rewatching) it with me. Lastly, I need to thank Betsy Huang
for four years of compassionate guidance and encouragement, for introducing me to Lily Bart, for
taking the leap on this project with me, and for the goodness you radiate wherever you go.

Thank you all, for all you’ve done.

2
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Existentialism in Mad Men………………………………………………………………….............. 5

BETTY……………………………………………………………………………………………10
Facticity and Transcendence……………………………………………………………..………..10
Bad Faith and Melancholia………………………………………………………………………. 22
Individuality and Freedom…………………………………………………………………........... 31

SALLY…………………………………………………………………………..………………... 38
Voyeurism and the Look……………………………………………………………………......... 38
The Question: Origins of Negation……………………………………………………….............. 49
Choices and Responsibility…………………………………………………………………...…... 57

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….…………...…. 62

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….……………....... 70

3
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Betty and Sally examine themselves ………………………………………………….………. 9
Figures 2 and 3 Betty reacts to losing an opportunity, leaving one utopia for another…………………….... 16
Figure 4 Using mirrors to reflect the duality of characters’ being versus appearance is a favorite practice in the show’s
shot composition; though Don appears to be there for Betty, she truly feels she is in it alone…….………….........19
Figure 5 “I’m going to die from so much love”; Betty faces motherhood once again…………………………..21
Figure 6 The mise-en-scene says it all…………………………………………………………....…....24
Figure 7 “Shut up, Betty”……………………………………………………………………....…..28
Figure 8 Betty in the dark………………………………………………………………………......29
Figure 9 Facing her fate………………………………………………………………....………….31
Figure 10 “I can’t talk to anyone”………………………………………………………….…….….33
Figure 11 “Antiques are expected”………………………………………………………….……..…35
Figure 12 Birdie flies toward divorce……………………………………………………….……....….38
Figure 13 Both of Gene’s ‘little girls’ face his absence……………………………………………..…..…41
Figure 14 A world apart from the adults, condemned to the television……………………………..….........43
Figures 15 and 16 Caught in the act—Sally experiences the Other’s look………………………………..46
Figures 17 and 18 Sally catches others in the act…………………………………………………...…48
Figure 19 “Shut up”………………………………………………………………………....…......52
Figure 20 Current events……………………………………………………………………….…...55
Figures 21 and 22 Navigating the world of boys……………………………………………………....59
Figures 23 and 24 “You just...ooze everywhere”………………………………………………..……..61
Figure 25 Sally tells Don she loves him…………………………………………………….……...…..62

4
 EXISTENTIALISM IN MAD MEN
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball,
If that’s all there is…

- Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” (“Severance” S7E8)

In a scene from the very first episode of Matthew Weiner’s 2007-2015 TV drama Mad Men, in

the midst of a meeting with Lucky Strike cigarettes following the public revelation that smoking

may cause cancer, creative director and series protagonist Don Draper introduces his audience

to the notion that “advertising is based on one thing: happiness.” And what is happiness?

“Happiness,” Don tells us with confidence, “is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear.

It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is

okay. You are okay.”1 This crucial assertion informs much of the show’s featured characters and

the existential anxieties that follow their unique narratives. The pursuit of happiness and

wholeness during the decade of transition in which the series takes place is constantly thwarted

or pushed aside, either in favor of meeting social expectations or in spite of efforts to rise

above these seemingly unbreakable boundaries.

Before delving too deeply into the content of Mad Men, however, we must first briefly

introduce the vocabulary this paper will use to connect the show with its existential leanings:

put in basic terms and drawn mainly from the ideas established by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1956 work

Being and Nothingness, modern existentialism is a philosophy—or in some ways, an anti-

philosophy—which emphasizes, first and foremost, the significance of the individual in

determining the value and purpose of his or her life. This notion is often phrased as existence

1Mad Men, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Season 1 Episode 1, dir. Alan Taylor, writ. Matthew Weiner (19 July 2007,
AMC), streaming online.

5
precedes essence, meaning that the most important thing for individuals to consider is that they are

individuals, acting independently and determining their person based on their individual

choices. On a character-based show like Mad Men, the idea of the individual is clearly a

substantial aspect of its overarching narrative, evident in every character’s struggle to define

themselves and make peace with the lives they’ve built. In relation to the universal struggle of

the individual among the masses, significant meaning is imbued within the show’s advertising

agency setting; later on the pilot episode, Don expresses the opinion that advertising works

because it saves people from having to make their own decisions, thus sparing them what

Sartre would call the anguish or despair of falling into the abyss of absurdity. This despair becomes

clear when individuals recognize the truly infinite nature of their freedom and the endless

possibilities in decisions which, regardless of their perceived significance, contribute to every

person’s understanding of their own identity and character. This is also strongly linked with

Sartre’s emphasis on authenticity and bad faith (living inauthentically): set in a (slightly) post-

conformist decade, Mad Men uses its intricate ensemble of characters to explore the divide

between social expectations (which, if one abides by, evidences one’s inauthentic life) and

personal fulfillment.

For anyone who is even remotely familiar with the show and its characters, the ways in

which the existential philosophy relates to Don Draper are somewhat obvious, given that the

entire premise of the show revolves around the question of “Who is Don Draper?” as the

audience observes Don’s struggle to reconcile with his identity, and these connections have

been thoroughly documented already. It is worth noting, however, that the significant lack of

comparable material written on some of the more marginal characters in this light seems to be

pointing to the suggestion that existentialism itself is an inherently male-gendered philosophy.

The following paper was written with this assumption in mind, which I acknowledge as largely

6
speculative at this point, and yet firmly believe in its truth. Particularly evident in the

outpouring of criticism which followed the series finale in May 2015, the unconsciously

gendered nature of the way in which the characters of Mad Men were examined revealed the

unfair simplicity behind casting the lives and struggles of Peggy, Betty, Joan and others under

the vague umbrella of ‘feminism,’ while the word ‘existential’ seems to apply exclusively to male

characters like Don, Roger, and Pete. This phenomenon is not uncommon in other mediums

either, including the realm of literature which so much of Mad Men is inspired by. Indeed, the

fact that doing a simple search online with the keywords “Mad Men” and “existential” seems to

yield only articles revolving around Don parallels the apparent absence of openly existential

heroines in much of America’s most significant cultural texts, as well as the lack of critical

attention given to the connection between gender and modern existentialism, which we see

played out in the dialogue between Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s defining texts on the philosophy.

Sartre’s book provides examples of how existential thought and behavior is a humanism,

common across the sexes—contrary to the seemingly understood masculine connotations of an

‘existential character’—but Beauvoir’s extensive account of how these existential tenets play out

and reveal themselves in the life of an ordinary woman, written through a specifically female

lens, illuminates what should be the obvious disparity between the existential man and the

existential woman, who copes with the same conflicts and questions he does in addition to the

singularly female experiences of being a wife and a mother—roles which almost certainly

heighten the effects of the existential turmoil she may feel, particularly in the era of Mad Men.

In the realm of published academia on Mad Men in particular, the results are only

slightly more diverse than one might expect: Stephanie Newman’s book Mad Men on the Couch

explores a range of psychological topics that relate to existentialism in a wider range of

characters (including Betty, Peggy, and Sally in the Freud-centered chapter “The Culture of

7
Narcissism”) but never uses the word explicitly; Yi-Ping Ong’s article “Smoke Gets In Your

Eyes: Mad Men and Moral Ambiguity” refers to both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre,

but only as their ideas relate to Don; even the essay collection Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing is

as It Seems is somewhat of a disappointment, with one essay entitled “The Existential Void of

Roger Sterling” and about two pages on Betty’s passivity and bad faith included in Ada S.

Jaarsma’s essay, “An Existential Look at Mad Men: Don Draper, Advertising, and the Promise

of Happiness.” A selection of essays in Heather Marcovitch’s and Nancy Batty’s collection Mad

Men, Women, and Children (2012) does a fine job of critically addressing the issues of domesticity

in the series and pays special attention to Betty’s relationship with motherhood, the kitchen,

and Glen—even making some of the same points I do in the paper which follows—but fails to

acknowledge the philosophical angle of these issues. While the work in Marcovitch’s and

Batty’s book comes closest to rectifying the absence of existential analysis in Mad Men’s female

characters, this paper seeks to push that work even further, for although existential conflicts are

apparent to viewers in the development of every character as he or she strives towards building

a life of meaning and purpose, the difficulty of achieving this (or even, the difficulty of taking

the first steps in aiming to achieve this) is never more plainly evident than it is in the lives of the

women on Mad Men. In light of the show’s recent conclusion, one relationship which proves to

be particularly illuminating under an existential lens is that between two of the most fascinating,

resonant, and inexplicably less-discussed characters—Betty and Sally.

Introduced as a housewife and a mother of two, Betty Hofstadt Draper/Francis suffers

more than any Mad Men character with the inability to define herself, and almost perfectly

embodies the anonymous, ambiguous woman explored and explained in Simone De Beauvoir’s

influential 1949 work The Second Sex. Given that a considerable amount of Mad Men’s historical

content revolves around the rise of second-wave feminism and the uncertain attitudes of

8
characters (both male and female) as they adapt to the changing world of gender treatment and

equal rights around them, it makes sense that someone as socially old-fashioned and frustrated

as Betty would coexist in the same world as more progressive workplace women like Peggy, as

well as those like the passively objectified Joan. What makes Betty unique among these complex

representations of mid-century femininity, however, is the potent combination of her deeply-

ingrained unwillingness to break away from her assigned social script as wife (which

consistently leads her through bouts of depression, anxiety, and anger) while she is

simultaneously tied to the responsibilities of motherhood. Manifested with particular force in

the developing relationship with her daughter Sally, Betty’s toxic internal pattern of confusion,

frustration, and repression epitomizes the maddening situation of midcentury women,

elucidated by Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and is eventually seen to have dramatic effects on

Sally’s own development as a woman-in-training in the world which bewildered and betrayed

Betty. Although the role of the traditional housewife may have been on the cusp of fading away

at the start of the series, Betty persists in pursuing her preconceived notion of what a woman

ought to be until the bitter end, all the while raising a rebellious Sally and unwittingly training

her through mistakes and bad faith to eventually become perhaps the closest instance of an

existentially authentic character on Mad Men, and ultimately illustrating for modern viewers

what it means to be an existential heroine.

Fig. 1. Betty and Sally examine themselves. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 8, “Souvenir.”

9
 Betty
I. Facticity and Transcendence
One day she'll smile, next day she'll cry
Minute to minute you'll never know why
Coax her, pet her, better yet, get her
Roses and lollipops and lollipops and roses…

- Jack Jones, “Lollipops and Roses” (“Love Among the Ruins,” S3E2)

From the first time we ever see Betty, we know that she is doomed. Making her brief

but powerful entrance in the final sequence of the pilot after viewers witness a typical day in

Don’s dishonest routine, we are quickly made aware of Betty’s own unawareness and naivety. A

Grace Kelly-esque image of the ideal yet innocent wife in a night slip and robe of ballerina pink,

Betty is instantly portrayed as loyal and doting while inadvertently revealing just how much she

does not know about the daily life of the man she is married to. Already, the show manages to

convey not only Betty’s willingness to play the role of housewife—calling the office, having

supper ready in the oven, believing there is no reason to question her husband on his

whereabouts—but also the extent to which she is merely another woman living in a man’s

world. Despite being the wife of Mad Men’s central character, her appearance is pushed until the

end, squeezed into the last few moments, a marginal element of her husband’s life at the end of

the day. Although these are our first impressions of Betty, none of this is obvious to her;

already, we know so much more than she does.

What Betty does know (and she knows it very well) is what people expect from her.

The expectations of others motivate Betty’s very being to the point that they have become her

own expectations for herself, and she aims to meet and exceed these unquestioningly—for, as

Beauvoir asserts about the wife, “reason is not her lot, she is without ‘reflection.’”2 As

2Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage
Books, 2010), 456.

10
mentioned earlier, this significant lack of reflection on Betty’s part is largely what distinguishes

her from the other leading females on the show. To use the existential term, what Betty remains

inexhaustibly fixated on is her facticity, the concrete details of her background, the “givens” of

her situation, the things about herself that she cannot change. Most importantly for Betty are

her roles and responsibilities as a housewife and a mother. Facticity is generally discussed in

relation to transcendence, which refers to the ability we, as conscious individuals, have to transcend

facticity, to surpass or “be more than” what constitutes our situation. As I will explore more

deeply further on, this ability—or inability—to realize ourselves through a wider lens is

arguably the biggest and most important difference between Betty and Don. As the creative

director at an advertising agency, it is literally his job to see things, objects, and services as more

than they are, and to convince the public of their greater value and significance: “Since he is the

producer, it is he who goes beyond family interest to the interest of society and who opens a

future to her by cooperating in the construction of the collective future: it is he who embodies

transcendence.”3 Don’s capacity to imagine and make things more than they are, to be able to

define and redefine the essence of something, is demonstrated time and time again, but is

particularly well-illustrated in the pilot’s meeting with Lucky Strike. Faced with the publicity

crisis and originally overwhelming task of making cigarettes saleable in spite of their newly-

founded association with cancer, Don is at a loss until he realizes, “We can say anything we

want.” Rather than focus on or even address the public health concerns behind smoking, Don

centers the new campaign on something else entirely, sticking with the tagline “It’s Toasted!”

and effectively shifting the consumers’ attention back onto the cigarettes and away from the

facts they would rather not know. By being able to redefine the essence of Lucky Strike

cigarettes in a way which maintains their public appeal, Don demonstrates not only why he is

3 Ibid, 443.

11
such a valuable asset to Sterling Cooper, but that his capacity for transcendence is even greater

than most of those in his same social situation, thus widening the gulf between him and Betty

and making her appear even more naïve and oblivious.

