All The Available Light by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Author:Yona Zeldis McDonough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Touchstone Book
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

FACE VALUE

Sabrina Barton

Marilyn Monroe manages to take up a lot of space on-screen. Exactly how much space seems to be a matter of some debate, but my point here has nothing to do with actual inches or pounds, and everything to do with the far-reaching effects of her vivid, dynamic, expansive star performance.

Now, I certainly recognize the camera’s relentless fascination with Monroe’s shapely, shining surfaces; that fascination supplies the gender studies classes that I teach with textbook examples of how Hollywood cinema can fetishize the female body. At the same time, however, the term “fetishize” implies a gaze that reduces the woman to a merely passive object. As far as I’m concerned, the concept of passive “objectness” fails to capture the Marilyn effect.

Monroe actively performs. Most frequently, she performs the role of performer (model, showgirl, musical entertainer) and, consequently, presents a stylized, exaggerated femininity. We witness the powerful and pervasive effects of her performance of femininity as, from movie to movie, Monroe’s characters dazzle, dumbfound, and overwhelm male costars. We might even venture to say that Marilyn Monroe represents a form of power: the power of a femininity actively performed.

However, rather than assessing the power of her performed femininity at face value, writers have mostly tried to penetrate Marilyn Monroe’s shiny surfaces in order to get to her underlying “truth,” a truth that tends to classify her as objectified and/or victimized.

I suspect that it is only now, decades after her heyday, that feminist critics can begin to contemplate the significance of Monroe’s performed identity. This is only natural: cultural commentators necessarily tell different stories about our stars at different historical moments according to our differing social, political, and emotional needs.

MONROE AND FEMINISM

In the early 1960s, what we needed was Betty Friedan (among others) to mobilize feminist discussions of gender and power. Friedan did not overlook cinema’s role in shaping cultural conceptions of femininity. In The Feminine Mystique (1963), she observed that whereas the classic female star of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood cinema once evoked a “complex individual of fiery temper, inner depth, and a mysterious blend of spirit and sexuality,” as exemplified by Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn, the female star in the course of the 1950s came to evoke the stereotypical “sexual object, babyface bride, or housewife,” and here Friedan mentions Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Brigitte Bardot, and Lucille Ball. 1 In 1974, Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape asked of the Monroe icon: “What was she, this breathless, blond, supplicating symbol of sexuality ... ” and then answered: “She was partly a hypothesis, a pinup fantasy of the other woman as she might be drawn in the marital cartoon fantasies of Maggie and Jiggs, or Blondie and Dagwood. ”2 [Editor’s Note: The chapter from which this is quoted appears earlier in this volume.]

Observe how both Haskell and Friedan criticize the unreality inherent in Monroe’s femininity (“stereotype,” “object,” “symbol,” “hypothesis,” “pinup,” “fantasy,” “cartoon”). In a moment, I will propose a different, more affirmative way of thinking about the unreality of gender.

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