Existential Affinities

Mailer on Monroe

Authors

  • Jeanne Fuchs Hofstra University Author

Keywords:

Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: A Biography, existentialism, celebrity, biography as novel, identification

Abstract

Marilyn Monroe offers the perfect subject for dissection by Norman Mailer. Monroe’s life and career and certainly her death have caused much ink to flow, but Mailer’s obsession with her ran deeper than the tabloid surface and explains, in part, how Marilyn: A Biography (1973) originally intended as an essay to accompany a photographic depiction of the star’s life became a new species of novel that overwhelms its primary goal. Norman recreates Marilyn in the structure itself of the book: the eight chapters begin with an apotheosis of her and proceed to her childhood. Mailer traces her metamorphosis from orphan to attractive but rather ordinary young woman, to model, then starlet, then luminous star of the silver screen and he takes us through her many incarnations—roles and husbands—and while he is seduced by her, he is never fooled by her.

Author Biography

  • Jeanne Fuchs, Hofstra University

    Jeanne Fuchs is Professor Emerita in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University. She published an essay “George Sand: Notorious Woman, Celebrated Writer” in The Lincoln Center Theater Review (Fall/Winter 2006) devoted to Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. She is co-editor with Ruth Prigozy of Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, The Legend (URP 2007) and has a monograph on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Pursuit of Virtue: A Study of Order in La Nouvelle Héloïse (Peter Lang 1993). She has also written on Molière, Marivaux, Alfred de Musset, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mailer. Her memoir, The Road to Epidauros was published by Author House in 2011.

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Published

2018-10-25

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Fuchs, Jeanne. “Existential Affinities: Mailer on Monroe”. The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Oct. 2018, pp. 121–127, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/648.