In Which I Talk About Two, Two, Two Heroines in One!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still not done with Harry. I'm working on it.

But with the return of Mad Men on Sunday comes fresh inspiration for a heroine post. Joan Holloway Harris and Peggy Olson are heroines for the ages (theirs and ours), and I'd like to take a moment to talk about them. And it's my blog, so I pretty much get to do whatever I want. HA!

I'm going to start with Peggy, because she is easily the single most evolved character on the show. I don't mean "evolved" like "forward-thinking and acting" (though she is that), I mean personally evolved since the start of the show.

The pilot is a typical "first day of work" by way of story-arc-opener for Peggy- she starts her first day as Don's secretary, taking advice (and OB/GYN recommendations) from the ever-helpful Joan and fending off the advances (momentarily, anyway) of the overzealous Peter Campbell. By the end of the episode, of course, she is on the Pill, knocked up, and well on her way to being more than just a secretary in the Sterling Cooper world.

Though modern times make this seem unlikely, Peggy spends the entire first season not knowing she's pregnant, and she's promoted to copywriter the day she gives birth. We later find out that Don tracks her down, helps her pick up and dust off, and the two set off toward the future knowing just a little bit of each other's secrets.

The changes in her over the course of season two are obvious-- at the end of the season she is able to confess to Pete that she had their baby, and that she could have made it so that they were together forever, but she "wanted more." This "more" seems to have been her disturbing affair with Duck in season three (still waiting to see how that hashes out) and very definite ambitions to be "the next" Don Draper, if not his most promising protege.

These seasons and changes are a marked by fierce contrasts-- Peggy hesitatingly welcoming Pete into her home in the pilot; Peggy rejecting his drunken offer of love and devotion. Peggy cowering under Don's glare when she missteps on her first day; Peggy looking Don straight in the eye and demanding his respect when he makes her an offer (but not really) to join the still-zygote Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce. Peggy the secretary; Peggy having her own secretary (a man!) who she can order around at will.

While Peggy has grown and changed (or, at the very least, figured out what she wants and how to go about expressing it), Joan has achieved her goals, only to find out that they're not all they're cracked up to be.

Joan Harris spends her time being the best: she is the best secretary (and therefore becomes the Office Manager), the best mistress (discreet and non-demanding... plus she's really great for your nuclear mother/daughter squabbles), and then later the best fiancee (to the biggest dirtbag around), and the best wife (she quotes Emily Post to the dirtbag and plays the accordion... awesome). All of this, but nothing in her life is perfect. Because she is a woman in this time, she might be given the "highest position" that can be given to a woman (Office Manager), but she is trumped by Peggy, who breaks through the ceiling and enters the men's realm.

Her perfection as a wife is indisputable, but the perfection of her life as a wife is nonexistent- Greg is a whiney, inept surgeon who is very jealous, possessive, and useless. When she brains him with a vase in season three, it is a joyous thing to behold.

I will be anxious to see what has happened to Joan since she was summoned back to save the men as they floundered trying to get the details in order to create SCDP (One of her last lines of the season: "Greg's going to kill me"). Last we heard, her useless husband had joined the Army so he could go be a surgeon in Vietnam, where I really, really hope he dies. Big time. Whatever she's doing at SCDP, she's doing well, since she has an office all to herself in the sleek (if crowded) new offices in the Time Warner building. And while we're at it, I hope she's still using her considerable charm and physique to lull those men into submission before going in for the kill. Manipulative? Sure. But you can't argue that it doesn't work, and you can't argue that it's not a smart move on her part.