In stark contrast to Don, Betty’s commitment to preserving the fiction of her life as

wife and mother and the fiction of self-worth gained by succeeding in these vocations is so

deeply engrained in her that, more often than not, it seems as though transcendence is simply

not an option for Betty. For Beauvoir, transcendence is almost an exclusively masculine

privilege, noting that “traditional marriage does not invite woman to transcend herself with

him; it confines her in immanence.”4 Restricted by the standard societal expectations of her sex,

Betty embodies the woman Beauvoir speaks of, initially appearing to accept her constricted

destiny of maintaining the home and taking care of her husband and children, dwelling in the

passive interior of immanence. Although Beauvoir insists that “all human existence is

transcendence and immanence at the same time,” it is clear that, for women of her era and for

women like Betty, “the wife has no other task save the one of maintaining and caring for life in

its pure and identical generality…she is given no direct grasp on the future, nor on the

universe.”5 Unable to perceive herself as anything other than ‘housewife’ and ‘mother’, it is

almost as if, for Betty, essence precedes existence in a way; because she is so completely consumed

with keeping up the appearance (or, appearing to have the essence) of a mother and housewife,

her very individual existence seems to fall by the wayside, and she accepts this as an inevitable

consequence of marriage and maternity.

Exhibiting the characteristics of someone living in bad faith—a concept I will explore

further on—Betty subconsciously denies herself the agency to acknowledge her real, true,

4 Ibid, 468-9.
5 Ibid, 443.

12
authentic motivations and desires. In “Shoot”6 we see just how much Betty’s freedom and

agency are limited by the fictions she uses to reassure herself: as part of a ploy by McCann-

Erikson to lure Don away from Sterling Cooper, Betty is approached by the larger agency to

revisit her young career as a model—a career which was interrupted and abandoned by her

marriage to Don. Visibly excited by the prospect of returning to work, Betty is all the more

disappointed when the scheme in which she was unknowingly used fails—Don rejects

McCann-Erikson and they, in turn, reject Betty. Discouraged and unaware that there were

ulterior motives behind her brief reentrance into the workforce (and, of course, oblivious to the

fact that Don was always aware of what was going on), Betty protects her pride and preserves

her image as loyal wife and mother by choosing to present the loss as if it were her own idea.

Telling Don that the position seemed promising, her expression falters as she tries and fails to

mask her disappointment in an effort to convince both Don and herself, “Honestly, I don’t

think I want to work anymore. I don’t like you coming home to some whipped-together mess

of whatever’s left in the fridge, and…frankly, I don’t like Manhattan on my own. It’s harsh.”

Here, Betty simultaneously and paradoxically reaffirms her duties as a housewife while

painting herself as a helpless little girl, uneasy about venturing into the city alone; at the same

time as she reinforces the responsibility she has to take care of her husband, she suggests an

inability to take care of herself. Going so far as to mock herself in order to defend the ‘choice’

between her modeling work and domestic duties, Betty goes on half-heartedly to say—as much

to herself as to Don—“I mean, what am I going to do? Run around the city with my book, like

some teenager, making a fool of myself?” By turning a legitimate career and interest of hers into

a joke, Betty subconsciously takes cues from the male world and infantilizes herself as a defense

6Mad Men, “Shoot,” Season 1 Episode 9, dir. Paul Feig, writ. Matthew Weiner and Chris Provenzano (13 September
2007, AMC), streaming online.

13
mechanism, beating others to a punch that may or may not be coming. When Don reminds her

that it’s his job to give her what she wants, she responds perfunctorily, “You do. I mean, look

at all this.” Quickly flicking her eyes around the finely furnished space that is ‘hers’—the ‘all

this’ that is everything she thinks she should want—Betty’s domestic prison suddenly seems

much smaller. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she concludes.

This is an important moment for Betty, showing viewers the extent to which she

exemplifies the type of person (and, especially in the era of Mad Men, the type of woman) who is

either so dedicated to trying force herself into the roles she thinks she needs to fulfill or so in

denial of the possibility that there are other possibilities that she would prefer to work within the

restrictions. Discouraged by this single failure in modeling—which we all know was no fault of

hers—Betty easily accepts that there are no alternative options besides her marriage and

motherhood and mildly resigns herself to duties of the home, the place which “has always been

the material realization of the ideal of happiness” for young girls who grow up dreaming of

being wives, which “embodies permanence and separation,” and where “neither time nor space

escapes into infinity, but instead quietly goes round and round.”7 Betty’s expression lightens

somewhat when Don begins to console her with a reminder that she already has a job—only to

fall once more when he completes his thought: “You are a mother to those two little people,

and you are better at it than anyone else in the world.” The exchange is quick, but deeply

significant for two reasons: first, wide-eyed and expectant at Don’s initial statement, Betty is

presented as completely willing to place her value in the hands of her husband. This scene in

particular illustrates the strong correlation between Betty and Beauvoir’s observation that “it is

man…who will imbue her contingent facticity with human worth” and that “she has only to

7 Beauvoir, Second, 469.

14
put her existence in his hands, and he will give it its meaning….she will become necessary.”8

Betty’s passivity and inclination to wait for instruction make her, among other things, an image

of the ideal consumer (to be examined more closely in a later example), regardless of whether

this complicity leads to an inevitable build-up of internal frustration and self-perpetuating cycle

of disempowerment.

Second, it is abundantly clear that Don reminding Betty of her vocation as mother is

the last thing she wants to hear. “Like the ‘passage’ into puberty, sexual initiation, and

marriage,” Beauvoir states, “motherhood generates morose disappointment for subjects who

are waiting for an external event to renew and justify their lives.”9 Although at this point Betty

is still one child, one husband, and several seasons away from fully grasping the extent of this

‘morose disappointment,’ her discernable sense of defeat in “Shoot” foreshadows her future

discontent as she continues playing the role she feels she cannot escape. Even if Betty doesn’t

acknowledge this herself, however—even if she totally lacks or represses the self-awareness

needed to realize she truly is playing a role—it is apparent that she knows there is something not

quite right with her situation; that there are times when the impulse and the desire for

transcendence are clearly there, drowning beneath the passive, pretty surface. The stifled

frustration and disappointment Betty struggles with throughout the series manifests itself in

sometimes violent outbursts, with the final moments of “Shoot” being among the most

memorable, showing Betty in a rare instant of uninhibited, authentic action as she shoots at the

neighbor’s pigeons overhead with her son’s BB gun in hand and a cigarette dangling from her

mouth.

8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 552.

15
 Fig. 2 and Fig. 3.Betty reacts to losing an opportunity, leaving one ‘utopia’ for ‘another.’ Screenshots from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 1 Episode 9, “Shoot.”

Moments like this illustrate the show’s ambivalent representation of Betty, letting

audiences know that there is an individual there, someone who can take autonomous action and

feel passionately; someone who can transcend the social script and be more than simply

‘mother’ and ‘housewife’; that person does exist, and yet Betty is continually presented and

understood as someone who doesn’t seem to have any purpose outside these roles, or any idea

what she would do if she could bring herself to acknowledge the infinity of other possibilities.

Additionally, this instance of Betty ‘acting out’ by borrowing Bobby’s BB gun and shooting at

the pigeons next door (the owner of whom had frightened Sally with threats of killing the

Draper family dog) demonstrates one of the peculiar binaries of Betty’s character in the

blended impressions of maternal defense and childlike petulance evident in her behavior from

time to time.

From a purely metaphorical perspective, there is also significance to be found in noting

that Betty—nickname “Birdie”—finds some liberation in expressing her inner turmoil this way;

that is, by shooting down other birdies. The thematic bond between birds and femininity is not

an uncommon onscreen trope (solidified in films like Hitchcock’s Psycho—which would have

been an audience favorite around the time when Mad Men begins), and is referred to more than

once in the series, enhancing the sense that this is an era in which women are treated (or feel)

like birds in gilded cages. The comparison is particularly apt for Betty, who surely felt ready to

16
fly away with the opportunity of modeling but masks her discouragement by reminding herself

of the much more socially acceptable feeling that she must instead keep her wings at her sides

and tend the nest. When she shoots at her neighbor’s pigeons in an instant of maddening

frustration and building depression, Betty may be acting out an allegorical form of self-harm;

perhaps one Birdie shooting another is meant to foreshadow her untimely death, smoking

cigarettes to the point of the habit becoming an accidental suicide; or perhaps she simply

wishes to shoot down all the other “birds” who are able and allowed to transcend their facticity

and fly away—jealous, petulant, and resentful of the domestic cage in which she feels she has

no choice but to remain.

Betty’s growing discontent with the immanence of her conjugal situation and, in

particular, her aversion to the task of motherhood, reaches a dispiriting peak with the accidental

pregnancy and nightmarish birth of her third child, baby Gene. When informed of the news in

the opening scene of “Meditations in an Emergency,”10 Betty’s disappointment could not be

more apparent; that her doctor immediately assumes her melancholy stems from concerns

about her appearance only furthers our understanding of the unjustly narrow space reserved for

women in 1960s American society, and reminds Betty of the myriad expectations she is

condemned to meet. Having finally asserted herself by kicking Don out of the house for his

suspected adultery, her situation becomes dismayingly complicated by the prospect of raising

another child—recalling the outcast Helen Bishop, Betty knows all too well the social

repercussions for the single mother, let alone a pregnant one. At her desperate suggestion of an

abortion, however, the doctor’s disapproval is glaring as he delicately responds, “That is an

option for young girls who have no other options.” Clearly feeling like one such young girl and

Mad Men, “Meditations in an Emergency,” Season 2 Episode 13, dir. Matthew Weiner, writ. Matthew Weiner and
10

Kater Gordon (26 October 2008, AMC), streaming online.

17
failing to find a feasible way out of her situation even after consulting Francine, her one female

friend and confidante, Betty reluctantly resigns to her pregnant state and allows Don to return,

consequently allowing herself to sink back into the housewife role which she had just begun to

attempt to transcend.

In spite of efforts to embrace her marital reconciliation and follow her doctor’s advice

to “get back in the swing of things” during the first few episodes of the following season,

Betty’s maternal anxiety reveals itself more than ever in “The Fog”11 as we—but, significantly,

not Don—witness her traumatic experience of giving birth. Through highly illuminating drug-

infused dreams,12 Betty’s experience validates Beauvoir’s point on motherhood that “pregnancy

is, above all, a drama playing itself out in the woman between her and herself. She experiences

it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite

exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it.”13 Betty’s violent reaction to the

complex bodily intrusion that is pregnancy interrupts her surreal fantasies as she is seen back in

the hospital, screaming and struggling with a nurse attempting to forcibly restrain her. This is

the most visibly distraught we ever see Betty. A significant aberration from the carefully

maintained image and flawless physical appearance for which she is almost exclusively praised,

we see Betty feeling “like the plaything of obscure forces; she is tossed about, assaulted.”14 “I

don’t want to be here,” she whimpers to herself, “I’m just a housewife.” Delirious and

exhausted as the unwelcome renewal of motherhood looms before her, Betty slips into another

11 Mad Men, “The Fog,” Season 3 Episode 5, dir. Phil Abraham, writ. Kater Gordon (20 September 2009, AMC),
streaming online.
12 The first of these dreams features a wide-eyed Betty walking down a sunny sidewalk to encounter a caterpillar dangling

in front of her; initially beholding the creature with wonder and delight, Dream Betty’s eyes appear to flicker menacingly
before closing her fist around it—whether she is aiming to crush or merely contain it is uncertain.
13 Beauvoir, Second, 538.
14 Ibid.

18
unsettling dream—but not before one last feeble protest that only we will hear, asking no one

in particular and everyone in the world, “Why are you doing this to me?”

Speaking further on the woman as Mother, Beauvoir writes that the “subject’s infantile

dreams and her adolescent anxieties are revived during pregnancy,” and that “it is experienced

in different ways depending on the woman’s relationships with her mother, her husband, and

herself.”15 Although the ways in which this applies to Betty are subtly apparent up until this

point, the second of her anesthesia-infused fantasies makes the connection more lucid than

ever. Wandering through the hospital which becomes her kitchen, a very pregnant Dream Betty

comes upon her recently deceased father, Gene, dressed in the same janitor’s clothes she

hallucinated seeing him in as she first entered the hospital, mopping what is revealed to be

blood. Reverted to her childhood self, “Elizabeth” introduces herself to her father, who initially

pretends not to know her, then insists that nobody knows he is there. “Am I dying?” Betty

wonders. “Ask your mother,” Gene replies in typical fatherly fashion. “Tell her, Ruthie.”

Fig. 4. Using mirrors to reflect the duality of characters’ being versus appearance is a favorite practice in the show’s shot composition; though
Don appears to be there for Betty, she truly feels she is in it alone. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 5, “The Fog.”

