Is Don Draper Anna Karenina?

For 86 episodes, the opening credits of Mad Men have shown Don Draper’s animated silhouette putting down his briefcase just as the world around him crumbles. Pictures slip off his office’s walls, then the office itself falls, followed by Don, who descends from a perch high amongst New York City’s skyscrapers, clad in 1960s period ads—his figure passes a model’s fishnet stocking, a sparkly diamond ring, and a smiling family, making amber waves in a liquor-filled glass along the way. We never see him land. Instead, the opening montage transitions to a view of Don’s shadow figure lounging in a chair, smoking a cigarette. Episode after episode, the intro haunts. Is Don going to kill himself? What if Don Draper’s true identity predates Dick Whitman and is in fact Anna Karenina reincarnate, the nineteenth-century’s most famous fictional cheater?

Sure, there are the obvious differences between the lead characters in Leo Tolstoy’s novel and Matthew Weiner’s show: Anna Karenina is a woman; Don Draper is a man. Anna is born into Imperial Russia’s high society, whereas Don is the son of a prostitute who grew up in a Depression-era brothel. That said, Anna is an adwoman of a different era and culture, who throughout Tolstoy’s sweeping novel, tries, unsuccessfully, to sell people on a new version of herself—one that she believes is more true, despite the flaws and infidelities required to realize that self. By leaving her husband, Karenin, to be with her lover, Vronsky, Anna believes she is unlocking the shackles placed on her by society. She thinks her new identity will yield greater happiness than what was prescribed by her natural born position. Isn’t that the same thing that Don reaches for, season after season? Both stories strip away their leading character’s façades to reveal their shadow lives, how they long for a good life, but mire themselves in muck that eventually falls out beneath them.

The divide of years, gender, and culture between the two epic stories grows smaller and smaller the closer one looks, until that shadow figure in Mad Men might as well be that of Anna’s, falling from the train platform to her death.

Consider Anna’s second coming: Wouldn’t she choose to return as a man after all she had to endure in her lifetime as a woman? After all, her gender didn’t exactly give her much of an advantage in Imperial Russia (her lover could move freely in society, whereas she was locked out entirely, losing not just her position but also her only son). Although American women in the latter part of the twentieth century may have made many gains, there remained (and remain) enormous challenges and obstacles for women to achieve equality at home and at work. Case in point, Mad Men’s Joan: her ginger coif hits the glass ceiling time and time again as less-qualified men advance past her; she’s sexually assaulted by her fiancée in Season 3; and in Season 5, she is asked by her male colleagues to prostitute herself to secure the Jaguar account in “The Other Woman” episode. Why would Anna choose that fate after being ruined for merely following her heart and leaving a stale and staged marriage? Women of her class didn’t have the option of working like Peggy or Joan in Mad Men; the gulf between Anna and the muzhiks, or peasants, who harvest the wheat belonging to her counterpart in the novel, Levin, was not possible to for her to cross. As a woman, Anna’s affair sealed her doom.

Driven to choose death over a life that was riddled with doubt about the love for which she’d gambled away everything—her children, her position in society—and given the chance to be born again, wouldn’t Anna choose to live in a world less cruel, one that was more hospitable to her human desires, without the societal constraints and punishments that she endured while living as a scorned woman, an elite outcast? Wouldn’t she select Cinderella’s story, in masculine form, instead of Eve’s?

Surely, Anna would want the freedoms that were still only guaranteed to men, a century later and on the other side of the planet from Russia. Anna was branded with her society’s version of the scarlet letter for having a single affair, whereas Don Draper sleeps with over a dozen different women while blowing through two marriages without the catastrophic consequences that Anna faces. Without a doubt, Anna would want a crack at living Don Draper’s life, which would help explain Don’s quenchless thirst for sex. Imagine Anna, free to indulge in lust and love, only to acquire a reputation that doesn’t directly lead to ruin, and in some circles makes him all the more attractive? But, as philosopher George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In very first episode of Mad Men, Don Draper is having drinks to discuss business with Rachel Menken, the head of a large Manhattan department store. Their conversation takes a personal turn when Don interrogates her unmarried state: “She won’t get married because she’s never been in love. I think I used that to sell nylons.” Their conversation continues:
Rachel: “For a lot of people, love isn’t just a slogan.”

Don: “Oh, you mean love—you mean the big lightening bolt to the heart, where you can’t eat, you can’t work, you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”

Rachel: “Is that right?”

Don: “Pretty sure about it. You’re born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”

In many ways, this is a continuation of Anna’s final ruminations on the nature of love. While taking a carriage ride through the streets of Moscow on the day of her suicide, she observes the signs for businesses along the street: an office, a warehouse, a dentist, a bakery, and one that says “Fashions and Attire.” These advertisements pass by her much like the ones that the Mad Men’s shadow man passes during his fall in the show’s intro. A storm of memories and thoughts charge through Anna’s head as she remembers her estranged husband and a trip to a monastery as a teenager. “The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots,” she thinks. “Impossible to tear it out, but possible to hide the memory of it. And I will hide it.” She sees two young girls smiling, and wonders what at: “Love, probably? They don’t know how joyless it is, how low.“ In Anna’s end, we see Don’s beginning.