Narrative Analysis

By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

City of Sand

This chapter highlights the life of two important person during Norma Jeane’s childhood years.
The life of Gladys in Los Angeles as a career woman and a single mother of Norma Jeane. The
life of Della as the mother of Gladys and grandmother of Norma Jeane.

Primary sentence
I was baptized in the Christian religion because my mother was a deluded soul, but I’m no fool.
I’m agnostic. I believe in science to save mankind maybe…But my faith isn’t very strong. Yours
won’t be either, Norma Jeane. The fact is we weren’t meant to live in this part of the world.
Southern California. (Page 37)

Sub-primary sentence
Los Angeles the ‘City of Sand’. It’s built on sand and it is sand. It’s a desert. (Page 37)
 Narrative Analysis
By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

Supporting sentences
1 In the night the smell of smoke — of ash! — a smell like burning trash and Page 35
garbage in the incinerator…Norma Jeane, who slept with Gladys, would have
awakened immediately to scramble from the bed panting and alert as any animal
primed for self-survival; and often, in fact, it was the child who ran to fetch
water. For though this was a true alarm and upset in the middle of the night it
had become familiar enough to be a routine ritual emergency and to have
evolved a methodology. We were used to saving ourselves from being burned
alive in bed. We’d learned to cope.
2 “…my fingers suddenly went numb. It’s been happening lately. I was playing Page 35
piano the other night and nothing came. I never work without rubber gloves in
the lab but the chemicals are stronger now. The damage may already have been
done. Look: the nerve ends in my fingers are practically dead, my hand doesn’t
even shake.”
3 “It’s as every philosopher from Plato to John Dewey has taught:You don’t go Page 35
until your number’s up, and when your number’s up, you go.” Gladys snapped
her fingers, smiling. To her, this was optimism.
Which is why I’m a fatalist. You can’t quarrel with logic!
And why I’m so good at emergencies, or was.
It was normal life day-to-day I couldn’t play.
4 When Gladys was herself, her truest self, she spoke in a flat, toneless voice, a Page 38
voice from which all pleasure and all emotion had been squeezed, like the last
drop of moisture wrung with force from a washcloth.

5 Now, Norma Jeane cried, “Oh what if the house burns down m-mother? I forgot my Page 38
doll!” Gladys snorted in contempt, “That doll! You’d be fortunate if it did burn. It’s a
morbid attachment.”
6 Her mother Gladys Mortensen, who was so proud and independent and loyal to The Page 41
Studio and determined to be “career woman” accepting charity from no one, had been,
just now, so stared at, so pitied and crazy. It was so! Norma Jeane wiped at her eyes,
which stung from the smoke, wouldn’t stop watering, but she wasn’t crying; she was
mortified with a shame beyond her years, but she wasn’t crying, she was trying to think.
Could it be true that her father had invited them to his house? All these years, he’d lived
only a few miles away.
7 So Norma Jeane was left to ponder what the truth was, or if in fact there was “truth”, for Page 42
life wasn’t anything like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle really: in a puzzle all the pieces fit
together, neatly and beautifully together, it didn’t even matter that the landscape in the
puzzle was beautiful, like a fairyland, only just that the completed picture was there: you
could see it, you could marvel over it, you could even destroy it, but it was there. In life,
she’d come to see, even before the age of eight, nothing was there.
 Narrative Analysis
By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