15 Ibid, 535.

19
 Appearing at the kitchen table behind an incarnation of Medgar Evers16 is Betty’s

mother. A crucial yet largely unseen influence on Betty’s character, Ruth’s physical absence on

the show (save for this tiny moment) manifests itself as a palpable presence in Betty’s life from

pilot to finale, as she persistently yet privately struggles to cope with the death of her mother

(revealed to have occurred just a few months prior to the events of the pilot) and reconcile her

confused desires with the old-fashioned teachings Ruth ingrained in her: “Elizabeth, shut your

mouth,” she instructs in the dream. “You’ll catch flies.” Allowed by the impossibility of a

dream sequence to finally be seen as what she truly is, Betty embodies all the uncertainty and

shame of a rebuked little girl while still looking the part of perfect housewife as she blurts out,

“I left my lunch pail on the bus, and I’m having a baby.” Shaking her head, Ruth holds up a

bloodied cloth and gestures to the silent figure of Evers, darkly implying a similar fate is in

store for Betty when she scolds, “You see what happens to people who speak up?” Dream

Betty acknowledges what seems to be familiar criticism with a weary nod, exposing for

audiences her most significant burden, fueling her most vicious internal battle which keeps her

from achieving transcendence. “Be happy with what you have,” Ruth advises as Betty’s fantasy

and baby Gene’s birth come to a close. “You’ll be okay,” her father chimes in, smiling. “You’re

a house cat—you’re very important and you have little to do.” Far more reductive than

reassuring, Betty’s imagined encounter with her parents only underlines the severity of her

existential struggle, illustrating for audiences the full extent and inerasable origins of the

expectations she must manage: that she must remain silent, passive, and unresponsive to her

situation; that marriage and motherhood is enough to fulfill any woman; that her importance is

unrelated to what she does; that her happiness depends only on what she has.

16Earlier in the episode it is mentioned that Sally has been asking her teacher about the civil rights activist, then recently-
assassinated (June 12, 1963).

20
 Never one to disobey, Betty subconsciously accepts her parents’ advice and awakens

from her fog ready to resign herself to “the boredom and blandness of pure facticity”17 and try,

once more, to find fulfillment in the life she cannot seem to escape. Waking in the middle of

the night to the sound of the baby’s wails a few days later, Betty lies in bed for a moment

before rising to face the familiar task. Despite lacking the consciousness to recognize and

define it, or the boldness to articulate it, her hesitation reflects the internal sinking feeling that

this is it: “Her own transcendence toward marriage took place from within the warmth of the

family; now she is married, there is no other future in front of her. The doors of home are closed

around her: of all the earth, this will be her portion…She has nothing more to expect, nothing

more to want.”18 Groggily, anxiously, reluctantly, Betty makes her way into the hall, the dim

light from downstairs casting onto her linear shadows of the railing; with another baby waiting

to be held in the room before her, the endless responsibilities she has no choice but to tend to

looming infinitely over her life ahead, she pauses again outside the door. Framed in darkness

and cast with the shadows of a cage, Betty silently admits defeat to the mandates of

motherhood, giving up dreams of outside happiness, surrendering to the walls of her domestic

prison.

Fig. 5. “I’m going to die from so much love”; Betty faces motherhood once more. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 5, “The Fog.”

17 Ibid, 487.
18 Ibid, 486.

21
 II. Bad Faith and Melancholia
Here she comes in her palanquin
On the back of an elephant
On a bed made of linen and sequins and silk
All astride on her father's line
With the king and his concubines
And her nurse with her pitchers of liquors and milk
And we'll all come praise the infanta

- The Decemberists, “The Infanta” (“Maidenform,” S2E6)

As we’ve observed in the facticity of Betty’s situation and the difficulty she exhibits in

conflicted efforts to transcend these concrete limitations of identity, “extravagant bad faith”19 seems

to inherently exist alongside the standards of female roles and behavior which Betty so dutifully

resolves to meet. Defining one of the most essential conditions of existentialism as articulated in

Being and Nothingness, Sartre identifies bad faith with falsehood, granting us the rudimentary

explanation that “bad faith is a lie to oneself.”20 Distinguishing this lie from lying in general,

however, Sartre makes the crucial point that in lying to others, the liar “must possess a complete

comprehension of the lie and of the truth which he is altering,” and that it is sufficient “that an over-

all opacity hide his intentions from the Other; it is sufficient that the Other can take the lie for

truth.”21 While the act of lying in general profits the duality of the self in the eyes of the Other,

Sartre stresses that “what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am

hiding the truth.”22 Most perceptible in episodes like “Shoot,” as when Betty weakly reassures Don

and herself of her contentment within the confines of the home, the intrinsic bad faith of the

midcentury mother and housewife plagues Betty throughout the series as she consistently tries to

convince herself of the dangerous misconception that marriage and motherhood are enough to

fulfill all women.

19 Ibid, 567.
20 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 87.
21 Ibid, 88.
22 Ibid, 89.

22
 Addressing this misconception and its “mystification,” Beauvoir argues that it begins “when

the religion of Motherhood proclaims that all mothers are exemplary”23 and provides a number of

examples throughout The Second Sex to prove that, as is repeatedly demonstrated by Mad Men’s

ensemble of distinctive female characters, “there is no such thing as maternal ‘instinct’…. The

mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.”24 Although men like

Don relentlessly expose their universal expectations that women be not only submissive and

carefully presented, but in possession of an imagined effortless ability to manage both the home and

children, it becomes clear to viewers over the course of seven seasons that even the fantasy of these

maternal ‘instincts’ does not prominently exist in Betty. Particularly evident as Sally grows up and

becomes more defined, individualized and rebellious, Betty’s impatience and frustration with the

task of mothering becomes an all-consuming interference, inhibiting both the self-reflection

necessary to know oneself and the ability to manage and maintain any healthy personal relationships.

This is not presented as something unusual (perhaps surprisingly, Betty is one of only a handful of

mothers among the primary and supporting female characters on the show) and Beauvoir even

claims that experiencing perfect authenticity in motherhood is rare: “Ordinarily, maternity is a

strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.”25

For Betty, this ‘strange compromise’ seems to encompass not only her approach to maternity but to

the childhood dream of marriage as well, as she continually tries to follow instructions from the

anesthetic vision of her mother and fuel a desire to desire what she already has. The depth of her

commitment to these illusions prove the reality of Sartre’s claim that “the true problem of bad faith

stems evidently from the fact that bad faith is faith.”26

23 Beauvoir, Second, 556.
24 Ibid, 554.
25 Beauvoir, Second, 556.
26 Sartre, Being, 112.

23
 As with nearly every other character, the problem of bad faith for Betty reveals itself in

countless ways—however, Betty is the only character whose practice of bad faith ultimately

consumes her entire being, exhausting and annihilating her sense of identity; mutilating the reflection

of how she appears to others and to herself. “A person can live in bad faith,” Sartre says, “which

does not mean that he does not have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith, but which

implies a constant and particular style of life.”27 Repressing her restlessness and mounting

melancholy within the domestic sphere, Betty’s perpetually performative nature is a byproduct of her

lifestyle in bad faith, highlighted in the planning and execution of a house party in “A Night to

Remember.”28

Fig. 6. The mise-en-scène says it all. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 2 Episode 8, “A Night to Remember.”

Already struggling with internal tension towards Don after an unsettling encounter with Jimmy

Barrett about the ongoing affair between their spouses, Betty appears snappy and anxious to Don

(and audiences) as she tersely goes about preparing for his upcoming work party. In a brief scene

accompanied only by the sounds of The Three Stooges29 on TV in the next room, Betty notices a

wobbling chair in the dining room which she must transform into a space of entertainment (“Don’t

27 Ibid, 90.
28 Mad Men, “A Night to Remember,” Season 2 Episode 8, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter, writ. Matthew Weiner and Robin
Veith (14 September 2008; AMC), streaming online.
29 Brideless Groom, dir. Edward Bernds (1947; Columbia Pictures), streaming online.

24
you strike me! Taking advantage of a poor, weak, helpless woman!”); increasingly frustrated when she can’t

seem to jiggle the chair leg back into place (“Now what’ll I do with it?”), Betty picks the chair up and

begins to slam it repeatedly against the floor (“Eh, who are you hitting?”) until the leg finally breaks off,

and then some. While Sally and Bobby curiously observe the scene from the living room, Betty

breaks off the last bit of chair before throwing it down (“You—you really horrible person!”), picking up

all the pieces (“Get up—what happened, kid?”) and walking away. In the same way that Beauvoir

suggests, “A woman who beats her child does not only beat the child, and in a way she does not

beat him at all,” Betty acts in such a way that may make her feel she is “taking her vengeance on

man, on the world, or on herself,” but it is, in this case, the chair that receives the blows.30 Although

we are able to see this, and even Sally may be starting to, it is Betty whose recognition of her feelings

is crucial, and Betty whose own bad faith suppresses this awareness.

Sounds of a grand piano waltz open the scene when the night of the party arrives. Sally

cheerfully entertains guests with her ballet and a fully dressed and made-up Betty adds last-minute

touches to the dining room—her realm, her sphere, the domestic domain over which she, the

housewife, presumes and is presumed to have some semblance of control. Already, the theatrical

nature of the evening and stark atmospheric difference between the full parlor and dimly-lit dining

room illustrates Beauvoir’s notion that “when confronting man, woman is always onstage; she lies

when pretending to accept herself as the inessential other, she lies when she presents to him an

imaginary personage through impersonations, clothes, and catchphrases….When with other women,

the wife is backstage.”31 The sense of being backstage is particularly strong in this sequence as Betty

waits for her cue, knowing she’s up next; while Sally in the next room ‘performs’ the part of

charming little girl in the most classically feminine form possible, Betty prepares to ‘perform’ as

30 Beauvoir, Second, 556.
31 Ibid, 585.

25
hostess and housewife, completing the costume change by shedding her ornamental apron before

heading ‘onstage’ into the parlor.

Dressed for the part, Betty follows her script perfectly through the evening as an attractive

accessory to the life Don shows off for his coworkers, until an unexpected (off script) moment

simultaneously puts her in the spotlight and makes her feel left in the dark. Having planned an

elaborate internationally-themed dinner, Betty proudly reels off the menu for her guests, illustrating

Beauvoir’s point that for the housewife confined to the loneliness of her home whose “routine tasks

leave her head empty…making a purchase is a profound pleasure: it is a discovery, almost an

invention,” as she is forced to work within the rules of economics and budgets: “winning the game

is what counts.”32 Feeling pleased with herself, surely thinking that she has indeed ‘won the game’

(of hosting, of housewifery, of consumerism), Betty concludes with the exotic-sounding option of “a

frosted glass of beer from Holland”; unaware that Heineken is one of Sterling Cooper’s clients and

that she has just inadvertently settled an argument between Don and Duck Phillips about the

marketing of their product, Betty tries to mask her confusion at the men’s laughter and waits for the

joke to be explained to her.

Later, Don ignorantly responds to her repeated accusations that he “embarrassed” her,

saying she is “making a mountain out of a molehill,” but it is hardly difficult to see why Betty would

dwell on this moment. Eternally out of place among Don’s fellow businessmen or in any social

recreation of the highly masculine office setting, Betty’s role in space she is allowed—her designated

corner of the world, the home—feels belittled and violated here as Duck unknowingly calls attention

to the lie of ‘housewife’ she has instilled in herself, momentarily exposing her bad faith in declaring

to the room full of people, “Don said you were the market, and you are.” The perception of Betty as

an ideal yet ordinary part of a predictable demographic is explicitly conveyed to viewers in Duck’s

32 Ibid, 479.

26
later report of the party as he describes Betty to Heineken executives: “She’s exactly who we’re

after—well-off, educated, with plenty of time to shop. And it’s important to her that she’s the

perfect hostess. The perfect wife.” Despite the consistently unabashed tipsiness of Petra Colsen, a

contrasting version of ‘the wife’ also present at the party, Betty’s clear embarrassment at feeling not

only left out of the joke but reduced to a mere signifier of the anonymous masses, a representative

of the generic housewives Don anticipated would buy into the idea of Heineken as an alluring

export, a is far more lasting and damaging memory for her than Petra Colsen missing her chair.

The tragedy of Betty, of course, is that even in the wake of such incidents and in times when

it seems that she has had enough, the cycle of bad faith keeps her both socially and introspectively

inert. This is the fundamental difference between Betty and Don, along with most other characters

who operate under the steadfast yet equally flawed strategy of ‘moving forward’ while Betty is stuck,

slowly learning that the “drama of marriage is not that it does not guarantee the wife the promised

happiness—there is no guarantee of happiness—it is that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition

and routine.”33 Even after working up the conviction needed to tell Don not to come home mid-

season two, we see her retreat into subordinate status once more following her unexpected

pregnancy; and even after fully realizing that marriage with Don isn’t working and initiating the

divorce process despite social pressure to keep trying, we see her slip into the same situation with

her second marriage to local politician Henry Francis. Betty seems to make strides towards

autonomy when she leaves Don for another man (“Her choice of lover is doubtless limited by

circumstances, but there is an element of freedom in this relationship”34), but we eventually see the

same frustrations follow into her second attempt to achieve fulfillment through matrimony.

33 Ibid, 519.
34 Ibid, 593.

27
 Fig. 7. “Shut up, Betty.” Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 4 Episode 8, “The Summer Man.”

Although Henry is decidedly less cruel and deceitful than Don, his literal position of power

and leadership results in the same sense of entitlement Don exhibits in his everyday actions; the

importance of Henry’s public image parallels Don’s narcissism, which consequently reproduces for

Betty the same issues of egoism and patterns of conjugal disrespect to manage, along with the

increasingly tiresome task of mothering her two young sons and a rapidly defiant Sally. When Betty

and Henry stumble upon Don in “The Summer Man”35 with one of his many young dates for the

first time since the divorce, Betty nearly has a panic attack in the bathroom but is obligated to stay

for dinner with Henry and his associate. “What did you want me to do, put you in a cab?” Henry

angrily asks her on the car ride home. “That wouldn’t be right.” Understandably distressed and

overwhelmed from running into her emotionally (and sometimes physically) abusive ex-husband

while seeing him with a much younger woman, and irritated with her new husband’s lack of

sympathy, Betty reacts with sarcasm to Henry’s insistence that he doesn’t hate his ex-wife saying he’s

a saint, to which he cruelly lashes back, “I’m an adult.” This familiar exchange makes it clear that

Betty is hardly better off now than she was with Don. “It was upsetting. Can’t you just let me have

35Mad Men, “The Summer Man,” Season 4 Episode 8, dir. Phil Abraham, writ. Matthew Weiner, Lisa Albert and Janet
Leahy (12 September 2010; AMC), streaming online.

