Mrs. Masters's Second Act

The story of Masters Of Sex is one of breaking brand-new ground; it seems impossible to write about the sex researchers Virginia Johnson and/or Bill Masters without using some form of the word "pioneer" (guilty). But one of the things that makes the show so rich and interesting is that Masters and Johnson aren't the only ones bucking received wisdom and societal mores.

When we met her, earlier in the season, Bill's mother Essie (short for "Estabrook"! How is that old-timey name not sweeping through our nation's preschools alongside the Sophias and Isabels?!) seemed like every good pop culture mom. She was kindly but brisk, nurturing but faintly embarrassing; she could have switched places with Cindy Walsh and not disrupted either of their shows' ecosystems very much. That Bill appeared to be so hostile toward such a nice, innocuous lady — and, especially, so offended by the steps toward self-sufficiency she'd taken since the death of Bill's father — was a reason for the audience to be suspicious of him.

We learn pretty soon after Essie's introduction that Bill's late father was abusive toward his son, which comes out when Essie tries to amuse the guests at a dinner party with a cute story about Bill fighting his father for the right to wear long pants. Masters Sr. refused to grant this boon as long as Bill could still fit into his knickers, so Bill altered his last pair, by hand, to make it appear as though he'd outgrown them. "A surgeon even then," says Virginia, amused. But Bill is still so angry about his battle with a dead man that he adds, through gritted teeth, IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY, that his father made him wear knickers until he was fourteen. I know the days of knickers are long dead, but that's...real old for a kid to be wearing them.

The latest episode finds Libby running out of patience to entertain Essie alone, in Bill's work-related absence, and imploring both mother and son to find some way to relate to each other — which they do, awkwardly and, on Bill's side, unwillingly. Bill gets home late from the hospital and refers to his study; when Essie responds in a way that makes it clear she thinks it's a study of pregnant women, he corrects her, clearly hoping to shock her, by saying it's a sex study. But Essie is unfazed, volunteering the information that his father had a very vigorous sex drive. She either doesn't notice or ignores Bill's obvious regret at opening this door, because she follows up by bringing a full dinner to the hospital and feeding study mainstays Virginia, Jane, cameraman Lester, and Bill; she's so matter-of-factly intrigued that she asks them extremely direct questions about sex of all sorts, and the younger people are so disarmed by her frank manner that they cheerfully answer. It's charming to everyone but Bill.

After this encounter, Essie pays Bill a visit in his office, so that she can tell him about her life's biggest regret. Since we've already seen a flashback to young Essie doing her best to blot out the sound of Bill's father beating their son, the viewer may assume this will be the topic about which she wants to unburden herself. Instead, she tells Bill that his father had a longtime relationship with his secretary, and that, because he was most himself with her, Essie and Bill got less of him at home. Essie regrets not having spoken up about it at the time: had she done so, and forced the issue, resulting in a divorce, everyone probably would have been happier; in any case, both she and Bill would have had a very different kind of life, both together and, eventually, separately. Having observed Bill with Virginia, Essie suggests that he might be most truly and completely himself with her — something we obviously know, and something we can see both Bill and Virginia trying to fight.

Essie's addressing the issue directly like this is of a piece with what we've learned about her since her appearance on the show: after years of unhappiness with Bill's father, his death has liberated her in ways that are thrilling to her (and alarming to her son, who is being forced to see her differently). Bill has grown up thinking of her as helpless and dependent, because she was: if she married in (let's say) the 1910s or so, she would have been conditioned to think of herself as subordinate. But as a widow, she has the chance, possibly for the first time in her life, to make all her own decisions: she can sell her own house, arrange her own travel, move cities, find a new circle of friends...and freely share the wisdom she's gleaned from her life's often painful experiences. She's not suggesting to Bill that he leave Libby because she doesn't like Libby: she's trying to save Libby and Bill from repeating the mistakes Essie and her husband made, for the sake of conformity, out of fear.

Essie is just one of the women in the show exploring the freedom of life post-marriage: there's also Virginia, of course, twice-divorced and reinventing herself as a genius-level pre-med student — good enough to be taken advantage of by the dimwitted male classmates who invite her to their study group (read: create a pretext under which to copy her excellent notes). There's also Margaret — not quite post-marriage yet, but brave enough to end a partnership that's been good for nothing but providing the structure for the people in it to follow convention. Even Libby — officially the show's most unhappily married woman since Margaret asked for a divorce (and since we haven't seen Betty since she weaseled a proposal out of her beard) — took the decision to prioritize her desire for motherhood over her marriage. The most thoroughly, determinedly conventional female character we've met is Vivian, and even though she's carefully played out her half of the courtship ritual pretty much the way Margaret and Libby did before achieving the "success" of their marriages, she's learning that, in this rapidly changing world, it's not just women who are demanding more from their lives than they'd been raised to expect: some men, like Ethan, aren't willing to settle, either.

Returning to Essie: the show has not absolved her of her responsibility for the horrors of Bill's childhood. It has, however, placed her behaviour in context, personally and historically, and from what we know of the character in the present, the viewer can project backward and imagine what doing her best would have looked like back then. Furthermore, showing her efforts now to do better with her son than she did back then challenges the viewer to consider whether some acts (or failures to act) can ever be redeemed.