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Sara Mechraoui                                                                                                                     
Dr. Edwina Helton
ENG-W 682
February 21, 2020

A Multilingual’s Iserian Reading of the Marilyn Monroe Poem by Judy Grahn

As a multilingual, my analysis would seem different due to my internalized linguistic systems. I

preferred to integrate the whole process that I went through while first reading the poem,

watching the video, and doing some research to uncover the hidden meanings that the author

wanted to convey. The whole stages that I went through activated some connections inside my

brain, a schema, a binding between what I have as prerequisites, and what the text offers. I

analyzed it through the lens of my research on a Cognitive Poetic Analysis of Milan Kundera’s

two novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Life Is Elsewhere. I have engaged in the

reading of the poem as a student to test how culture influences reading. I mentioned in the

previous post that teachers should be careful when choosing resources for repertoire information.

From personal experience, watching the video may not be openly accepted by some conservative

learners, thus it is always better to consider alternatives. In the following paragraphs, I tried to

analyze the poem from a multilingual’s perspective. I also preferred to compose paragraphs,

longer constructions embedding my reading stages instead of labeling each with a title to show

that ESL/EFL learners possess differing rhetorical and stylistic choices in response to readings.
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Man’s plight in the world to self-affirm and self-define is as old as his existence. Societies were

built of people interacting with others. Families were created from a joint relationship between

two people, which creates security and actualizes a sense of belongingness in the offspring.

George Lakoff informs us, through advances in neuroscience, that we develop the container

metaphor from our childhood. Our feeling of belonging to a family, a friend, and society is part

of the embodiment that humans are endowed with. My initial reading of the poem reveals the

insecurity of belonging that the narrator is mirroring through Monroe’s body, and the multiple

sources for belonging which her soul seeks and her body detracts. A body that is reduced to a

picture, a model, an isolated paper that should be ‘dug up, handed over, crammed in the

narrator’s paper sack’. The poet provided a safe inclusive horizon for Monroe, which she so

lacked throughout her life as a child, a teenager, a blond girl, a bombshell, and a mortal corpse.

The alienation that the blonde star experienced started from her father’s denial and reached its

zenith when her body was discovered. Who is to blame her soul or her body? Which is heavier,

and which is lighter? Was her body unbearable? The poet goes on, after claiming her body for

her own, to question her serious smile, which ironically reflects her distrust with her body. In the

second stanza, the poet directly addresses Marilyn and other women whose ‘pretty’ bodies led to

their self-destruction. But, the possession of their bodies is dependent on the poet’s sack; it is not

their own. Reporters asking the new-possessor of Monroe’s body, their claims were rejected

furiously for her body is locked within the confines of the poets’ sack and words. Marilyn has no

control over her body, over her beauty, and over her mortal corpse, the poet ephemerally plays

the advocate for her lost dream of writing poems, for aspiring to have a body that is her own.

Long ago you wanted to write poems;

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Be serious, Marilyn

I am going to take you in this paper sack

around the world, and

write on it:--the poems of Marilyn Monroe—

Dedicated to all princes,

the male poets who were so sorry to see you go,

before they had a crack at you.

They wept for you, and also

they wanted to stuff you

while you still had a little meat left

in useful places;

but they were too slow.

Monroe was involved in an act of total submission, in a world where the price of submission is

destruction. She submitted to the representation of the American woman as a model, and a

Hollywood star. As she reached puberty, the fifteen-year old girl was driven to the forced

marriage by her mother, her fate was decided by her beauty, but her soul was reduced to the

notes she wrote in her diary, and her poems. On her feelings of ‘rejection’, she confessed:
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The world around me then was king of grim. I had to learn to pretend

in order to…I don’t know…block the grimness. The whole world

seemed sort of closed to me…I felt on the outside of everything, and

all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend-game….Grace

McKee arranged a marriage for me, I never had a choice. There not

much to say about it. They couldn’t support me, and they had to work

something out. And so I got married. (qtd. In Kreiner 1-2)

Maybe the poet identifies with men who wanted to possess Monroe’s beauteous body, but I felt

feminist compliance in the poem, an alliance with her femininity that is revealed through the

somber feelings of despair she holds for the misogynic society of the time. Monroe’s spark of

fame on the American televised image and magazines made her dreams of belonging to the

world, of containment that her childhood in the foster homes missed come true; but the joy soon

faded under the veneer of the blonde bombshell of America who’s been the sexual-satisfaction

dream of every man. A woman whose soul was burdened by the lightness of her body.