28
that?” Betty asks Henry in earnest, to which he answers, “Not when it ruins the whole evening.”

That Betty finds her situation still essentially unchanged signifies her deep and blind devotion to

practicing her bad faith and taking the unhappiness that comes with it.

Along with the repressed fury and discontent carried over from Betty’s first marriage—

indeed, even fueled by it—is her underlying melancholia. With her depression introduced as one of

her original storylines, the trouble Betty faces in attempting to cope with her enduring sadness as a

bored housewife, a detached mother, and a confused individual follows her throughout the series,

made ever more difficult by her insistent inability to confront and express her true feelings, and

certainly not helped by her experience with an apathetic and dishonest psychiatrist. From growing

up under the rules of a strict, old-fashioned mother to succumbing to the chore of motherhood,

from leaving one controlling husband to another, everything Betty has ever learned seems to

reinforce her sense of helplessness in life: “It is mainly because she has never experienced the

powers of liberty that she does not believe in liberation: the world to her seems governed by an

obscure destiny against which it is presumptuous to react.”36

Fig. 8. Betty in the dark. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 4 Episode 13, “Tomorrowland.”

36 Ibid, 643.

29
Although the show’s focus on Betty’s depression shifts after the first season, when viewed in light of

Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, it is easy to see how these states of emotion continue to

envelop Betty throughout her life. Describing cases of melancholia, Freud writes that often “one

feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss [of an object of love] has occurred, but one cannot

see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient

cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either.”37 This sense of loss coincides with the

profound emptiness Betty feels as a result of preserving her bad faith, acknowledging little but

vaguely aware that the “heavy curse weighing on her is that the very meaning of her existence is not

in her hands,” and, as Beauvoir states, “nothing is more depressing than discovering a destiny over

which one no longer has a hold.”38

Sartre’s explanation of melancholy is particularly relevant to Betty:

My melancholy is a method of suppressing the obligation to look for these

new ways [of living], by transforming the present structure of the world,
replacing it with a totally undifferentiated structure. What it comes to, in
short, is that I make the world into an affectively neutral reality, a system
which is, effectively, in complete equilibrium… In other words, lacking both
the ability and the will to carry out the projects I formerly entertained, I
believe in such a manner that the universe requires nothing more from me.39

Sartre’s words ring true for Betty and capture the essence of her mixed motivations of simultaneous

fear, duty, ennui, and confusion. In efforts to overcome her melancholy, Betty resorts to repressing

it through bad faith; in bad faith, the weight of the lie only plunges her into deeper melancholy.

Seemingly launched into a helpless life doomed by routine, headed towards a “gilded mediocrity

with neither passion nor ambition, days leading nowhere, repeating themselves indefinitely, a life

37 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume XIV (1914-1916), trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1917), 245.
38 Beauvoir, Second, 485-6.
39 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Routledge, 1962), 68-9.

30
that slips toward death without looking for answers,”40 it is not until the end is nearly in sight for

Betty that she begins to escape her self-imposed prison.

Fig. 9. Facing her fate. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 7 Episode 13, “The Milk and Honey Route.”

III. Individuality and Freedom

Rolfe: You wait, little girl, on an empty stage
For fate to turn the light on
Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
Liesl: To write on...

- Cast of The Sound of Music, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” (“Tea Leaves,” S5E3)

Thus far, we have seen how Betty confines herself and is confined by the domestic birdcage

awaiting midcentury mothers and wives, how her sense of captivity renders her unable to transcend

the melancholia of routine and repetition, and how paradoxically powerful her commitment to

weakness is—that is to say, how forcefully she maintains the lie of accepting her secondary

existence; and although these self-defeating beliefs and patterns make up a large part of Betty’s life

as we know it, this is not to say that, as mentioned by Sartre earlier, she is without moments of

awakening and authenticity. From the first season, Betty is exposed to the initially unfamiliar notion

of female freedom in the suburbs with the introduction of single, divorced mother Helen Bishop in

her then-picture-perfect life. Betty becomes aware—if not somewhat judgmental—of a woman who

40 Beauvoir, Second, 468.

31
chose to leave her husband and chose to work to support herself and her son on her own. Helen’s

political leanings and volunteer work with the Kennedy campaign may have subconsciously inspired

Betty’s own dip into local politics in season three and, of course, Helen is responsible for one of the

most significant aspects of Betty’s life and arguably her most authentic human connection: Glen.

The idea of knowing a person (“You really know me,” “I know what kind of man you are,”

etc.) runs rampant throughout Mad Men and underscores its thematic emphasis on face to face,

person to person relationships. This is also deeply entwined with Sartre’s ideas of concrete relations

with others and authenticity. In spite of Betty’s aforementioned lack of meaningful, healthy

relationships, there may have been a time when, if ever asked, Betty might have said it was Glen who

really knew her best. In the season one finale, although forbidden to speak to each other by Helen

following her accusations about the seemingly inappropriate nature of their friendship, Betty

confesses her sadness and sense of alienation to Glen, openly crying and finally requesting of him:

“Please tell me I’m going to be okay.”41 Not only is this a striking moment of honesty for Betty—

“The young wife rarely admits her feelings to herself with such sincerity”42—but it exposes the very

real connection Betty feels with Glen by virtue of the fact that she allows herself to engage in (no

less, initiate) such an open and sincere exchange. “For friendship to be authentic,” Beauvoir writes,

“it must first be free. Freedom does not mean whim….feeling is free when it does not depend on

any outside command, when it is lived in sincerity without fear.”43 It may be argued that this idea

exclusively applies to Glen, in Betty’s case. Her complex attachment to him in early seasons

enhances what we already understand about her—how much trouble she often has playing along

41 Mad Men, “The Wheel,” Season 1 Episode 13, dir. Matthew Weiner, writ. Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith (18
October 2007; AMC), streaming online.
42 Beauvoir, Second, 495.
43 Ibid, 511.

32
with the grown-ups, the influential imprint of her childhood on her adult life, and her often

overwhelming sense of confusion and misunderstanding towards the world and towards herself.

Fig. 10. “I can’t talk to anyone.” Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 1 Episode 13, “The Wheel.”

Much in the same way as a child, Betty (more often than not) feels utterly uninvolved in how

things are, powerless and unable to change them, dependent on the men who can: “In this sense

there is truth in the saying that condemns her to remaining ‘an eternal child’… Woman’s lot is

obedience and respect. She has no grasp, even in thought, on this reality that involves her.”44 It is in

this state of helplessness that Betty turns to Glen—relying even on a child before relying on

herself—for some sort of comfort or affirmation. The idea of “being okay” pervades throughout the

series—its significance no less noticeable as part of a key scene in the pilot episode—and in the lives

of its characters, but this moment between Betty and Glen is particularly affecting in hindsight, as

viewers learn by the end that Betty will, in fact, not be okay. Glen’s hesitant response to her plea, “I

don’t know,” highlights the ultimately unpredictable nature of life for even the most (supposedly)

predictable of demographics, thus pointing to the absurdity of needing an answer—or even asking

the question at all.

44 Ibid, 639.

33
 But Betty does ask the question, she does not yet know the answer, and she must go on living

in this fundamentally human state of uncertainty, slowly beginning to figure out—starting with

Glen—that perhaps the only rule of freedom, authenticity, and happiness, is to sometimes break the

rules. Though we have examined the plethora of ways Betty feels she must abide by social

constructs, stay in designated spaces, and stick to the script, there are numerous moments and

occasions (some of which have been explored above) when Betty breaks away from the script; her

friendship with Glen is an important one. Despite her awareness of their significant age difference

and of how their relationship may be perceived as improper, knowing how Glen does not fit into the

socially acceptable sphere of her life, Betty continues to engage with him. She makes this feeling

explicit when she first encounters him waiting in the car, meeting Glen’s embarrassed reminders that

he isn’t allowed to talk to her and that his mother will be out soon with a repeated “I don’t care.”

When Glen later strikes up a friendship with Sally, Betty’s obvious resentment and jealousy appears

be an inappropriate reaction; however, given our understanding of Betty’s isolation and symptoms

of melancholia, it is clear that she is truly mourning a loss—perhaps at that point, the loss of the

only person who really knew her.

Following Betty’s defeated efforts in moving towards autonomy in the second season,

overthrown by her unwelcome pregnancy, her developing relationship with Henry leads her to

another significant move of authentic action when, in one of their first meetings, Henry jokingly

suggests that she buy a Victorian fainting couch. “Ladies would get overwhelmed—corsets and all—

and need a place to lie down,”45 he explains. Already in the process of redecorating and furnishing

the parlor, Betty buys one, much to the dismay of her interior designer. “You have ruined the whole

45Mad Men, “Seven Twenty Three,” Season 3 Episode 7, dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer, writ. Matthew Weiner, Andre
and Maria Jacquemetton (27 September 2009; AMC), streaming online.

34
room!” she exclaims in disgust at the antique sofa, awkwardly placed in what had been an empty

space in front of the fireplace where Betty had earlier asked the designer, “What goes here?”

Fig. 11. “Antiques are expected.” Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 7, “Seven Twenty Three.”

Betty’s fondness for the old-fashioned piece of furniture, in addition to serving as a

reflection of her inability to adapt to the rapidly-changing times of the decade and further aligning

her as much with the outdated ways of the past as Megan Calvet Draper is aligned with the trends of

the present and future, reminds Betty of Henry, of her repressed sexuality, and of the satisfaction in

seeing things messed up and out of place sometimes; just as the couch does not ‘fit’ with the rest of

the room, Betty does not seem to ‘fit’ in her allotted domestic space. “If you want to keep it, please

do not tell people I did this,” the designer tells her, repulsed by the aberration of the sofa, viewing it

as a violation to the space she had carefully crafted. Betty’s connection and attachment to the couch,

however trivial it may seem, is important, mainly for two reasons: first, the antique sofa illuminates

Beauvoir’s claims about the midcentury woman’s deep investment in using things to express their

individuality: “Her home is thus her earthly lot, the expression of her social worth, and her intimate

truth. Because she does nothing, she avidly seeks herself in what she has.”46 We already know that

46 Beauvoir, Second, 471.

35
appearances are of the utmost importance to Betty; aside from the fact that she was a model in her

youth and is praised incessantly for her looks, the nearly singular significance of one’s exterior as

Betty understands it comes out frequently as Sally grows up, with rather violent reactions to

haircuts-gone-wrong and incidentally broken noses. As we saw in “A Night to Remember,” one’s

own perception of how they appear to others can be flattened in an instant, thus illustrating the

dangerous position of being-for-others, a mode of being originally defined by Sartre and explained by

Thomas Martin as the “risky and uncertain state” in which “the self can see itself, through the eyes

of others, as really being there and really being something.”47 That said, Betty’s choice to keep the

fainting couch becomes all the more bold and authentic—either she doesn’t see how bad it looks

(which is doubtful, considering how acutely attuned she is to her own physical appearance) or she

doesn’t care.

Second, Betty’s acquisition of the sofa parallels what Beauvoir calls the “paradox of woman’s

situation”: “They belong both to the male world and to a sphere in which this world is challenged;

enclosed in this sphere, involved in the male world, they cannot peacefully establish themselves

anywhere.”48 Looking back again at “A Night to Remember,” it is understandable that Betty would

hate being embarrassed in her own home—if that is not a comfortable space for her, then where is?

Indeed, the places Betty seems to feel most at ease in times when she is seeking comfort are the

places where she specifically cannot fit: in Glen’s life, in Sally’s bed, in the empty pink bedroom of the

Ossining house on the night before moving out… In a brief but revealing instant while meeting with

a child psychiatrist for Sally in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,”49 Betty absentmindedly rests

her gaze on a dollhouse, then smiles—however much she hates ‘playing house’ in her real life, it is

47 Thomas Martin, “Sartre, Sadism, and Female Beauty Ideals,” 92-3.
48 Ibid, 638.
49 Mad Men, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” Season 4 Episode 5, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter, writ. Erin Levy (22

August 2010; AMC), streaming online.

36
clear that her childhood longings and desires to make the game ‘real’ still exist; it was just more fun

when it was only a game.

As Betty goes on living in Henry’s shadow, serving the same exterior purpose she so often

did for Don, she quickly becomes restless once again, and begins to seriously question her maternal

strengths after visiting with her old friend Francine in Season 7’s “Field Trip.”50 Surprised to hear of

Francine’s desire for a challenge after her children have become more independent and of her

satisfaction working three days a week at an office job, Betty assures her that there are still plenty of

parenting challenges ahead. “Fine,” Francine says, “I guess I needed a reward.” Still confused, Betty

responds, “I thought they were the reward?” After a disastrous day spent with Bobby in an attempt to

reaffirm this belief, Betty begins to recognize her flaws as a mother and the effects they have had on

her children. Meanwhile, a political comment Betty makes among Henry’s associates causes tension

between them, and proves to be the last straw for Betty and her subordinate treatment. “I’m tired of

everyone telling me to shut up!” she snaps at Henry. “I’m not stupid. I speak Italian.”51 When Henry

mocks her declaration of intelligence by suggesting she run for Senate instead of him, Betty retorts,

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Henry, but that’s a good idea!” That she eventually decides to

return to school and pursue a Master’s in psychology is surprisingly fitting for Betty; as someone

who has spent a lifetime thinking only of themselves through the eyes of others, it is clear that what

Betty wants more than anything is to understand herself for herself—what she wants is to know what

she wants. In taking this significant step towards self-awareness, Betty finally makes a truly free

choice—an important decision which, with her sudden cancer diagnosis, makes her life all the more

tragic and absurd. When Sally finds out that Betty does not want to be treated, she angrily confronts

50 Mad Men, “Field Trip,” Season 7 Episode 3, dir. Christopher Manley, writ. Matthew Weiner and Heather Jeng Bladt
(27 April 2014; AMC), streaming online.
51 Mad Men, “The Runaways,” Season 7 Episode 5, dir. Christopher Manley, writ. Matthew Weiner and David Iserson

(11 May 2014; AMC), streaming online.

