For what it’s worth I enjoyed Betty for the first time when she got fat, because it was the first time I could sympathize. I don’t see her as very well rebelled. So she matured a little since season one, but mostly my opinion of her is the same as her two husbands: she’s like a child. Which could make for an interesting character, but even knowing that I have a hard time following her motivation.
Take the episode where she started modelling again. She’s a bored housewife who hares her kids and whose husband is a cad. Getting out to work makes her feel special, independent, useful, appreciated. She’s flattered the guy saw something in her. Turns out it was a ruse to tempt Don, and she’s in his shadow again. So she’s sad, and what does age do? Shoots the neighbor’s birds. Okay, he was mean to her kids and threatened her dog, but that’s a bit psychotic. They were only just over the property line, and she didn’t even have it out with the neighbir beforehand.
Her being capable of such things doesn’t deepen the character for ne. It just means she makes less sense. The daughter is much better written, even with the similarly salacious things they have her do.
A lot of Betty needs to be viewed through Don’s speech about how ad men like him invented the romantic love the people he was talking to sought. She is a product of the Madison Avenue push, she wants to be the all American homemaker she used to portray in ads, she’s pretty, she has the hansom successful husband, she lives in the burbs, she has 2 lovely children. She has achieved everything she was taught (by ad men) she was supposed to achieve, and yet all of those things define her by other people, who she married, who her kids are, who turns their head as she walks by. So with it all she has no idea what she’s supposed to be herself. She’s a lost little soul, then the cracks start appearing. Don’s infidelity ramps up to a level she can’t ignore, life in the suburbs is boring, her daughter is openly rebelling against the lifestyle she lives. Then she finds out Don isn’t even Don, and it all falls apart. Even now she can’t manage to define herself as herself, she’s stepping into the role of “mean first wife”.
I loved her shooting the birds, it was one of her first big steps towards individual identity. None of what she’d been taught to be included shooting birds. The daughter is the anti-Betty. She’s also defining herself by what others think, but she wants go the opposite of what’s expected. She’s just as much the product of ad men, she’s just running the standard rebellion of zigging every time culture says to zag.