"The Catastrophe of My Personality": "Mad Men" and the Crisis of the Separate Self
Open Access
- Author:
- Evans, Sabrina Suzanne
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Michael Francis Berube, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Marcy Lynne North, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Mad Men
Television
Portnoy's Complaint
Frank O'Hara
Dante
The Inferno
Rosemary's Baby
English
Literature
Otherness - Abstract:
- Since its premiere in 2007, Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed television series Mad Men has left viewers postulating and critics raving: Who is Don Draper, where did he come from, and where is he going? On the surface, Don is a successful creative director at a New York advertising agency, a loving husband and father of three. Behind closed doors, though, Don is an adulterer with an impressive track record, an absentee father to his ex-wife’s children, and a recovering alcoholic with an unpredictable tendency to up-and-leave at any given moment. Time and time again, we see Don try to shake his former identity – as a Korean War deserter and the bastard son of an abusive farmer – in favor of chasing the American dream, but time and time again, he winds up right back where he started. This paper explores Mad Men’s conception of ‘identity’ as a process of rejection and acceptance, incorporating the show’s numerous literary references to discuss the trajectory of its characters’ various, yet similar journeys to self-discovery (The Inferno), its dealings with self-loathing (Portnoy’s Complaint) and alienation (Rosemary’s Baby), and its eventual embrace of the ‘othered’ self (Meditations in an Emergency). When a man walks into a room, he has a million reasons for being anywhere – just ask him. In this paper, not only do we ask, but we also listen to where he’s been and where he’s going.