In my opinion Mad Men really comes alive in its second episode (“Ladies Room, written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Alan Taylor), and this is largely because it’s our proper introduction to Betty, a character who embodies the perfect voice and perspective/lack thereof – at least in the definitive sense – to communicate Mad Men’s themes of traumatic displacement and socially enforced repression and confinement that are especially central in season one.
The show’s pilot episode (”Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”) spends a good deal of its narrative establishing its placement in history and culture and imo does this to varying degrees of success (often in too self aware and winkingly ironic of a manner for my tastes, but I’m forgiving in how developing an effective narrative tone takes time, especially if what Matthew Weiner has stated is true, which I can believe it is, and network execs in 2007 – even at a relatively forward thinking cable channel like AMC – were reluctant to allow the writers certain subtleties on the basis that perhaps the audience wouldn’t get it), but the highlight of the episode to me is Don and Rachel’s conversation over old fashioned and mai tai cocktails towards the end that speaks about the alienation of outwardly participating in a culture in which you are not able or even capable of expressing your true interiority within. Of not having the structure of a home for any of that to exist in, and how there is an underlying but undeniable distance between images and words and what they actually mean and how to possibly construct a coherent self amidst that. How much gets left inside you and outside everything else; all the things there are no socially legitimized “room” for and how this begins to be internalized and let out of confinement only in ambiguous and indirect or subconscious ways. Symbolism is the primary expressive vehicle of this, and this form of communication is one of Mad Men’s greatest strengths, as Matthew Weiner himself has touched on:
As Matthew Zoller Seitz details in Mad Men Carousel “’Ladies Room’ goes outside the office, letting us see more of the character’s private lives and developing them as personalities aside from Sterling Cooper […] it is also the first fully formed example of Mad Men using symbolism to complicate its stories rather than tie them up in a bow. Every scene is filled with images, gestures and lines that seem to have a single, graspable meaning, but become richer when another scene comes along that builds upon them, or opens them up.” With this in mind, two feminist figures within literature, a discipline where symbolism is fundamental, who I think are very relevant to these ideas, especially to Betty and especially in “Ladies Room,” are Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.
Woolf, beyond being interested in Freudian psychology and the emerging field of trauma (most explicitly seen in her depiction of Mrs. Dalloway’s Septimus), delivered a lecture on women’s “place” in literature and education, later adapted into a seminal work aptly titled “A Room of One’s Own.” In it, she demonstrates how the existence and communication of a creative self depends on the ability to destabilize and restructure the seemingly contradictory concepts of expression vs. repression, housing vs. confinement, and internal vs. external. In other words, the ability for a singular process to both build upon and open up. Tellingly, she uses the symbol of a room within the domestic structure of a house to illustrate how in order to produce work, a writer must have access to a space they are able to both define for their internal selves and seek protection in their external inhabitance of, and how and why this is especially complex and historically rare for women.
Betty, in Ladies Room, is not able to do this in any capacity. At best, she is presented with a series of both literal and symbolic rooms that seek to define and inhabit her instead, destabilizing and restructuring her from the outside in. Her hands numb and fail to work within these rooms, dropping the symbols she knows to hold great if ungraspable and deceptive meaning. Throughout the episode, women’s and men’s conduct within the rooms they inhabit directly contrasts one another. Looking at physical movement alone, Mona Sterling, applying Betty’s lipstick for her when her hands deaden themselves inside in one of several Ladies Rooms, advises “Don’t smile, you’ll smear.” In the room of Don’s Sterling Cooper office, meanwhile, the men who work there engage in especially spirited physical rough-housing joking about sexually assaulting a young woman on prom night, not even noticing what physical and symbolic structures they firmly grasp and carelessly fling about while they are always eventually free of the environment itself imposing itself oppressively onto their interior.