37
her mother with all the criticism viewers had harbored over years of frustration with Betty’s

frustration—“He doesn’t know you won’t get treatment because you love the tragedy”52—but Betty

calmly explains that she isn’t quitting, she has just learned to believe people when they say it’s over.

The decision to accept her fate, the decision to continue going to school, the decision to refuse

treatment—these are all choices Betty makes in the end, evidence of her newfound freedom and sense

of individuality. Her immanent, off-screen death changes nothing; it only reminds us of what an

absurd game existence is, and that it is not a weakness to know when it’s over.

Fig. 12. Birdie flies toward divorce. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 12, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.”

Sally
I. Voyeurism and The Look
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's clouds’ illusions I recall—
I really don't know clouds at all.

- Judy Collins, “Both Sides Now” (S6E13, “In Care Of”)

One would be remiss in any attempt to understand the character of Betty without taking an

equally thorough look at Sally, Betty’s eldest child, only daughter, and constant source of frustration.

Mad Men, “The Milk and Honey Route,” Season 7 Episode 13, dir. Matthew Weiner, writ. Matthew Weiner and Carly
52

Wray (10 May 2015; AMC), streaming online.

38
However, it is hardly a surprise that most of The Second Sex, which served us well in the previous

chapter, does not seem to apply to Sally at all. While Beauvoir’s work is an incredibly revealing and

(as proven by our application of its claims to Betty) fairly accurate portrait of the existential

midcentury woman and housewife, even Beauvoir’s sections on “Childhood” and “The Girl” seem

to explain much more about Betty and how the sort of upbringing she experienced influences her

adult character than anything about Sally. This impression alone points to the significance of the

generational gap between this particular mother and daughter—while Betty is consistently

characterized as “old-fashioned,” romantic about the past, and determined to (unconsciously,

submissively) follow the example set by her own mother, Sally is inquisitive and challenging,

confused by past traditions and increasingly disillusioned by the world of adults who follow them.

The most valuable and consistent quality of Sally’s character—which effectively defines her

as an individual on the series and sharply distinguishes her from Betty—lies in her habits of

observation. Growing from barely more than a toddler to a mature young adult throughout the

course of the series, Sally is frequently subjected to the role of witness throughout her development,

and often acts as a mirror to audiences as we observe and attempt to make sense of the

‘complicated’ adult antics around her. This makes perfect sense in light of the ever-developing

contrast between Betty and Sally: while the only career we’ve ever known Betty to have is as a

model, Sally’s first job is working at the pool as a lifeguard; while Betty is taught to believe that her

only value lies in the power of holding another’s gaze, Sally learns to keep an eye on what goes on

around her and thinks carefully about what she sees; while Betty’s roles as model, housewife and

mother revolve around being observed, Sally’s role as the child of a turbulent decade and domestic

life primarily requires her to be an observer. If Betty’s verb is to be seen, Sally’s is undoubtedly to see.

As she gets older and learns to control the power of her own gaze, many of Sally’s experiences can

be understood in light of the Sartrean notion of “the look,” but first, one crucial component of her

39
childhood and development as a voyeur must be established in a brief examination of her

relationship with television.

From what we already know of Betty as a mother and of her attitude toward the task of

parenting, it is not surprising that a bored, frustrated housewife such as herself would turn to the

television set as a surrogate caretaker in times when the responsibility of having children becomes

overwhelming (or simply a nuisance). While viewers come to see this as a common practice among

mothers and maternal figures of the era—further illustrated in later seasons with scenes depicting

Joan and her toddler son with Sesame Street on in the background, and with Peggy (the show’s most

potent example of female aversion to motherhood) bonding with the little boy downstairs when he

comes up to use her TV—there is no other character who has a closer relationship with TV than

Sally (no, not even Harry Crane). “Sally, go watch TV!” may as well be Betty’s catchphrase, with the

vast number of times these four words have been used to offer her temporary relief from her duties

as a mother. Although the television is nearly as constant a presence to Sally as her own family

(which may not be saying much, from one perspective, but is undeniably revealing about her

childhood development), there are a few particularly meaningful moments when Sally’s TV viewing

experience uncannily coincides with the troubled experience of her life growing up. Among the most

influential of these early childhood incidents is the death of Betty’s father, (Grandpa) Gene, in

Season 3’s “The Arrangements.”53 At nine years old, Sally has already seen her parents go through

the painful process of separation and reluctant reconciliation, and becomes understandably close to

Gene when he temporarily moves in with the Drapers and becomes another parental figure for her,

while offering far more consistent affection and support than she likely ever received from Betty or

Don. “You can really do something,” Gene tells Sally in a moment of solemnity. “Don’t let your

Mad Men, “The Arrangements,” Season 3 Episode 4, dir. Michael Uppendahl, writ. Andrew Colville and Matthew
53

Weiner (6 September 2009, AMC), streaming online.

40
mother tell you otherwise.” The clear differences in Gene’s behavior towards his daughter and

granddaughter shed light on both Betty’s upbringing and how Sally’s completely contrasting view of

herself came to be, especially when compared to what Gene says to Betty during her dream in “The

Fog.” It is clear to viewers that Betty never received the type of encouragement from her father that

Sally does, and it is possible that this is clear to Gene as well—Sally offers an opportunity for Gene

to correct the parenting mistakes he made with Betty.

Fig. 13. Both of Gene’s ‘little girls’ face his absence. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 4, “The Arrangements.”

These moments of sincere intimacy between Sally and her grandfather make his death one of

the most significant events of her childhood (indeed, it would not be unreasonable to assume she

has more of these moments with Gene in just a few episodes than she ever does with either of her

parents). Utterly devastated by her first close encounter with death, Sally lashes out at the adults

when she overhears them laughing over memories of Gene: “Why are you laughing?” she asks, tear-

stricken and sincerely appalled. “How can you be sitting there like nothing’s happening? Like he’s

not gone?” Sally’s shock here quickly turns to rage as she continues to fume at the adults with

mounting force and volume, “He was here, now he’s not here. He’s gone forever and nobody even

knows that. He’s dead!” she finally screams. “He’s dead and he’s never coming back, and nobody

cares that he’s really, really gone!” The scene is exceedingly meaningful for Sally in many ways

41
(indeed, this episode may be the most direct in revealing Sally as a force of opposition to the world

of Mad Men), demonstrating the physical aggression her character is capable of, her burgeoning

distrust and frustration with the adults around her, as well as her emerging understanding of the

negation and implicit annihilation faced in adult life (to be further explored in a later section). Fueled

by the raw anguish of her first real loss, Sally is incapable of expressing anything but the truth of

what she feels and eventually erupts in bewildered fury over the adults’ apparent acceptance of

Gene’s death. This is a major turning point in Sally’s young life, affecting her sense of isolation in

the world and increasingly troubled behavior, and is merely one of many, many instances of Sally

making explicit and external what the adults (on the show and in the world) experience and

understand as implicit, and restrict to the internal.

The gravity of this particular moment for Sally is underscored—as usual—by the sounds of

the television in the background. When Betty inevitably tells her to go watch TV in response to her

daughter’s fit of grief and anger, she is not only reinforcing the exact claim Sally has just made

against her and the other adults, but she is rejecting her daughter and maternal duties at a crucial

moment in Sally’s development. By telling her to “go watch TV” when she is clearly in need of

comfort and emotional support, Betty (and the other adult bystanders) prove something essential to

Sally about the grown-up world of which she is already suspicious and eventually comes to

despise—adults do not tell the truth. Sally has already begun to unconsciously learn this from

experience with Don’s overt, extensive lies and Betty’s deep-seated philosophy that she must repress

her true feelings, but episodes like “The Arrangements” bring Sally’s confusion toward adults to the

forefront. It is significant, too, that what is often on the television (her old surrogate supervisor,

temporarily forgotten in Gene’s presence) in these times of isolation is the news—a suggestion of

truth and reality among channels and channels of staged entertainment.

42
 Fig. 14. A world apart from the adults, condemned to the television. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 3 Episode 4, “The Arrangements.”

Profoundly, Betty orders Sally away to the TV just in time for her to catch the headline story

that day—June 11, 1963—when Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself in protest at an

intersection in Saigon. Dismissed to the dark living room, Sally is subjected to images of the

disturbing story as she copes with her grandfather’s death and her parents’ rejection. That this

particular news story revolves around Buddhism, a philosophy associated with mindfulness, ethical

conduct, and the attainment of enlightenment through suffering, is highly relevant to Sally (and the

series as a whole, particularly in light of “Person to Person” and the show’s final shot). After

expressing the feeling that she alone is reacting appropriately and honestly to Gene’s death, only to

have those feelings ignored and then find herself physically rejected and removed from the situation,

it is easy to see how the story of self-immolation would resonate with Sally. In an increasingly

constant state of protest against her parents and their universe, Sally’s bouts of rage are about as

close as she can go to setting herself on fire—but, more often than not, even these are not enough

to make the grown-ups turn their heads.

This incident reveals Sally even in her youth as a complex and rounded character,

introducing viewers to her most strongly-defined attributes—her candid questioning and willingness

to act among them, to be further explored below—but above all, underlining the significant role of

43
looking and observation in Sally’s development. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre ascribes substantial

weight to this fundamental act and asserts that it is only through the Other’s gaze that we become

aware of our own physical presence in the world54, and that “[T]he original relation of myself to the

Other is not only an absent truth…it is also a concrete, daily relation which at each instance I

experience. At each instant the Other is looking at me.”55 We know already how the awareness of

another’s gaze affects Betty in her everyday life, and we know from this how Sally comes to prefer

behaving under opposite assumptions; however, Sally’s increasing determination to be different

from her parents is not enough for her to fully escape the effects of the Other’s presence,

particularly in her early childhood. Her voyeuristic tendencies take many forms, from the passive act

of watching TV to curious glimpses of her parents’ often inexplicable behavior, but we can see how

Sartre’s idea of the look relates to some of Sally’s more traumatizing experiences, particularly in the

vein of ‘getting caught’ or ‘catching’ someone else.

Many of Sally’s most memorable and important scenes fall under this category, with the

events of “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”56 ranking near the top. In an episode filled with

instances of Sally ‘acting out’, nothing compares to the moment when she is caught masturbating at

a slumber party by a friend’s mother. Around ten years old at this point, Sally finds herself alone

watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E., with a quick glance around the room of sleeping girls to indicate

the detachment she is already beginning to feel among her peers. Flicking between close-up shots of

the men onscreen and a slow zoom-in on Sally’s faraway gaze, the way the camera treats her

moment of awakening is both tasteful and symptomatic of her character’s meaningful association

with looking and seeing, rendering audiences equally as entranced by Sally as she is by The Man From

54 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 349.
55 Ibid, 345.
56 Mad Men, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” Season 4 Episode 5, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter, writ. Erin Levy (22

August 2010; AMC), streaming online.

44
U.N.C.L.E.—and thus, equally jarred by the sudden, accusatory sound of “What are you doing?”

moments later. Sally’s instinct to immediately stand and say “Nothing!” stresses the freezing effect

of the Other’s look and illustrates what Sartre means when he says, “I grasp the Other’s look at the

very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities.”57 In the moment

she realizes that the host’s mother has seen her, Sally simultaneously becomes aware of what she was

doing and the fact that she can no longer do it; in other words, she is now conscious of both her

own physical possibilities—her freedom—and the overpowering presence of the Other that destroys

these possibilities. “Thus in the look,” Sartre states, “the death of my possibilities causes me to

experience the Other’s freedom; I am inaccessible to myself and yet myself, thrown, abandoned, at

the heart of the Other’s freedom.”58 Although the implied power dynamics of the look could be

considered constant from the perspective of a child, always under someone’s supervision, what Sally

experiences here is the beginning of a truly disempowering realization of how greatly one’s actions

can be affected by the mere presence of others.

Indicative of the way she will mostly go through her childhood and general pursuit of

knowledge, it is significant that Sally’s first sexual experience is with herself, making audiences aware

of her burgeoning sexual curiosity and the deeply repressed nature of female sexuality and sex

education. This scene is also significant for taking place—where else?—in front of the TV,

highlighting the act of watching which guides Sally (for better or worse) to the most affecting

moments of her childhood and aligns her in complex, contradictory ways with her mother. We see

Betty at various times “in more indirect masturbatory practices” like horseback riding, pressing

herself against a vibrating washing machine, and lying on her fainting couch while daydreaming

57 Sartre, Being, 352.
58 Ibid, 362.

45
about Henry,59 but Sally is caught openly masturbating, revealing the shared sexual frustration

between them while also pointing to the fundamental differences in how they approach their

dissatisfaction. In addition, the masturbation incident puts Sally at the mercy of the Other’s gaze in

ways which echo what was likely her earliest experience of being caught in the Look, when Betty

finds her smoking a cigarette in the bathroom toward the end of the second season.60

Fig. 15 and Fig. 16. Caught in the act—Sally experiences the Other’s look. Screenshots from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 2 Episode 12, “The Mountain King” and Season 4
Episode 5, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

Knowing, in the instant she and the Other lock eyes, that she is doing something she shouldn’t, Sally

in both cases feels the shame which Sartre equates with pride in different circumstances: “It is

shame or pride which reveals to me the Other’s look and myself at the end of that look. It is the

shame or pride which makes me live, not know the situation of being looked at.”61 Moreover, it is

significant that Sally’s motivation to try smoking obviously stems from years of observing her

parents—but particularly Betty—doing the same thing, thus adding a layer of confusion and

frustration to the shame Sally experiences in the moment of being seen, caught trying to emulate the

only role models she has.62

59 Carol M. Dole, “Bishops, Knights, and Pawns: Mad Men and Narrative Strategy” from Mad Men, Women and Children,
ed. Heather Marcovitch and Nancy Batty (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 184.
60 Mad Men, “The Mountain King,” Season 2 Episode 12, dir. Alan Taylor, writ. Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith (19

October 2008; AMC), streaming online.

