Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I had no idea what I was in for when I went to read this. Yes fictionalized.
The license Oates has given herself is less the woman who was Norma Jean Baker but more the image of Marilyn Monroe as an icon of the sexualized infant-girl-woman: a figure who is innocent (even in sex), needs love, protection…daddy… and the challenge inherent in humanizing such an image into a flesh and blood woman. Here we have the highest and most abstract of reversals, a woman with feelings trying to be her image, not be her image, and yet in her sometime attempts to escape it and her sometime attempts to fulfill that role, in both vectors she can’t escape. Marilyn only manages to fulfill that role even more completely. The rumors, the insinuations, the mask that she was hidden in — these are the spaces that Joyce attempts to write through, to fill the gap between an actual person and the blind eye society turned to her as a person, and instead forced upon her. At times, I thought this worked out well, but given the lengthiness of the novel and the relative consistency of writing (which I suppose is a display of Oates’s magnificent talent more than anything else) I eventually tired of it…if anything as the story progressed into deeper complexity, if anything, the language itself (I feel) should have reflected that greater depth…if only to build tension in what was already complex tension. I did appreciate, after some thought, that the space between the woman and the image was psychobabble, a void of unwriteable depth, given one’s inability to structure that space coherently…and that space was mainly where Oates meant to dwell the longest. As a result of that impossible stay, much of the other “plot” writing she did do had to rely on structural description of who various characters were, often standing slightly outside Marilyn’s awareness, and yet informing her awareness all the same. If anything, this is a narrator that is not omnipresent but a kind of hoovering Oort cloud that provides the context for the reader to understand what’s going on, while also designating the limit to Marilyn’s psychic space.
Ironically, the designation of this inner space surrounding the unknown core of Marilyn’s actual personal mental space takes the place of Marilyn’s actual mental space as Oates can never really designate an internal limit, as far as where the narration can go…although you can see that having designated an internal limit of real Norma Jean, which is untouchable, that limit shrinks by itself to a position of being outside the narration completely. Thus, Marilyn in this book ends up as a completely neurotic, unstable woman completely haunted by the external factors that govern her image, even while the personal forces that govern her past (outside of Hollywood) only served as an unstable and insufficient bulwark for her to cling to in the construction of a personal identity. Thus, Marilyn’s life spirals out of control as her Hollywood image provides her with limitless validation, an image that accumulates lust, jealousy, anger and spite, but never translates into any actual personal validation in the form of security, money or stable personal relationships. Perhaps that’s about as good an analysis as one can get.
When I read this book I didn’t know anything about Marilyn Monroe. But the paradox of being what other people want while trying to be yourself is most definitely a tenuous position… and Oates manages to capture the complex, painful whirlwind of being caught up in a patriarchal machine that wants one for a very limited surface area all the while discarding any other depth that desired formation unique to an individual subjectivity.
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