As it’s already been noted, Americans experiencing the so-called hell of self-quarantine and the lockdown measures thereof (though it will never compare to the actions of more dictatorial countries like the Philippines) now know precisely what it felt like to be a housewife in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. The latter decade is, of course, the one where we meet Betty Draper (January Jones) in Mad Men. Still hopelessly trapped in the decade of Eisenhower, Betty’s primary fixations are on her appearance and taking small vengeance on those who stoke her petty jealousies (hence, Petty Betty). And though she tries to implement her “values” within her children–Sally (Kiernan Shipka) being the one who suffers the most from this–it’s evident for the majority of the series that she herself doesn’t even believe in them. Take, for example, one of the earliest episodes in the series, “Ladies Room,” in which, despite the surface of a perfect suburban existence, Betty can’t get an explanation from a “real” doctor about why her hands have started to feel intermittently numb. It is after being told that her condition is perhaps psychosomatic, therefore requiring the expertise of a “different kind of doctor,” that Betty briefly has a glimmer of her true emotions.
The emotions she can’t dare examine too deeply lest her entire facade come crumbling down. The one built upon a structure that is completely empty on the inside, for it stands upon the foundation of absurd and meaningless patriarchal rhetoric designed to drill into women that it wasn’t how hard they thought but how beautiful they looked that would make them a success in life. Betty was taught this “philosophy” by her own misogynistic mother as well, the “nurturer” who shoved such sayings as, “You’re painting a masterpiece, make sure to hide the brushstrokes” and “Shut your mouth, you’ll catch flies” down her throat. Berating aphorisms that only made her all the more fucked up after marrying Don (Jon Hamm) and realizing now that her sole life goal of “landing a man” had been achieved, there was nothing left. Nothing but endless days pocked by an unliftable void.
If it sounds like the average human being’s existence au moment, that’s because it is. As such, maybe we can learn something from the ways in which Betty passed her days in submission (then again, maybe not) to all those authorities who indoctrinated her with the belief: “You’re a house cat. You’re very important and you have little to do.” This, too, is, in essence, what the government has told its denizens in instructing them to #StayHome #StaySafe as everyone tries to buy more time in pretending to know how to combat COVID-19. The only thing to do is wait out the pandemic the same way Betty D seems to be waiting out her marriage (ultimately for another one that turns out to bear a similar dynamic).
Conversion Disorder, as her condition would later be more commonly known, stems from a combination of stress, depression and anxiety manifesting in physical form. Thanks to Betty’s keen ability to suppress her true feelings and emotions even to herself, her psychosis unleashes within the frame of numb hands. Betty herself being so numb to her reality (or lack thereof), this feels all too appropriate. And it wouldn’t be surprising to find the condition in many of the people self-quarantining at the moment as they watch the hours pass (Mrs. Dalloway-style), trying their best not to notice.
Just as Betty was forced to. Some of her most iconic “activities” during the days spent in a “homebody haze” including: pressing her vag to the washing machine while in spin cycle mode, sitting in her bedroom in a contemplative sadness coma while still wearing her nightgown in the middle of the day, slamming dining chairs against the ground, shooting the next door neighbor’s pigeons and haplessly trying to clean while cooking (and smoking) before finally falling down on the couch in exasperation with a glass of wine at her side on the coffee table (thank god for black maids to keep the kids away from her at times like these, eh?).
Watching Betty’s existence–the overt imprisonment–unfold now looks and feels only too familiar as the masses struggle to figure out how to fill their time with distractions that won’t prompt them to recognize how meaningless it all is. Again, as with everything, this also boils down to a luxury and privilege of the higher classes in America and beyond (just look at India’s migrants dying of walking all the way home before they die of coronavirus). The luxury of being able to wallow in one’s ennui being augmented tenfold in the present conditions in the U.S. Indeed, there can be no denying that part of Betty trying her best to stifle signs of her unhappiness sprung from a certain guilt about feeling that way when, by all estimations, she’s supposed to be satisfied–grateful for the hand she’s been dealt.
Yet the image of Betty alone, smoking her ever-present cigarette in a confined kitchen that somehow always looks dimly lit in comparison to Don’s often sun-soaked jaunts in California can only suggest that her imposed self-quarantine is a miserable existence, and no amount of “domestic busying” (which, in the present, includes binge watching more than ever) can mitigate that very plain fact. Even a fatuous preoccupation with prettying herself (this includes arbitrary makeup application and playing dress up in her room like she’s still a child) to keep up the pretense that she’s got anywhere to be other than possibly the store ends up making Betty (and the rest of us presently in her position) notice her despair all the more.
Her trappedness in the “perfect” suburban milieu for a quarantine–Ossining–is layered by the looming presence of the notorious Sing Sing Prison within the same environs. A literal prison nesting doll within Betty’s own. Ironically, another major New York State suburban “paradise,” Westchester County, would be ordered as a quarantine zone thanks to a New Rochelle denizen who caused a major chain of corona spread. Similar to the way Virginia Woolf (via Mrs. Dalloway) and Betty Friedan set off a chain of female independence spread. Alas, it didn’t infect Betty, whose devotion to the housewife “cause” of that which galvanizes one to self-quarantine could not be quelled. Just as it won’t be for many people suffering from the fear-induced PTSD of venturing outside to anywhere beyond the grocery store if and when this is over. Like Betty, we are resigned to our slow death (of freedom).