61 Sartre, Being 350.
62 Additionally, it is worth noting that Sally demonstrates her increasingly acute observational abilities later in the same

scene when she accuses Betty of being the reason for Don’s recent absence and not letting him come home, offering
“His suitcase is here, and he’s not” as evidence of what she assumes will be his imminent return.

46
 These incidents of finding herself shamefully caught in the Other’s look occur less and less

as Sally grows older, and gradually disappear as she realizes her freedom and learns to rely on her

gaze alone. Over years of observing the behavior of others and trying to make sense of what she

sees (particularly when it comes to her incompetent and self-destructive parents), Sally’s dissociation

with the variety of ever-intriguing subjects encountered in her world continues to grow, giving

viewers the distinct sense that she studies each encounter, witnessed or experienced, as one studies a

panel of exhibits in a museum.63 Generally speaking, it is “this very detachment,” Sartre says, which

“causes there to be an Other” in the first place,64 but Sally illustrates the effects of this detachment

with special resonance in the context of the series, offering the perspective of a girl who grows from

innocently idolizing her parents and wanting to grow up in order to imitate them, to despising the

adult universe and desperate to grow up in order to do things differently.

Sally’s disillusionment is fostered by a number of alarming incidents as she enters

adolescence, the most traumatizing of which put her in the detached position of voyeur. “At the

Codfish Ball”65 is an episode which revolves entirely around this aspect of Sally’s development. Early

on, we see Sally preparing to enter the world as Betty does—fully made-up and anticipating being

looked at—a move which proves to be too much for Don to accept in his slow realization that his

daughter will soon become an object of desire for people like him; fittingly, the episode ends not

with the Other’s look imposed on Sally, as Don fears and as we’ve seen in earlier seasons, but with

Sally exercising her own look on another. Though Marie and Roger do not reciprocate the look

when Sally, on an innocent journey to find the bathroom, catches them in a dark corner of the adult

underworld stumbled into by attending an awards dinner with Don, the disturbing sexual encounter

63 Articulating this feeling is reminiscent not only of Sally and Glen’s trip to the Museum of Natural History in
“Commissions and Fees” (S5E12), but, even more significantly, of Betty’s undergraduate degree in anthropology and
eventual pursuit of a Master’s in psychology.
64 Sartre, Being, 378.
65 Mad Men, “At the Codfish Ball,” Season 5 Episode 7, dir. Michael Uppendahl, writ. Jonathan Igla (29 April 2012,

AMC), streaming online.

47
she witnesses puts her in the same position of power as the Other who had denied Sally her freedom

many times before.

Fig. 17 and Fig. 18. Sally catches others in the act. Screenshots from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 5 Episode 7, “At the Codfish Ball” and Season 6 Episode 11, “Favors.”

The incident visibly shakes Sally, but hardly holds a candle to what she witnesses a year later:

while breaking into the neighbors’ apartment to retrieve an embarrassing note signed with her

name,66 Sally walks in to see a full view of Don having sex with Sylvia Arnold, the married woman

who lives on the floor above Don and Megan’s penthouse. This time, Sally’s look of horror is

reciprocated when her father sees who has walked in; this time, Sally is the Other whose look

transcends Don’s freedom and brings the death of his possibility. However, unable to fully harness

the power of judgment that might be expressed with an accusatory “What are you doing?” at this

point in her young life and in this particular moment of shock, Sally feels equally violated in this

instant as Don does and flees the scene without pursuing the look that has passed between them;

indeed, the significance of this moment is heightened when we realize that this look—The Look—is

the last time Don and Sally can stand to see each other for a while. “You make me sick!” Sally shouts

later that night after keeping her head down, locking herself in her bedroom and ignoring Don’s

66 Sally’s growing social disconnect is significantly illustrated in this episode, made particularly apparent by the
contrasting presence of her school friend, Julie. Condescending and sex-driven, Julie is uninterested in helping Sally
study for their test and overly flirtatious with neighbor Mitchell Arnold, for whom she eventually leaves a love letter
signed with Sally’s name in a teasing effort to help her “go all the way.”

48
thunderous demands for her to open the door. “You don’t get to talk to me anymore,” she tells him

through the wall, now armed with the freedom of one who has seen someone else doing something

they shouldn’t have. The exchange that follows brings all the elements of Sartre’s look to light as

Don and Sally lean against opposite sides of the locked door, equally defeated and nauseated by

memories of the last look to pass between them, and unable to face each other in its aftermath.

II. The Question: Origins of Negation

My, my, the clock in the sky is pounding away, and there's so much to say
A face, a voice, an overdub has no choice, and it cannot rejoice
Wanting to be, to hear and to see
Crying to the sky…

- The Monkees, “Porpoise Song (Theme to ‘Head’)” (S6E12, “The Quality of Mercy”)

In the previous section, we established the distinction between being observed and the act of

observing as one of the fundamental differences between Betty and Sally, highlighted by Sally’s

traumatic reel of experiences with the Other’s look and, consequently, her own. While the act of

looking and thematic significance of seeing undoubtedly denotes Sally’s most essential attribute and

ultimate function as a critical perspective of Betty, the other component of her ability to judge lies in

the persistent act of asking questions. We have seen in this Sally even from her earliest appearances

on the show as she learns to become economical and deliberate in her ongoing investigation of the

world around her, but this habit of inquiry holds even greater significance than simply signifying

curiosity, according to Sartre: “In every question we stand before a being which we are questioning,”

he begins, going on to remark that with each question is the implication of both a negative

affirmative answer, and an expectation that the being toward whom the question is directed will

provide this answer. “There are questions which on the surface do not permit a negative reply,”

Sartre acknowledges, “but actually we see that it is always possible with questions of this type to

reply, ‘Nothing’ or ‘Nobody’ or ‘Never.’ Thus…I admit on principle the possibility of a negative

49
reply.”67 In Sally’s case, it is easy to see where her adolescent cynicism comes from, then, as the

possibility of negation actually becomes the norm for her and she grows up expecting negative replies

from her parents and most other adults. It is in this way, Sartre argues, that we admit to being faced

with the possibility of non-being as well as we admit ourselves to be “in a state of

indetermination,”68 not knowing whether the answer to our question will be negative or affirmative,

knowing only that we do not know. “Finally,” he claims in the same passage, “the question implies

the existence of a truth,” suggesting that with each question we affirm the expectation of an

objectively true answer. As we know already, Sally’s expectation of truth is progressively diminished

with each inexplicable or phony exchange she sees and each instance of negation she encounters.

Among the strongest episodes centered on Sally (as well as in the series as a whole), “The

Beautiful Girls”69 depicts one of her most affecting ‘negative’ experiences when she becomes

frustrated with her parents’ recent divorce and decides to visit Don at the office on her own. Still

affectionate towards her father at this point (“I wanted to see you and I didn’t want to wait two

weekends”), Sally is met with instant admonishment and negation from both parents. Although she

does not hear her mother’s side of the conversation when Don angrily calls Betty to inform her that

their daughter has taken a train to the city by herself, we know that Sally is used to the sort of

estranged dismissal with which Betty increasingly handles her, as when she responds to Don’s

demand for her to pick up Sally, “Oh, because it’s so easy. It’s so much fun taking care of her.

Enjoy.” Despite being rejected by her mother and unwanted by her father, however, Sally is happy

her plan to get out of Betty’s house and spend time with the father she still idolizes appears to have

succeeded, even at the cost of their rebukes.

67 Sartre, Being, 35.
68 Ibid, 36.
69 Mad Men, “The Beautiful Girls” Season 4 Episode 9, dir. Michael Uppendahl, writ. Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner

(19 September 2010, AMC), streaming online.

50
 Later that night, after being babysat by Don’s latest girlfriend, Dr. Faye Miller, Sally once

again demonstrates the analytical capacity she has begun to refine in a highly conventional yet

illustrative exchange with Don:

(Cont.)
SALLY SALLY
Can I ask you something? She had your keys.

DON DON
Yes, I’m still mad at you. I gave her my keys.

SALLY SALLY
Are you going to marry Faye? She knew you had peanut butter.

DON DON
What? No. Everyone has peanut butter.

SALLY SALLY
Is she your girlfriend? Well, she said she wanted to meet
me. Why would she want to meet
DON me?
No.

At once, this conversation reveals Don as one of the major sources of casual negation in Sally’s life,

exemplified by his instant decision to answer her initial question with a reminder that she is not

welcome and still in trouble for coming to see him, while Sally is depicted once more as a sharp

observer who is knowingly in a state of indetermination and resolutely pursuing the truth of the

situation in which she finds herself. Additionally, it is worth noting that Sally pursues the truth in

somewhat indirect ways here, choosing to start with yes-or-no questions instead of asking upfront,

“Who is Faye?” and thus reinforcing her character’s critical function as an eye of judgement in Mad

Men’s universe and proving how much she has progressed in the way she asks questions; rather than

counting on others for a satisfactory explanation right off the bat, she learns to approach her

investigations from a carefully considered angle, supported by the evidence of her observations.

Sally continues to face negation from her father on numerous occasions throughout the

episode, including a brief and rather tragic exchange that begins with “Daddy, I love you so much”

and Sally’s wish to live with Don all the time, and ends with inevitable rejection and “Sally, go to

51
sleep.” Though it may be somewhat surprising that Sally remains so fond of Don at this point, she

makes it clear the next day that however much he insists she cannot stay with him, she won’t go

down without a fight. “I want to stay, and I don’t know why I can’t,” she tells him civilly with Nancy

Drew in hand at the office the next day, prepared to demonstrate just how reasonable and adult she

can be, as this is clearly what it takes to be part of Don’s life. The scene quickly escalates to a

shouting match70 when Don attempts to force Sally out of his office to meet Betty outside, and ends

with a crash as Sally trips and falls while running away from the father trying to get rid of her. The

incident proves to be something of a final straw for Sally, who finally seems to accept that Don

sincerely does not want the responsibility of caring for her. When Betty instructs her to say goodbye

to her father, the resignation in Sally’s voice and expression make it clear that she is doing just that;

something between them has changed forever.

Fig. 19. “Shut up.” Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 4 Episode 9, “The Beautiful Girls.”

“The Beautiful Girls” illustrates both Sally’s maturing sense of individuality (marked by the

initiative taken in visiting Don and her efforts to ask questions and behave like an adult) and the

70Although I’ve refrained from commenting on the actors (or even mentioning their names) up to this point, it is worth
saying that Kiernan Shipka’s performance in this scene is positively phenomenal, even for her. The bare bones of the
script convey Sally’s frustration with Don’s constant negation well enough, but Shipka adds a monumental amount to
her character and the episode with her aggressive physicality and dynamic tone as she parallels Sally by exhibiting an
impressive level of control for any actor—let alone a child.

52
extent of negation faced in her young life thus far, which we know will come together to make Sally

an understandably alienated and pessimistic young adult. Even as she grows older, however, another

significant topic among her many unanswered questions (why she can’t live with Don, who Faye

really is, why her parents act the way they do, etc.) is sex. Like most everything else, sex is a topic of

discussion which Sally is constantly denied and forced to figure out through her own assumptions

and experience. The often unfortunate (and, indeed, frequently traumatizing) consequences of

learning through experience, however, come to be closely intertwined with both Sally’s growing

disillusionment in her perception of adulthood and her aforementioned observational, inquisitive

tendencies. We see her developing sexual curiosity in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” not

only when The Man From U.N.C.L.E. comes on, but when Sally uses the occasion of having

babysitter as an opportunity to ask questions she can’t at home: “Are you and my daddy doing it?”

she asks Phoebe, the nurse down the hall in Don’s Manhattan bachelor pad. “I know what it is!” she

insists, assuredly relaying information from a girl at school, “I know that the man pees inside the

woman.” When Phoebe uncomfortably suggests that she ask her mother about it, Sally simply says

she doesn’t want to, demonstrating her reluctance to broach such topics with Betty (although this

surely reflects more on Betty than Sally). Even in her direct exchange with Phoebe, however, Sally’s

questions are left unanswered and her intentions are dismissed, making it apparent—if it wasn’t

already—what fuels her growing frustration with adults and independent search for truth.

This search continues into Season 5 with particular emphasis in “Mystery Date.”71 The

historical premise and meaningfully gendered arc of the episode is established when Peggy’s

photographer friend shows the creative team unpublishable photos of the “sex crime” of the eight

student nurses who were murdered by Richard Speck on July 14, 1966. While others eagerly look at

71Mad Men, “Mystery Date,” Season 5 Episode 4, dir. Matt Shakman, writ. Victor Levin and Matthew Weiner (8 April
2012, AMC), streaming online.

