It’s all about the restlessness and dissatisfaction in the post-college lives of young bright women in the starting in the 1930’s. It’s the proper blend of insight and satire about ladies trying to find hapiness outside of the roles of wife/mother. There’s also a lesbian!
A big best seller in 1963, required reading.
Favorite passage # 1
Things had never stood still long enough for her to decide. It sometimes struck her that Harold would not let her be sure of him for fear of losing his attraction: it was a lesson he had learned in some handbook, the way he had learned about those multiplication tables. But Kay could have told him that he would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him.
Favorite passage # 2
But so far nursing, like most of sex, was an ordeal she had to steel herself for each time it happened by using all her will-power and thinking about love and self-sacrifice. The nurse was watching her now, to make sure that the baby was drawing at the nipple properly. ‘Relax, Mrs. Crockett,’ she said kindly. ‘Baby can sense it if you’re tense.’ Priss sighed and tried to let go. But naturally the more she concentrated on relaxing, the more tense she got. ‘Bless braces, damn relaxes,’ she joked feebly. ‘You’re tired this evening,’ said the nurse. Priss nodded, feeling grateful that someone knew and disloyal, at the same time, to Sloan, who did not know that it wore her out to have company, especially mixed company that sat there discussing her milk.
But so far nursing, like most of sex, was an ordeal she had to steel herself for each time it happened by using all her will-power and thinking about love and self-sacrifice. The nurse was watching her now, to make sure that the baby was drawing at the nipple properly. ‘Relax, Mrs. Crockett,’ she said kindly. ‘Baby can sense it if you’re tense.’ Priss sighed and tried to let go. But naturally the more she concentrated on relaxing, the more tense she got. ‘Bless braces, damn relaxes,’ she joked feebly. ‘You’re tired this evening,’ said the nurse. Priss nodded, feeling grateful that someone knew and disloyal, at the same time, to Sloan, who did not know that it wore her out to have company, especially mixed company that sat there discussing her milk.
Advertising agencies are forced to hire so-called ‘creative’ people. They are artists, writers, musicians, radio and television directors, and the like. They are sure to give you trouble. … The writers are thinking about the books they plan to write exposing advertising (and probably you) …The agency has tried to make it easy for you by keeping you away from these people. It has provided keepers or overseers called Account Executives. They are hired for their rugged good looks, their flair for wearing clothes, and their skill — sometimes brutal but always effective — in handling creative people.
“By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths.
You guys! We’ve never discussed the Most Important Outfit of All: Don Draper’s uniform! The gray flannel suit.
So the gray flannel suit gets a bad wrap; the single breasted, three buttoned, narrow lapelled, tapered trouser is cultural short hand for the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and early ‘60s (with the accompanying necktie serving as a metaphorical noose. ) No other dress style of the modern era elicits with such scorn as the gray suit.This is thanks in part to the 1960 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and the Gregory Peck movie based on the novel . The suit in Sloan Wilson’s story is emblematic of pervasive soullessness in the mechanized world,making men numb to themselves and their families and their morals.
Yet the reason for the mass adoption of the suit was not likely due to thoughtless conformity. Before the late 1960’s men didn’t really own very many clothes! As men moved off the factory floor and into a corporate building the new standardized uniform became the gray flannel suit. From lowly office drone, to FBI spook, or IBM engineer, the men riding the train into Grand Central wore the same wore the same thing (sometimes accented with a brimmed hat, tweed overcoat, and a handy umbrella).
The gray suit was an acceptable wardrobe to wear daily that didn’t require much upkeep nor varied season to season. And while yes, the suit was a type of uniform, to make the historic verdict that men who donned the outfit did so out of unquestioned conformity is too simplistic.
According a Time magazine article “The Masculine Mode,” from 1964, the American male over 30 actually preferred to dress similarly to everyone around him. “If one of his colleagues — or two of them — turns up in the same outfit he is wearing, he does not feel embarrassed, as would his wife. He feels reassured.”
In Don’s case, as for most men in gray flannel suits, their business uniform allowed them to singal a sense privilege and status that a farm boy on Madisonwould not generally be able to access.
Bert puts some socio-economic theory into practice when he hands Don an unexpected bonus. Befuddled and slightly alarmed, Don begins to stammer in lieu of gratitude Bert explains that he gave Don an extra $2,500 because of Ayn Rand. He explains:
‘When you hit 40, you realize you’ve met or seen every kind of person there is. And I know what kind you are, because I believe we are alike. By that I mean you are a productive and reasonable man and in the end completely self -interested. It’s strength. We are different. Unsentimental about all the people who depend on our hard work.’
Bert encourages Don to take two bucks out of his mondo bonus and pick up a copy of Rand’s 1957 best selling novel Atlas Shrugged. For the uninitiated, the primary lesson of Atlas is the individual must be put first, else a society will collapse.
In Rand’s dyspeptic future, parasitic autocrats and businessmen are able to horde a nation’s wealth by collectivizing land and industry. In protest to the nation-wide swindle, the country’s best innovators go on a ‘strike of the mind’ , refusing to contribute to the economy. Society then quickly disintegrates with oil fields set ablaze and trains derailed by striking industrialists.