Plath, who beyond being a poet and therefore by nature using a great deal of symbolism in her work, was highly influenced by Woolf, and a contemporary housewife with an ivy league education of Betty (though Birdie attended Bryn Mawr, NOT Smith, thank u V much)
Ladies Room concludes with a shot of Don, nearly closing the door to his office (the “nearly” of it in itself can probably be analysed in a variety of ways) while on the phone to Betty’s psychiatrist, being invited into another male dominated room of symbols that define Betty under the guise of protecting her. The very last shot before the titles is backing away from an oven:
the enclosed space that Plath died by her own hand in and the symbol that came to define her after her death. Google “Sylvia Plath oven” and you’ll be directed to what purport themselves to be images of her corpse captured post-mortem, her head surrounded by the walls of the oven with her body and high heeled feet sticking out, the photograph of her internalized confinement yet another room confining her. As Betty remarks to her therapist: “[My mother] wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man. There’s nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go until you’re in a box?”
The demurely sinister song over the credits (”The Great Divide” by The Cardigans) is one of the few decisively modern choices featured on Mad Men, possibly implying the same communicative difficulties and placenessness within the language and meanings available are still experienced by women. Zoller Seitz again:
Also: along with all of these women dying by their own volition, if you want to arguably reduce cigarette addiction into a prolonged form of suicide, and having complex relationships to their fathers and ensuing reactions to their deaths, obviously none of them are woke intersectional feminist baes conscious of race (there’s a lot of existing discussion about Plath’s antisemitism) or class (Virginia “thankfully i don’t have to worry about the money needed to have a room of my own to create my poorly selling novels, my rich aunt left me an inheritance lol” Woolf), but I think that’s part of what makes them befitting figures to Betty. I also think one of the more interestingly subtle acknowledgments of class and race and how this is all extremely relative in connection to everything I’ve been talking about in Mad Men occurs in Ladies Room, when Betty and Mona are leaving the powder room mirror and the two black women working as patrons remark “If their purses get any smaller, we’re going to starve.”
Oh man, thanks! I’ve always been clumsy af at essays even in mint writing practice condition and am extremely rusty at this point but I’d been thinking about these ideas for a long time so wanted to try to capture some of the twisted bare bones of them lol. I worry that I don’t have enough to say about Plath in comparison to Woolf since I’ve never studied her in as great of depth and I also haven’t revisited season five’s explicitly Plathian titled “Lady Lazarus” (that amongst other probable allusions features Beth, the depressive housewife who undergoes electroshock therapy) in a while.
I left my phone at work and therefore can’t consult Mad Men Carousel but this blurb from the AV club review is interesting:
“Lady Lazarus,” feels even more than a usual episode of the show like something that is pointing toward a larger purpose, a larger thematic statement, and we just don’t have all of the pieces yet. I feel like we could start just about anywhere with this one, and we could have an immensely pleasurable discussion about, say, Don Draper staring down an empty elevator shaft, right after the bottom has fallen out of his world, wind howling in his ears. That discussion would go on for a good 1,500 words, and then we’d realize that, hey, we hadn’t even mentioned Pete’s dalliance with his friend’s wife, who makes the childish little heart in the condensation on the window for him, then erases it with a flick of the power window switch.
“Lady Lazarus” feels big. It feels like a Rosetta Stone for the season, one that we don’t have all of the pieces to read just yet, but an episode that will seem even more obviously great in retrospect once we do. At the same time, though, analyzing it feels ever more like taking hold of one thing and trying to make it stand in for the episode as a whole. In this fifth season, Mad Men has all but perfected the art of taking over-obvious symbols—that elevator shaft, that window fog—then not insisting they apply to the characters as a whole. Don feels the bottom dropping out in a way he can’t articulate, so he takes it out on Peggy. Pete’s fallen in love with someone who might as well be a helpless child, playing at being grown-up. But these circumstances don’t apply unilaterally. These are all people trapped in their own lives, and the episode chooses one perfect image for each and every one of them, but it doesn’t stretch to make those images do too much of the work. “
As is this piece on the episode, which I found by literally googling “Mad Men Virginia Woolf” and which is ultimately so superficial that I kind of wonder why it was professionally published (Forbes buying time before their annual wealth rankings I guess lol) but also mentions A Room of One’s Own. I’m reading another result of that search (“The Unsaid: The Silence of Virginia Woolf”) right now lol.
mysong5 