Word: marilyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While the living Marilyn was all things to all men, her corpse has taken on its strangest incarnation of all as a feminist icon. It all started in 1972 when Gloria Steinem wrote an essay on Marilyn Monroe for Ms. Magazine. The piece portrayed Monroe as a pre-feminist victim of male exploitation. Appropriately titled "The Woman Who Died Too Soon," it was later anthologized in Steinem's book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. It has now become the basis for her latest work...
...MARILYN: NORMA JEANE, which is half Steinem's text and half photographs by George Barris, is both an earnest revisionist history and a coffee-table decoration wrapped in one glossy volume. Steinem attempts to debunk the endless, and accumulating, Marilyn myths and cast Monroe in a role more realistic than diamond-digger Lorelei Lee could ever...
Steinem's book also attempts to redress a sexist imbalance in the field of Marilyn mytho-biography. This is the first major book on the star written by a woman. "Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe's death were written by men," Steinem writes. "So are almost all of the more than forty books that have been published about Monroe." Steinem devotes many pages to arguing with the male-written works, focusing particular attention and ire on Norman Mailer's famed bitch-goddess vision of Monroe that ignored her very human vulnerability...
...Marilyn: Norma Jeane does not, however, make the mistake of being merely a feminist interpretation of Monroe's life. Barris' photographs show us a playful woman who loved to drink champagne and run on the beach. The chapter titled "Fathers and Lovers" is a gossipy look at her love life, "The Woman Who Will Not Die" attempts to decipher the enduring mania for Marilyn, and "Who Would She Be Now?" offers a speculative look at what Monroe would be like if she were alive today...
...that, after all, is what our curiosity is all about. We know what Monroe was, but we wonder what she might have become. While Marilyn: Norma Jeane only perpetuates these useless questions, the answers it offers may help put them to rest...