Rand’s intention was to champion the ethos of unfettered ‘rational self interest’:
‘I work for nothing but my own profit—which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it’
This was the mantra of the mind mindstrikers, who’s creativity, according to Rand, was more important to society than physical labor if their creativity was not rewarded our progress would decay.
So what else would the grease the Sterling Cooper gears of a big fat check for the Head of Creative?!
It has been said before of Joan, but she does seem to have some uncanny Holly Golightly traits. Particularly, with her choice of roommates.
How could have a savyy lil sex kitten like Joan have not seen this coming?
Remember when she kissed Sal at the election party and that dumbfounded look came across her face? We get the sense that Joan’s gaydar is very keen. So how did she not notice that her roomie was a big old Lezzie? The night of the big confession, Joan smiled it off and even brought men back to their apartment!
Perhaps Joan was doing what Lightly did which was to make sure there was no missed opportunity. Joan, well intentioned but sometimes clumsily, believes that she can teach girls in her life how to get the most from men. Even if Carol chose to be a lesbian, surely, that didn’t mean that she should live in poverty as a spinster. According to Truman Capote, who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s some of the best kept women in New York were actually lesbians.
Playboy: Holly Golightly alludes to her onetime Lesbian roommate and obliquely expresses a sexual interest in other women. Was Holly a Lesbian? Capote: Let’s leave Holly out of it. It’s a well-known fact that most prostitutes are Lesbians—at least 80 percent of them, in any case. And so are a great many of the models and showgirls in New York; just off the top of my head, I can think of three top professional models who are Lesbians. Of course, there’s a Lesbian component in every woman, but what intrigues me is the heterosexual male’s fascination with Lesbians. I find it extraordinary that so many men I know consider Lesbian women exciting and attractive; among their most treasured erotic dreams is the idea of going to bed with two Lesbians.
So while Joan doesn’t seem to have an enlightened view of homosexuality, she does seem to have only the best intentions for Carol. But like, Golightly, Joan, of course, abandons her roommate to find her own sort of happiness. Though, Joan’s vision of contentment more domestic than Holly’s it’s still equally as elusive.
“Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be. In older, gentler times, when age still had its privileges, the old folks never harbored any guilt feelings about being a drag on the young.”
“As its title indicates, Americans View Their Mental Health is concerned with self-diagnosis, with people’s own estimates of their well-being and their troubles. Such estimates are apt to be colored by defenses and failures of insight, but the authors are right in emphasizing their relevance to the study of mental health, since it is subjective evaluations which decide what the ordinary person does about his emotional difficulties”
“This realization has placed new and complex responsibilities on parents, teachers, and community services. Many parents are now well aware how much their presence or absence, their words, their actions, indeed, their whole emotional state affect their children. This is an important gain.”
“Girls do not lag far behind boys in early adoption of smoking, but the boys appear to be consistently heavier smokers. Adolescent smoking is by no means a recent phenomenon, yet the last decade has seen a highly accelerated shift to an earlier age for beginning smoking, and young teen-agers characteristically smoke cigarettes only.”
*And of course Kenneth Cosgrove on the craft of tapping a mapple trees in Vermont!
![You guys! We’ve never discussed the Most Important Outfit of All: Don Draper’s uniform! The gray flannel suit.
So the gray flannel suit gets a bad wrap; the single breasted, three buttoned, narrow lapelled, tapered trouser is cultural short hand for the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and early ‘60s (with the accompanying necktie serving as a metaphorical noose. ) No other dress style of the modern era elicits with such scorn as the gray suit. This is thanks in part to the 1960 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and the Gregory Peck movie based on the novel . The suit in Sloan Wilson’s story is emblematic of pervasive soullessness in the mechanized world, making men numb to themselves and their families and their morals.
Yet the reason for the mass adoption of the suit was not likely due to thoughtless conformity. Before the late 1960’s men didn’t really own very many clothes! As men moved off the factory floor and into a corporate building the new standardized uniform became the gray flannel suit. From lowly office drone, to FBI spook, or IBM engineer, the men riding the train into Grand Central wore the same wore the same thing (sometimes accented with a brimmed hat, tweed overcoat, and a handy umbrella).
The gray suit was an acceptable wardrobe to wear daily that didn’t require much upkeep nor varied season to season. And while yes, the suit was a type of uniform, to make the historic verdict that men who donned the outfit did so out of unquestioned conformity is too simplistic.
According a Time magazine article “The Masculine Mode,” from 1964, the American male over 30 actually preferred to dress similarly to everyone around him. “If one of his colleagues — or two of them — turns up in the same outfit he is wearing, he does not feel embarrassed, as would his wife. He feels reassured.”
In Don’s case, as for most men in gray flannel suits, their business uniform allowed them to singal a sense privilege and status that a farm boy on Madison would not generally be able to access.
Related Links:
* Somewhere in Time: Conform and Function [Ivy Style]
*Man in a Gray Flannel Trap [LIFE archive 1956]
*Brooks Brothers Don Draper Edition [Colider]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1iyx0r7rD1qzlum5o1_500.jpg)