53
the images and react with the same morbid delight one might feel watching a horror movie, Michael

Ginsberg is the only person in the room to express regret at having seen the images. “Why are you

laughing?” he asks the others in disgust, echoing word for word Sally’s incredulous sentiment to

Betty and Don during her Season 3 post-trauma burst of outrage. Ginsberg’s revulsion towards both

the subject matter of the images and the removed attitude of the others parallels Sally’s general

outlook on the adults surrounding her and their tendency to ignore the truth of their feelings or

situation and, instead, act as if nothing unusual is happening. Often forced to draw her own

conclusions based on first-hand observation and careful reflection, we see that Sally grows up to

become a sharp and intuitive girl, well-practiced in the art of logical reasoning and asking deliberate

questions, but the case of the Chicago murders allows her an opportunity to learn something about

the current state of the world as well as the hazards of growing up female—something Sally has

never been explicitly taught by anyone.

Under the supervision of her new step-grandmother Pauline, Sally becomes obliquely aware

of the grisly student murders, and despite Pauline’s obvious desire to keep her ignorant of the

shocking news (“Some things are not for children”), Sally has years of experience seeing things she

probably shouldn’t have to back her up: “Mommy lets me watch the news,” she counters. Much in

the same way as adults have treated Sally her entire life, however, Pauline refuses to inform her

further on the murders and leaves Sally in the dark (accidentally revealing only the newspaper’s

terrifying headline—possibly the most nerve-wracking clue to learning about a major national event

a twelve-year-old girl could receive). The anxiety surrounding unexpected encounters is a theme

prominently explored throughout this episode but which rings particularly true for Sally, as she is

stuck knowing only that there is something she does not know, illustrating with special terror the perpetual

state of being a child, constantly under the supervision of others who control what information is

received and what is ignored.

54
 Fig. 20. Current events. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 5 Episode 4, “Mystery Date.”

A commercial for Milton Bradley’s board game Mystery Date brings these themes and

anxieties to an especially unsettling light. “He’s here—my Mystery Date!” the girl on TV exclaims, while

a bored Sally lies slumped on the couch and Pauline gossips about the Speck murders over the

phone. Catching wind of the conversation, Sally’s attention drifts away from the television while

images from the commercial come into an eerie focus for viewers, aligning with each of the

episode’s subplots: young girls excited to play the game; doors opening and men appearing; question

marks and wide eyes. Tension mounts when Pauline realizes Sally is listening and abruptly makes an

obvious attempt to further conceal the content of the conversation, merely enhancing Sally’s

confusion and uneasiness along with her continued frustration towards the pervasive adult figure

who asserts authority and control over her by withholding information. Pauline serves another

purpose as the adult in this scene when she makes the case that Sally needs more discipline and

fondly reminisces about her own strict father, recalling, “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he kicked

me so hard I actually flew across the room and hit a piece of furniture. Then he looked at me and

said ‘That’s for nothing, so look out.’” Baffled, Sally remarks, “That wasn’t very nice,” to which

Pauline says, “No, but it was valuable advice.” Utterly mystified by Pauline’s nostalgic account of her

father’s abuse, Sally now looks at her with the same dissociation usually reserved for her parents.

55
Steadily learning more and more about the lives of these adults, we see Sally begin to figure herself

out based on what she does not want to be, exemplifying what Sartre means when he says, “I am the

self which I will be, in the mode of not being it. It is through my horror that I am carried toward the

future.”72 Similarly, it is through Sally’s growing disgust with the adults around her—her ‘horror’—

that she carries herself toward a future where she might do things differently.

Only when Sally sneaks a copy of the newspaper upstairs does she fully comprehend the

horror of the story that’s been kept from her, and only then does Pauline step away from her

authoritative position and change gears completely, choosing to treat Sally like someone much older

than she is rather than someone much younger when Sally admits she can’t sleep that night. “Those

girls got ready for bed,” Pauline slowly explains in response to Sally’s confusion over what happened

to the nurses, “and there was a knock at the door, and a handsome man was there, and maybe one

of them knew him, but probably not because he was probably just watching them from afar….” The

episode’s established association between female sexuality and violence comes to the surface here,

particularly when she goes on to mention “all those young innocent nurses, in their short uniforms,

stirring his desire…” When Sally asks what for, her grandmother again chooses to see Sally as

someone much closer an adult than a child and tersely answers, “What do you think? You’re old

enough to know.” While responses like this are likely preferable to being told nothing at all, this

exchange demonstrates exactly the type of guidance Sally has received throughout her life,

particularly when it comes to sex: either she is considered too young to hear of such things, or she is

assumed to already know. Both approaches relieve adults from the responsibility of providing

explanations for potentially difficult subjects, and both continue to leave Sally no choice but to guess

and come to trust her own assumptions about the world and the way it works, as she is rarely given

72 Sartre, Being, 68.

56
explicit information by any of the guiding authority figures in her life even on universally essential

topics.

That the subplot ends with a shot of Sally asleep beneath the couch—further initiated into

the adult club after being knocked out with the help of Seconal from Pauline—while Betty wonders

aloud where she is illuminates Sally’s independent learning abilities as well as her development as a

young woman. Calling back to the one nurse who got away by hiding under the bed and is

mentioned numerous times throughout the episode as one of the highlights of the Speck story, the

image of Sally asleep under the couch suggests that she is now not only more aware of her particular

vulnerability as a female, but that she is now better equipped to handle and even escape from

whatever situation her femininity may lead her to; now, she knows to think twice before opening the

door.

III. Choice and Responsibility

Words of love, so soft and tender
Won't win a girl's heart anymore.
If you love her, then you must send her
Somewhere where she's never been before.
Worn out phrases and longing gazes
Won't get you where you want to go.

- The Mamas and the Papas, “Words of Love” (S6E8, “The Crash”)

“You know what I’m gunna write down for my dream?” Sally tells Don at the end of Season

7’s “The Forecast.”73 “I want to get on a bus, get away from you and Mom, and hopefully be a

different person than you two.”

“I’m your father,” Don responds indignantly, “and you may not want to listen to this, but

you are like your mother and me, and you’re going to find that out. You’re a very beautiful girl—it’s

Mad Men, “The Forecast,” Season 7 Episode 10, dir. Jennifer Getzinger, writ. Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner (19
73

April 2015, AMC), streaming online.

57
up to you to be more than that.” In a single exchange of dialogue, Sally’s arc comes full circle, and

her purpose on Mad Men becomes wholly defined.

In the seasons leading up to this moment, we have seen Sally perpetually struggle with her

relationship to Don and Betty and in her taxing quest to learn the truth about them and the world

they live in; we determined it is through observation that she learns to ask deliberate questions when

she is confused, and it is through the array of negation she receives in response to these questions

that she learns what type of person she does not want to be. These revelations happen slowly and

dramatically over a decade of Sally’s young life and ultimately leave us with no clue as to where she

will end up in the future, but seem to promise that she has the sense and motivation to try and be

better than the unhappy, inauthentic adults around her—most significantly, in one of the greatest

discrepancies between her and Betty, Sally much more quickly becomes aware of her power to choose.

“The duality of potency and act falls by the same stroke,” Sartre writes in the opening pages of Being

and Nothingness, “The act is everything.”74 When we look at how Sally chooses to act in the situations

of her life, particularly compared to the enduringly immobile Betty, it becomes clear that although

she may not be able to fully articulate what she wants or who she is yet, Sally’s choices and actions

often speak for themselves.

A key distinction between Sally and her mother is in their consciousness of ‘the rules’ and

how they handle them; while Betty is so accustomed to succumbing under social pressure that she

eventually seems to prefer working within these restrictions, Sally rails against the rules when they

don’t seem to make sense. We see this in a number of intense incidents throughout the series, but in

smaller yet significant ways as well. In her earlier days of childhood, for instance, Sally is scolded by

her mother for kissing Ernie Hanson during a game of playing grown-ups, told that “You don’t kiss

74 Sartre, Being, 4.

58
boys. Boys kiss you.”75 Though, at nine years old, Sally says, “I think so” when asked if she

understands the importance of her first kiss and letting the boy take charge, we later see her reject a

move from Glen’s friend Rollo once she reaches her teen years. While her boarding school friends

are preoccupied with goals of drinking, smoking, and hooking up, Sally tries to talk to Rollo about

music and his interests, then physically pushes him away when he makes it clear he isn’t interested in

talking.76 With these memories in mind, it is deeply significant that when Sally’s real first kiss finally

happens in the last season, she not only initiates the encounter but chooses to kiss the younger,

intellectual Neil rather than his football-playing brother who had previously caught her eye.

Moreover, the fact that her first kiss takes place during the first moon landing highlights the rapidly-

changing world Sally lives in and the revolutionary nature of her generation—perhaps Sally’s first

kiss is merely one small step for her, but choosing to reject Betty’s warning that only boys can do the

kissing is fairly close to a giant leap for the rising generation of Third Wave feminist young women

raised by mothers like Betty.77

Fig. 21 and Fig. 22. Navigating the world of boys. Screenshots from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 6 Episode 12 “The Quality of Mercy” and Season 7 Episode 7, “Waterloo.”

75 Mad Men, “Souvenir,” Season 3 Episode 8, dir. Phil Abraham, writ. Lisa Albert and Matthew Weiner (4 October 2009,
AMC), streaming online.
76 Mad Men, “The Quality of Mercy,” Season 6 Episode 12, dir. Phil Abraham, writ. André Jacquemetton and Matthew

Weiner (16 June 2013, AMC), streaming online.

77 Mad Men, “Waterloo,” Season 7 Episode 7, dir. Matthew Weiner, writ. Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner (25 May 2014,

AMC), streaming online.

59
 As she grows up, Sally proves again and again that she isn’t afraid of the physicality required

to act in substantial ways—unlike Betty, who lives most of her life as though on display behind glass

windows, Sally is capable of mobilizing herself in order to follow through on what motivates her,

unconcerned with consequences so long as she knows she is acting freely. We saw this in “The

Beautiful Girls” when Sally took the initiative to visit Don by herself, and after her traumatic run-in

with him and Sylvia in “Favors” when she decides to go to boarding school in an effort to get away

from her parents and grow up on her own, but her willingness to take physical action is perhaps

most succinctly illustrated in “The Runaways”78 when she comes home with a broken nose. A

consequence of fooling around with golf clubs, the injury is at once taken as an insult to Betty: “It

was a perfect nose, and I gave it to you!”79 she scolds, reinforcing her deep-seated value of looks

more than ever when she tells Sally, “That is your face, young lady,” to which Sally perfectly replies,

“That’s right. It’s my face.” These two lines alone epitomize the characters of Betty and Sally, their

fundamental differences and the relentless conflict between them. Seeing how much importance her

mother chooses to ascribe to maintaining her flawless appearance, Sally gradually chooses not to

make her looks a priority and places far greater value, instead, in her individuality and the

consciousness that she can do what she wants with her face and her body—even if that means

breaking her nose, or making boys uncomfortable, or simply not doing anything.

By the time Sally tells Don that she wants to be different from him and Betty when she

grows up, it is clear to viewers how strikingly different she already is. By even expressing that

thought and making that statement, Sally demonstrates the dissociation from her parents that allows

her to attain the level of self-consciousness and negation needed to make herself someone she

78 Mad Men, “The Runaways,” Season 7 Episode 5, dir. Christopher Manley, writ. David Iserson and Matthew Weiner
(11 May 2014, AMC), streaming online.
79 Given what Beauvoir says about the mother seeing her child as a replica of herself in some ways, it is not surprising

that someone like Betty would feel betrayed and personally insulted by such overt carelessness around the appearance
Sally inherited from her mother.

60
actually wants to be. After witnessing Betty’s starry-eyed reunion with Glen and Don’s teasing

engagement with her flirtatious friend in “The Forecast,” Sally’s disgust with her parents—the

‘horror’ which propels her toward the future—reaches its peak in her long-overdue confrontation

with Don, as she simultaneously expresses an awareness of her unformed state and a motivation to

escape the influence of her parents. It is worth noting here that both components of Sally’s

declaration parallel critical aspects of the role models she so urgently seeks to avoid becoming: like

Sally, Don was desperate to forget his influences growing up, going so far as to create a new persona

in order to dissociate from his past; Betty, on the other hand, practically embodies the undetermined

state of selfhood, characteristic of being a child, which defined Sally’s entire upbringing and carries

into her young adult life. These fundamental components of Sally’s character, echoed and

dramatized in the fundamental qualities of her parents, prove Don’s claim that Sally will realize—

someday, in some ways—she is like them already.

Fig. 23 and Fig. 24. “You just…ooze everywhere.” Screenshots from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 7 Episode 10, “The Forecast.”

What makes Sally different, though, is both her consistent mode of resistance—even Don,

who may embody the transcendence Betty lacks, uses his individual power of choice and freedom as

a means of fitting in—and her well-trained eye for lies. Aware of what she does not know and able

to see through her parents’ bad faith, Sally’s story ends with hope that she is better equipped than

61
they were for choosing how to make herself, and may end up more successful in the moment-by-

moment struggle for authenticity.

Fig. 25. Sally tells Don she loves him. Screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, Season 7 Episode 2, “A Day’s Work.”