Parmenides divided the universe into positive and negative opposites. Milan Kundera, a Czech

novelist, in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being examined life through the concepts of

lightness and heaviness. He questions, through his characters’ lives, the paradoxical reality of the

emptiness of life whether one chooses to live with total freedom to the body over the soul; or

choose duty and heaviness. Marilyn chose to live with lightness, but her longing for a secure life

that is dutiful led to her death; she was struck by heaviness. To identify Marilyn with lightness

might contradict with what the poet intends to reveal about her, but the feelings that arise when a
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woman reads it and watches the documentary on her life identifies an instinct, a shared feeling of

women’s submission to the unjust world of men.

1. Does Monroe represent the prototypical American blond girl who seeks recognition

through exposing her body at the expense of her soul?

2. Does she represent women’s plight to get along with heaviness?

3. Would Monroe receive equal universal-acclaim if she were from another ethnic group?

4. Is she still the most desired woman body for men?

The narrator of the documentary explains that ‘the girl felt isolated and insecure in a world of

emotional and sexual abuse and that she grew up feeling invisible, she became visible through

her physical self”; her body was her gate toward inclusion and toward overcoming the feelings of

abandonment. Her body conceived as a body that embodies the modern American icon, and a

caricature of an actress who submitted to self-destructive fame. Monroe could give anything to

be loved and recognized; “she used nudity to get attention” and perfected her physical self to

detract “feelings of insecurity and abandonment which she grew up with from her childhood”.

Peter Graves claims that Monroe’s inner clash between her two identities as an actress and as a

woman originated from the struggle between public and self, from a commitment to retaining the

famous sex icon and maturity, and from an abandoned girl to 1950’s American icon. In her thesis

What Makes: Marilyn Monroe And Representations Of Femininity In Early Cold War Era

America, Katerina J. J Vuletich claims:

At face value, [Monroe] appears to be nothing more than a mass produced…

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truly defined Monroe for her 1950s audience….yes, at least in the beginning of

her career, Monroe shaped herself…However, her fame was more thoroughly

rooted in the audience that consumed her striking image…we are not buying

Monroe, we are buying an illusion….Inarguably Monroe’s proposed image of

femininity and female sexuality was iconic and pervasive…she was a

“deliverance” for the mid-century middle-class heterosexual male who felt

ostracized by society and, more importantly, belittled by women….“gorgeous,

forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender,” Gloria Steinem calls “eager for

approval”. (11-12)

Toward the end of the narration, Graves describes the ubiquitous yet idiosyncratic type of

woman that Monroe's true self represents; “I don’t belong to anything else nor anybody else”, he

concludes. What is ephemerally-perceived as a typical American blond bombshell, as a body that

is appreciated through its physical side, engraved the serious, real young girl, adult woman, and

the serious housewife that Marilyn Monroe aspired to live. She is struck by Vertigo, by the

heaviness that Kundera uses to explain his characters’ lives in The Unbearable Lightness of

Being (1984). “Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the

voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which,

terrified, we defend ourselves (59-60).” Fearful of losing her charm and her body’s lightness, she

self-destructs through suicide.

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Works Cited

Grahn, Judy.  “The Marilyn Monroe Poem 1971.”  Indiana East University

            Web. 10 Feb. 2020.

Graves, Peter. “Marilyn Monroe – The Mortal Goddess Documentary.” Indiana East University

Web. 15 Feb. 2020.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper& Row, Publishers, Inc., 1984.

Kreiner, Cynthia. “A Reader-Response Reading of Marilyn Monroe: An American Love Affair

With an Invisible, Fearful, yet Hopeful Goddess and Studio Object”. 23 February 2016.

ENG-W 682 Multiculturalism Literature, Indiana University East, student paper.

Patrick, Melissa. “The Impact of Media on Attitudes toward Women and Sexual Attitudes in

Emerging Adults.” Google Advanced Search. 18 Feb. 2020.

http://etd.fcla.edu/CF/CFH0004521/Patrick_Melissa_J_201312_BS.pdf

Vuletich, Katerina J. J., "What Makes: Marilyn Monroe And Representations Of Femininity In

Early Cold War Era America" (2015). Regis University Theses. Paper 654.

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4375.0800