“You have to be a transparent eyeball”

This chapter demonstrates that Mad Men, the award-winning and popular twenty-first-century television series, explicitly identifies itself with American Romanticism by conceiving of its chief protagonist, Don Draper, as a representative of its core philosophy and practice. The series constitutes Draper’s double identity in direct reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, at once preserving an older metaphysical heritage and refusing to dilute it in favour of a secularised form of Romantic self-becoming.