I don’t need to tell you what going through puberty feels like, with all its urgency, eroticism, and ugliness. You went through it yourself. If you didn’t go through it as a female, I can tell you that the desire to appear adult is consuming. Whenever there’s role-playing to be done, the pubescent female will assume the role of Teacher in School, Doctor in the Hospital, Mother in House—and beware the girl who played student, patient, baby. For young girls, the thinking goes, if they exude an air of maturity, they’d be chosen to enter the world of adults. A young girl’s desire to play cook is not only a demonstration of her ability to be an alchemist, converting raw globs of yoke and salt into something edible, but also to show that she can successfully manage adult responsibilities. This is to wriggle into the world of grown-ups. So there’s no greater shame to be exposed as a fraud—when, despite a girl’s best efforts, she finds herself reflected in the pitying leers of adults. There are few positions more shameful than face down on the hall floor of your father’s office.

Footnotes of Mad Men: Mrs. Draper, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter

12:46pm | 141 notes | Sally Draper

August 26, 2010

A Freudian Analysis of Ms. Sally Draper

I’m going to wager that when Sally reaches sexual maturity there’s a good chance that she’s going to equate getting slapped around, debased, or humiliated with sexual pleasure.

This is thanks, in part, to Betty’s thwack across young Sally’s face post her slumber party diddle. Also keep in mind that Betty was in her night gown and noticeably flushed from some carnal interactions with her new husband (and Sally’s replacement dad) when she struck Sally. Then in Sally’s bedroom, in the dark, with Sally on the bed coming up to about Betty’s mid section, Betty berates Sally for her solo act and then goes back into the bedroom where Sally’s dad, Don, used to sleep.

So let’s parse this family romance via some primary text by Freud

ON DON AND SALLY AND BETTY

*The little girl is affectionately fixated on the father, who has probably done everything to win her love, and who is thus sowing the seeds of hatred and competition towards the mother, which co-exists with a current of affectionate devotions, and which may have the option of becoming increasingly strong and more clearly conscious, or else provide the impetus for an immoderate reactive bond of love with her.

ON THE GLENN, SALLY, BETTY TRIANGLE

*At about the period I have mentioned (6-8 years old), then, the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who as a rule, are of higher social standing…The technique used in developing fantasies depend on the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal.

WATCH OUT, BABY GENE

*The loss of the parent’s devoted care, either actually experienced or justly feared the sense that all of one’s possessions will henceforth and for ever have to be shared with the new child, have an awakening effect on the child’s emotional life and its ability to think. The older child manifests unconcealed hostility towards its competitor, expressed in unkind judgements about the newcomer, in the desire that ‘the stork can take him away again’ and the like, and sometimes even in minor attacks on the baby as it lies helplessly in the cradle.

SALLY’S GOING TO HAVE A PUERTO RICAN BOYFRIEND/GIRLFRIEND

*The mother is the subject of the most sexual curiosity… The motive of revenge and retaliation it is, as rule, precisely these neurotic children who were punished by their parents for sexual naughtiness and who now revenge themselves on their parents by means of fantasies of this kind.

If we were consulting Freud, then it’s likely that Sally’s sexual maturity will be delayed or diverted —even perverted- due to Betty’s violent interruption, the arrival of the new baby, Don’s departure, and the delinquent influences of Glenn. Arousal, risk, guilt, shame, pain, abandonment, humiliation at the hands of a fearsome matriarch, Sally or her shrink are going to have sort these things out.

Nevertheless, this is the task put to us all during puberty overcome our childhood sexual traumas and become functioning adults:

*The liberation of individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents s one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that liberation should occur and it maybe presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.

5:26pm | 199 notes | Sally Draper | Freud

April 29, 2010

Messieurs Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Pryce may have wiggled out from under the thumbs of their British overlords, but by February of 1964, our captains of advertising industry would’ve been trying to harness the power of a different kind of British Invasion.

On February 9, 1964, Liverpool’s The Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and changed popular culture forever. An estimated 73 million people sat glued to their television sets for a performance of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, setting off tears in the eyes of their tween converts and dollar signs in the minds of ad men across the world—with an audience like that, Harry Crane’s TV department had to sit up and take notice. The song quickly shot to Number One, and young Sally Draper would surely have insisted both sides of her broken home take her to see movies like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Help!’, campy rock romps that in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo got into scrapes, played their way out of them, and tossed around their shiny hair in under 2 hours, paving the way for tween-friendly behemoths like the Jonas Brothers and the American Idol franchise.

The Beatles would appear on Ed Sullivan’s variety program throughout ‘64 and ‘65 to great fanfare, but that first fateful night still holds a place in the record books as the highest rated network telecast of all time.

footnote by - Angela Serratore

6:29pm | | Sally Draper | The Brittish | Mad Men Playlist

November 29, 2009

Recommended reading for Ms. Sally Draper.

11:05am | 20 notes | Sally Draper | Mad Men season 3

November 27, 2009

Something that caused a bit of a ripple when it occurred in the season 3 premiere was Betty’s dropping the word “lesbian” in relation to little Sally. She tells Don when he returns from his adventure in Baltimore that Sally ‘has taken to his tools like a little lesbian’.

Was the use of this word at all common in those days? Well, taking into account Betty’s background at Bryn Mawr, one of the Seven Sisters rather known for its lesbian proclivities, she probably has some experience knowing lesbians. From this, her rather un-demure comment to Don comes from this background: Betty feels she has the authority to say this, whereas Don doesn’t know as much about it. If you notice, in these areas, Betty grows more decisive and stronger in voice, in this instance and a few others (when she orders food, for example).
As for the use of the word, it isn’t at all unbelievable that it would be flying around at this point.

From commenter Luna in this post:

“Between 1955 and 1969 over 2,000 books were published using lesbianism as a topic, and they were sold in corner drugstores, train stations, bus stops, and newsstands all over the U.S. and Canada. However Most were written by, and almost all were marketed to heterosexual men. Coded words and images were used on the covers. Instead of “lesbian”, terms such as “strange”, “twilight”, “queer”, and “third sex”, were used in the titles, and cover art was invariably salacious.”

Apparently “lezzie” was also the preferred insult, so perhaps Betty was being kind by using the full word?

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

October 9, 2009

Rome, you guys, it’s a theme! Remember when Rome popped up earlier in this sumptuous season?

Sally lisps adorably over this passage from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon’s master work on the ancient society:

“The Praetorian bands, whose licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of the decline of the Roman empire…”

The Praetorian were body guards, plucked out of the Roman army, to protect the Emperor (You may know one of these men by the name of Mark Anthony). It’s a bit of a stretch to call the Sterling Cooper employees “soldiers”, but they have already taken a casualty this season (poor Guy!), and they have the ego to consider themselves shapers of the masses. Didn’t turn out so well for Rome. Let’s see how it turns out on Mad Men.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

12:28am | 24 notes | Sally Draper | Mad Men Season 3 | Mad Men Bookshelf

September 17, 2009

"She [Merry] watched in silence, as still as the monk at the center of the flames, and afterward she would say nothing; even if he spoke to her, questioned her, she just sat transfixed before that set for minutes on end, her gaze focused somewhere else than on the flickering screen, focused inward — inward where the coherence and the certainty were supposed to be, where everything she did not know was initiating a gigantic upheaval, where nothing that registered would ever fade away…."

—

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Reminds you a little bit of Sally in front of the burning monk on television, right?

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

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