Welcome to Day Five of the Basket of Kisses Fundraiser. We’ve been taking a look back at some of our Best Of’s.
A note about our older posts. When we changed urls, most of the comments transferred over, but not all of the comment counts did. So at the bottom of a lot of these posts, you will see ’0′ comments. Click on it anyway, and you may find a whole thread of discussion.
Waaay back, right after The Wheel had originally aired, I wrote about Francine and Betty:
It is in this episode that Betty declares to Don that Francine is like a sister to her when Betty delivers the line to Don, it sounds like a dig. I think she is defending relationships in general. In her therapy session in the same episode, she tells Dr. Wayne that Don doesn’t understand family.Betty is rather insightful; as she awakens she makes statements like these, and tells some very simple but very big truths. She’s not suddenly getting smart, she’s starting to lift the veil between the place in her brain from where she functions (the good girl, the dutiful wife who knows better than to ask questions, the daughter who never thought a bad thought about her mother), and the woman who in many ways is an equal to Don, does match him in humor, and certainly has more than a clue. She’s been collecting clues for years, and she is starting to lay them all out and figure out what they mean. Regarding who she is, who Don is, and regarding their marriage.
A while later I wrote more specifically about Don and Betty’s marriage.
And here’s a key to her appeal for Don; Betty doesn’t ask questions.
Don, as we see, goes for some pretty amazing women. And I think, because of her subservience, he’s failed to notice that Betty is pretty amazing. What a trick. Why he chose her is how he finds her lacking. She is certainly not living like she’s that kind of amazing, the way that the self-sufficient brunette women who continue to captivate him live.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of Betty on the other side of this depression. Maybe this marriage will end; at least pause. (Maybe it already has.) And then perhaps Don will find her attractive in ways he hadn’t to this point.
And while I was wondering if Don would have eventually put Rachel into the same box, I also brought it back to the Drapers:
I’m not saying that Don ever had with Betty what he had with Rachel. But I stand by that Don and Betty do have a marriage. And that while, yes, Betty was absolutely perfect for Don on paper, he was also genuinely drawn to her. I think that at some point Don opened up to Betty, if simply by loving her, from a deeper place than he’d ever accessed prior.Okay so maybe it wasn’t that deep a place. But remember, this is a guy who doesn’t believe in love. Love was invented by guys like him to sell nylons. And okay so maybe Betty was an easy mark; certainly she was easy to lie to and to withhold from. And let’s face it, Betty followed Don’s ˜don’t ask don’t tell’ rulebook. She married a man who won’t discuss his past. But now the lies, the withholding, and the anger at Betty if/when any of these things are challenged; these are all the fabric of the Drapers’ marriage.
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3 Responses to “A Fundraising look at Don and Betty's marriage”
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New York Times Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Be…
"In 1956, the sociologist David Riesman studied a series of lengthy interviews commissioned by Time magazine that sought to determine how college seniors imagined their lives would look in 1970."
I imagine that Betty's vision of her future would be similar.
I remember those housewife humorists well: I was a child in the '50s, but a precocious one, already interested in prose humor, I read McGinley, Shirley Jackson and Jean Kerr.
If for no other reason than they seemed to be the only women humorists in print. (Also read Shirley Jackson's psychological horror fiction, as well, which of course holds up better: The Haunting of Hill House, and the Lottery.)
But the humorous housewife mode also provided contrast to the life of quiet desperation that was my mother's, was a relief from that Feminine Mystique world (which I read later, and was struck by the chilling descriptions so close to my mother's suffocating suburban life.
But notice that McGinley may have been comfortable in the housewife genre, because that was a role she'd chosen after a rootless childhood, and satisfying career.
Housewife humor was what sold, a mold a woman could exploit, easily. I can't imagine the magazines of the period running anything humorous but that from a woman writer.
I entered the magazine business in the early '70s when there was still a defacto segregation: only at women's magazines could women be hired as writers and editors (elsewhere females never got higher than researcher), and humor was considered a mine field, tip toeing around what subjects would be suitable. Housewife humor was out, but no one in charge wanted to hazard a guess as to what the hell women would consider funny.
It was assumed over at the male magazines that women didn't have a sense of humor, and I only barely broke into that market by the late '70s, writing for Playboy and National Lampoon.
I hadn't really followed the women's magazine market in recent years, and was interested to see the droll, arch, ironic and tongue-in-cheek humorous writing style in some of the younger women's fashion mags. Yea!
I remember those housewife humorists well: I was a child in the '50s, but a precocious one, already interested in prose humor, I read McGinley, Shirley Jackson and Jean Kerr.
If for no other reason than they seemed to be the only women humorists in print. (Also read Shirley Jackson's psychological horror fiction, as well, which of course holds up better: The Haunting of Hill House, and the Lottery.)
But the humorous housewife mode also provided contrast to the life of quiet desperation that was my mother's, was a relief from that Feminine Mystique world (which I read later, and was struck by the chilling descriptions so close to my mother's suffocating suburban life.
But notice that McGinley may have been comfortable in the housewife genre, because that was a role she'd chosen after a rootless childhood, and satisfying career.
Housewife humor was what sold, a mold a woman could exploit, easily. I can't imagine the magazines of the period running anything humorous but that from a woman writer. (The cultural assumption was that women married early and had no career to speak of– although of course, that may not have been the reality — that was the assumption. Leaving not much of a window for any other aspect of women's lives to be considered suitable for satire.)
I entered the magazine business in the early '70s when there was still a defacto segregation: only at women's magazines could women be hired as writers and editors (elsewhere females never got higher than researcher), and humor was considered a mine field, tip toeing around what subjects would be suitable. Housewife humor was out, but no one in charge wanted to hazard a guess as to what the hell women would consider funny.
It was assumed over at the male magazines that women didn't have a sense of humor, and I only barely broke into that market by the late '70s, writing for Playboy and National Lampoon.
I haven't really followed the women's magazine market in recent years, and was interested to see the droll, arch, ironic and tongue-in-cheek humorous writing styles in some of the younger women's fashion mags. Yea!