Is Don Draper Anna Karenina?

Don and Anna may be cynical about love, but they both still long for that big lightening bolt to the heart and have felt it themselves. To watch Don’s proposal to Megan in the Season 4 finale episode, “Tomorrowland,” is to see the skeptic himself being struck from the sky with his sudden offer of marriage to the woman who becomes his second wife. And when Anna discovers that Vronsky, her future lover, is following her from Moscow to St. Petersburg on the train, although she demurs, she receives the lightning bolt, too: “The magical, strained condition that had tormented her at the beginning not only renewed itself, but grew stronger and reached a point where she feared that something wound too tight in her might snap at any moment. She did not sleep all night. But in that strain and those reveries that filled her imagination there was nothing unpleasant or gloomy; on the contrary, there was something joyful, burning, and exciting.”

And what of Anna and Don’s advertising skills? Don knows how to sell most anything that comes his way—his ad pitches are, for the most part, spot-on and sometimes even spellbinding. For Kodak’s Carousel slide projector, Don delivers a soliloquy to his clients in a darkened room while flashing pictures of his beautiful first wife, Betty, and their two young children: “This device is not a space ship: it is a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” Anna is equally skilled at the art of the pitch, as we see in the beginning of Anna Karenina, when she convinces Dolly, her brother Stiva’s wife, to stay with him, despite his affair with their children’s governess:

“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how people like Stiva look at it. You say he talked with her about you. That never happened. These people may be unfaithful, but their hearth and wife are sacred to them. Somehow for them these women remain despised and don’t interfere with the family. Between them and the family they draw some sort of line that can’t be crossed. I don’t understand it, but it’s so.”

 

Anna’s pitch is a home run, and Stiva and Dolly’s marriage lives on, even if it’s not happily ever after. (It also seems to explain Don’s approach to balancing his mistresses with his family life.) Anna is a born adwoman who, like Don, is a skilled charmer, adept at tailoring her presentation and message—especially the ideas that sell everlasting love, even though both characters see it as a flawed product incongruous with their own lives.

So what are we to make of the unexpected shared likeness of Anna Karenina and Don Draper? One can’t help but hope that Don somehow aborts the descent he’s begun and avoid Anna’s fate, now that his second marriage is in shambles and his identity becomes thinner and more transparent to his family and colleagues with every episode. Perhaps he’ll choose an alternate way, just as Anna’s counterpart throughout the novel, Levin, chooses an honest life and ultimately finds happiness. But that’s a happily-ever-after trope that neither Don nor Anna are set up to experience. Death stalks each character from the beginning of their stories until the end.

We know how Anna succumbs, under the wheel of a train—that mighty force of industry that shuttles both her and Don from city to suburb to country, allowing them to shift their identities. In many ways, Don attempts to kill Dick Whitman, his born identity, by swapping dog tags while in combat and escorting the deceased real Don Draper via train to Dick’s family, and then riding away to assume his new character. The train continues to be a place where Don is a chameleon, where he transforms from a Manhattan Lothario to a suburban Ossining family man. One can’t help but see Anna in these scenes, her spirit rising from the rails and crawling under Don’s skin.

With the Mad Men shadow man’s long and iterative fall, viewers are prodded to question Don’s mortal fate. Sometimes the references within episodes are sly and others are more overt, like his pitch for Sheraton Hotel’s reps: “Hawaii. The jumping off point.” The client declines, for the obvious reasons. Will he survive the shame of the shadow life that Anna could not bear? We’ll find out soon enough.

So, is Don truly Anna? Perhaps the answer has been there all along in Mad Men’s very first episode, just before Don pulls off a heroic ad pitch to the Lucky Strike cigarette executives. While discussing the US government’s ever-tightening tobacco regulations, one of Lucky Strike’s men says, “Might as well be living in Russia,” – and everyone in the cigarette smoke-filled room begins coughing.