Conclusion
Does Sally escape? Does Betty really achieve some semblance of freedom in the end? How

do these two characters broaden our understanding of the scope of existentialism? What are the

writers and the show itself doing by creating these characters? Though Betty and Sally may represent

familiar tropes, the vast differences in the way they perceive the experience of human and female

development draw us closer to understanding the female condition without needing to distinguish it

from the typically male-gendered existential one. By considering Betty and Sally just as much a part

of Mad Men’s philosophical agenda as prominent male characters like Don, Roger, and Pete, and

establishing the distinction between these two domestic women and the leading workplace women

Peggy and Joan, we have already succeeded in broadening the generally narrow discussion of

fictional female psychology and situations, which—at least in the context of Mad Men—have tended

62
to veer towards the safety net of feminism, and avoids acknowledging the simple truth that everyone

(regardless of gender) undergoes the same internal struggles and questions of meaning, purpose,

who it is we really are, and who we would like to be. Mad Men is positively brimming with characters

who embody existential tenets like bad faith and transcendence, who resist or cope with the facticity

of their situations, and who quietly adapt to the negation experienced and observed all around them,

but these qualities are perhaps most intriguing and unexpected when we see them in the domestic

figures of Betty and Sally. For men and women in the workforce, as most of the show’s characters

happen to be, the great existential questions may be either more easily answered or more easily

avoided with the tasks of a profession to manage and make one feel productive; for those in the

domestic sphere without any real occupation, however, the issue of what to do becomes a much

deeper problem, and the question of who we are is not so easily answered.

As female figures set in a decade of tumult and shattering social changes (and given Mad

Men’s known reputation as a hyper-literary melodrama), it is not surprising that the characters of

Betty and Sally and their distinctive gripes with existence contain echoes of past heroines in

American literature. In the same tradition as women of these great novels preceding them, however,

critical writers have largely failed to recognize the existential nature of the social and personal

turmoil experienced by female characters like Betty and Sally, implicitly rejecting the notion that

such internal conflict transcends gender. While the female character’s femininity undoubtedly

informs her approach to and perception of the questions of purpose and meaning which plague

every person, we see ultimately—in Mad Men and other texts—that the questions and conflicts

remain the same from man to woman to child. Even a brief literary comparison can illustrate this:

just as Don’s character might be associated with novels of excess and individual masculine mystery

like The Great Gatsby (1925), Betty and Sally clearly embody two discrete modes of midcentury

feminine existence as foreshadowed by the protagonists in turn-of-the-century novels like Edith

63
Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Like Betty, Wharton’s

tragic heroine Lily Bart lives under the eternal influence of her appearance-obsessed mother and

continues trying in vain, even after Mrs. Bart’s death, to live up to her hope that her daughter escape

a humiliating life of dinginess. After the death of Lily’s father, “only one thought consoled [Mrs.

Bart], and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty… It was the last asset in their fortunes, the

nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt.”80 As we see throughout the series—and explicitly

during Betty’s Twilight Sleep dream in “The Fog”—the pressure placed on appearances and

outward beauty comes to be similarly crippling for Lily and for Betty, particularly when it comes so

constantly from the adult, authoritative voice of their mothers. Leading both to a lifetime of bad

faith and perpetual dissatisfaction, this internalized emphasis on the value of one’s looks is not

questioned by either Lily or Betty until it is too late—so great is the influence of their maternal

figures that their denial is further concealed by unconsciously developing their own justification for

their female philosophies. Lily, perhaps like Betty, “liked to think of her beauty as a power for good,

as giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the

vague diffusion of refinement and good taste.”81 Although neither admit so explicitly, both Lily and

Betty are raised to understand their beauty as the only means of escaping their situations and

transcending the roles they have been assigned as women aiming for the social elite.

Opposing the old-fashioned mode of female existence stuck in societal rituals is the resistant

one, illustrated in Mad Men by the development of Sally and presaged by Mrs. Edna Pontellier in

Chopin’s protofeminist work, The Awakening. Just like we know Sally will, Edna grows up in an era

of strongly-enforced social conventions and ultimately comes to realize the absurdity of strictly

abiding by these frequently unspoken expectations. As we witness Sally experiencing time and time

80 Edith Wharton, House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 53.
81 Ibid, 54.

64
again through interactions with her parents and other adults, Edna suddenly begins to wonder how

she could have ever complied with such obstructive and perplexing rules: “She perceived that her

will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than

denied and resisted.”82 Here, Chopin implicitly points to the negation which we established as key to

Sally’s growth. This reinforces the notion that these experiences of negation may be among the most

crucial aspects of female existentialism as it is anonymously portrayed in classic American literature

and in Mad Men—arguably the most “literary” television show created yet—for it is only through

instances of lived disillusionment and rejection that we see these female characters begin to realize

their own capacity to disillusion, and to reject. Like Edna, Sally comes to grips with the awareness

that “it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s

life”83 after a decade of seeing her mother maintain such self-delusions. As we observe in the entirety

of Sally’s childhood, the stirrings of such awakenings may begin long before they are fully realized,

but even these small beginnings are of great significance when we look at the vast distance between

Betty’s mode of existence and Sally’s. “In short,” Chopin writes in the opening pages of her novel,

“Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to

recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.”84 The direct articulation

of these realizations further aligns Edna’s transformation with Sally’s shift into adulthood, and

exemplifies the shared self-consciousness between them which Lily and Betty determinedly lack.

By mere virtue of the fact that these literary comparisons can be drawn, we have discovered

that the existential heroine does exist. While this statement may seem obvious and unimpressive after

the close analysis in previous pages, there seems to be an implicit assumption in contemporary

critical culture that the adjective ‘existential’ connotes male characters and experiences, while

82 Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1899), 32.
83 Ibid, 110.
84 Ibid, 14.

65
anything similar relating to female characters tends to be addressed simply in terms of feminism; it is

for this reason that Hamlet and Holden Caulfield are known as some of the great ‘existential

characters’ in literature instead of Edna Pontellier or Lily Bart, and for this reason I chose to begin

seeing Betty in light of Simone de Beauvoir instead of the more obvious Betty Friedan. Moreover,

not only do Beauvoir and Sartre illuminate some of the philosophical differences and similarities

between Betty and Sally, but conversely, Betty and Sally illuminate and broaden the scope of the

philosophy Beauvoir and Sartre were committed to unfolding within their work. While Sally’s

character undoubtedly challenges gender norms (perhaps even to the point of reclaiming the male

gaze, one might argue), the behavior which indicates her burgeoning feminist leanings are better

understood in the broader context of her individual growth as a human rather than as a female—just

as Betty’s character and lifelong struggle are elevated by earning the ‘existential’ label traditionally

designated to her male counterparts, rather than being confined to the exclusionary domain of

feminism alone.

It is both an indicator of and a tribute to the female condition that characters such as Betty

and Sally can be called both ‘existential’ and ‘feminist’, and that their narratives can be justifiably

seen as both parallel and divergent. Although Mad Men explicitly fixates on the fluid identities of

mainly male characters, we have seen how the numerous and discrete feminine roles offered to

women by traditional society creates an inherent split or layer of complexity in the female character.

“I’m so many people,” Sally notices aloud, half to herself and half to Don during their Valentine’s

Day diner stop in “A Day’s Work.”85 Articulating what Don has always known about himself, Sally

here touches on one of Mad Men’s major themes and unspoken points about the nature of its

gendered characters: while the men think about who they are in terms of the personality projected

Mad Men, “A Day’s Work,” Season 7 Episode 2, dir. Michael Uppendahl, writ. Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner (20
85

April 2014, AMC), streaming online.

66
by their names (Don and Pete’s ongoing relationship overtly deals with the significance of names),

the socially promoted idea of femininity demands that the women must always first consider that they

are women (a mother, a wife, a little girl) and who they are as individuals comes second. Growing into

adolescence, Sally has become well aware of how the expectations differ from boys to girls, and

learned through observation and trial and error how the Sally-for-Don differs from the Sally-for-

Betty, and how Sally-for-Glen differs from Sally-for-schoolmates. Not yet sixteen years old at the

point of this exchange, she already finds herself wearying from dips into the same failed approach to

meet understood standards that kept both her parents living in bad faith for so long. Sally’s remark

also points to the divergence between Betty and herself once more: while Sally and Don may be

capable of transcending their facticity should the occasion call for it, even if this means finding

themselves feeling false or disconnected with their situation at times (as Sally clearly does when

talking on the phone and appearing utterly uninterested with her roommate, Carol), Betty is unable

to act with the same degree of awareness and authority and, as a result, Betty is always only Betty—

but who is that? The tragedy of Betty and Sally’s story is that what it shows us most clearly are their

completely parallel narratives of frustration in connecting to people they want to be close to and in

their “projects of being.”86 Both mother and daughter experience the same distancing effects from

Don and become disillusioned by his rejection; both are seen acting out at times, dismissed as

childish or dramatic and not taken seriously or given adequate attention when they need it; both lack

any real social investment and find themselves generally unattached to the people they are

surrounded by, and both find solace in their relationships with Glen and Gene; both feel the desire

to be autonomous, and feel they cannot be; finally, and most importantly, neither Betty nor Sally

seem to know who they are or what they want—only that what they have doesn’t seem to be

working.

86 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 38.

67
 While it remains consistently opaque how Betty’s variety of existentialism fits in her male-

dominated universe (and in the established world of philosophy), it is undeniable that both she and

Sally live the theories of Beauvoir and Sartre with as much, if not more, resonance and meaning as

any of the over-analyzed male characters. With Sally functioning as a critical eye on Betty and,

unknowingly, her double, viewers become aware of the possibility that perhaps what the fan

criticism (and in turn, critical denial) of these women comes down to is our own engrained

expectations of age. Because Betty is an adult, her confused and exploratory behavior is seen as

unacceptable, when she and Sally—an actual child—are truly coping with the same situation from

different perspectives, and often handle their anxiety far better than the emotional and frequently

reckless men on the show. Alternately incongruous and complementary, the dynamic between this

mother and daughter typifies one of the most resonant impressions from Mad Men’s depiction of

human relationships, which Matt Zoller Seitz regularly returns to in his book, Mad Men Carousel

(2015), and describes as a resistance to the dichotomy of ‘either/or’ in favor of a ‘both/and’

mindset.87 While Betty’s detractors are inclined to see her as either cold-hearted or childish, the fact

is that she is both and more, being emotionally removed from her role as mother and equally

confused about her place in the world as the children she is often compared to. Likewise, while one

might be tempted to see Sally as more an iteration of Don than of Betty, or vice versa, the show

does nothing to affirm either theory; she is both her mother and her father, and neither of them,

too. Although the ‘both/and’ mentality has most often been applied to the indefinable relationship

between Don and Peggy (who are, at times, both father and daughter, brother and sister, mentor and

pupil, friend and friend, etc.), our exploration of Betty and Sally makes it clear that they, too, resist

easy interpretation and challenge the simplistic criticism with which they have largely been treated

thus far. The inherent contradictions of these characters and their relationship are a testament to the

87 Mark Zoller Seitz, Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2015).

68
writers of Mad Men and their commitment to creating realistic, complex, and often inexplicable

characters, offering a (perhaps, at times, unflattering) mirror to ourselves and our own unavoidable

contradictions.

Despite the disappointing amount of critical attention these characters have received since

the end of the series, it is my hope that writers will continue exploring the philosophical meaning

and literary significance to be gleaned by looking more closely at these women and others on the

margins of the society and story which they inhabit. As it is made clear by the end of Mad Men, the

unique experiences of womanhood lend themselves far more deeply and easily to a humanistic

existential analysis than the predictable male narrative of self-loathing, creative crises, and multiple

personas which has become so common in modern storytelling and in the ever-developing concept

of an existential character. Proving that females can be more than just ‘feminist’ and embodying the

inevitable contradictions of such an absurd existence, Betty and Sally earn the title of ‘existential’

characters and more as they illuminate the gendered representation of intellectual thought, the

meaning of being female, and how courageous one must truly be in the moment-by-moment

struggle to build a world for oneself based in authenticity—for, as Chopin says, “the beginning of

things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How

few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”88

88 Chopin, Awakening, 14-15.

69
 Works Cited

Bernds, Edward, director. Brideless Groom. Columbia Pictures, 1947.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1899.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New
York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916). Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press,
1917.

Marcovitch, Heather and Nancy Batty. Mad Men, Women, and Children: Essays on Gender and Generation.
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.

Martin, Thomas. “Sartre, Sadism, and Female Beauty Ideals.” Australian Feminist Studies. Vol. 11,
Issue 24, 1996.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press,
1956.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existential Psychoanalysis. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Routledge, 1962.

Weiner, Matthew. “A Night to Remember.” Mad Men. dir. Lesli Linka Glatter. Aired 14 September
2008. Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “At the Codfish Ball.” Mad Men. dir. Michael Uppendahl. Aired 29 April 2012.
Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “Field Trip.” Mad Men. dir. Christopher Manley. Aired 27 April 2014. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “Meditations in an Emergency.” Mad Men. dir. Matthew Weiner. Aired 26
October 2008. Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “Seven Twenty Three.” Mad Men. dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Aired 27
September 2009. Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “Shoot.” Mad Men. dir. Paul Feig. Aired 13 September 2007. Los Angeles: AMC
Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Mad Men. dir. Alan Taylor. Aired 19 July 2007. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Arrangements.” Mad Men. dir. Michael Uppendahl. Aired 6 September 2009.

70
 Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” Mad Men. dir. Lesli Linka Glatter. Aired
22 August 2010. Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Fog.” Mad Men. dir. Phil Abraham. Aired 20 September 2009. Los Angeles:
AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Milk and Honey Route.” Mad Men. dir. Matthew Weiner. Aired 10 May
2015. Los Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Mountain King.” Mad Men. dir. Alan Taylor. Aired 19 October 2008. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Runaways.” Mad Men. dir. Christopher Manley. Aired 11 May 2014. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Summer Man.” Mad Men. dir. Phil Abraham. Aired 12 September 2010. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Weiner, Matthew. “The Wheel.” Mad Men. dir. Matthew Weiner. Aired 18 October 2007. Los
Angeles: AMC Networks. Television broadcast.

Wharton, Edith. House of Mirth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.

Zoller Seitz, Mark. Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion. New York: Abram Books, 2015.

71