8 Youngish blond minister could admire Norma Jeane in her Shirley Temple curls and Page 45
prissy Sunday dress, an invariably he did. Smiling, “God has blessed you, Della
Monroe! You must be real grateful to him.” Della laughed and sighed. She wasn’t one to
accept even a heartfelt compliment without giving it a sly twist.” I am. If not Norma
Jeane momma.”
9 Grandma Della didn’t believe in spoiling children. She did believe in putting them to Page 45
work at a young age, as she’d worked, herself, all her life.
10 She’d been born on the frontier and was no silly fainting lily like some of these Page 45
ridiculous females in the movies and like her own neurotic daughter. Oh, Della Monroe
hated “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford! She’d long supported the nineteenth
amendment giving women the right to vote and had voted in every election since fall
1920. She was shrewd, sharp-tongued, and quick-tempered; though hating movies on
principle because they were phony as a plugged nickel, she admired James Cagney in
the Public Enemy, which she’d seen three times — that tough little bantam quick to
strike out against his enemies but accepting of his fate, to be wrapped in bandages like a
mummy and dumped on a doorstep, once he knew his number was up. The same way
she admitted killer-boy “Little Caesar”, Edward G. Robinson, talking crooked out of his
girl mouth. These were men enough to accept death when their number was up.
11 When your number’s up, it’s up. Grandma Della seemed to think this was a cheerful Page 45
fact.
12 Sometimes after Norma Jeane had been working with Della all morning, cleaning the Page 45
apartment, washing and drying clothes, Della took her on a special outing to feed with
birds. Norma Jeane’s happiest time! She and Grandma scattered bits of bread on the
sandy soil of a vacant lot and stood watching from a short distance as the birds flew in,
cautious yet hungry, a flurry of wings, quick darting little beaks. Pigeons, mourning
doves, orioles, noisy scrub jays.
13 Norma Jeane loved her grandmother, who was the only living person who truly loved Page 46
her, the only living person who loved her without wishing to hurt her, only just to
protect her.
14 My God, she’d forgotten about Della. Her own mother, Della Monroe. She’d allowed Page 48
Della to become vulnerable to harm, having pushed her out of her thought.
15 Gladys hadn’t been able to love Della in recent years, loving was exhausting and Page 48
required too much strength, but she’d assumed that Della, being Della, would outlive
her. Della would outline the orphan daughter Norma Jeane who was her charge. Gladys
hadn’t love Della because she was frightened of the old woman’s judgment. An eye for
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. No mother can abandon her babies without being
required to pay. Or, if she’d loved Della, it was a squabbling sort of love inadequate to
protect her mother from harm.
For that is what love is. A protection from harm.
If there is harm, there was inadequate love.
16 That Gladys was thirty-four years old! — and her life hadn’t yet begun. She’d had three Page 50
babies and they’d been taken from her and in a sense erased, and now this eight-year-old
with the mournful eyes, the young-old soul, a reproach to her she couldn’t bear yet must
bear, for we are all we have of each other as Gladys told the child repeatedly as long as I
am strong enough to hold it together.
 Narrative Analysis
By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

17 Norma Jeane was uneasily that other adults, especially men, were fascinated by her Page 51
mother, the way you’d be fascinated by someone leaning too far out of a high window or
bringing her hair too close to a candle flame. Even with the streak of gray-white hair
lifting from her forehead (which, out of “contempt”, Gladys refused to dye), and the
bruised, creepy shadows beneath her eyes, and the fevered restlessness of her body. In
the bungalow foyer, on the front walk, and in the street, wherever Gladys found
someone to listen, Gladys did scenes. If you knew movies, you knew that Gladys did
wad doing scenes. For even to do a scene that made no clear sense was to capture
attention, and this helped to calm the mind. It was exciting, too, that much of the
attention Gladys drew was erotic.
Erotic: meaning you’re ‘desired’
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
18 She was the only child at Highland Elementary to have “pocket change” — in a little Page 52
strawberry-red satin change purse — to buy her own lunch at a corner grocery.
19 Norma Jeane was allowed to walk by herself two and a half miles to Grauman’s Page 52
Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where, for only ten cents, she could see a
double feature.

The Fair Princess and the Dark Prince! Like Gladys, they were always waiting to
console.
20 The Dark Prince. If the man is anywhere, he was in the movie dream. Your heart Page 53
quickened approaching the cathedral-like Egyptian Theatre. Your first glimpse of him
would be in the posters outside, handsome glossy photos behind glass like works of art
to be stared at…Inside he would be gigantic on the screen, yet intimate, so close you
could reach out your hand and touch him — almost! Speaking to others, embracing and
kissing beautiful women, still he was defining himself to you. And these women, too —
they were close enough to be touched, they were visions of yourself as in a fairy-tale
mirror. Magic Friends in other bodies, with faces that were somehow, mysteriously, your
own. Or would one day be your own.
21 Wherever you are, I’m there. But this was not always true at school…The Dark Prince Page 53
had no presence there at all. Even in daydream, even with her eyes shut hard, Norma
Jeane could not imagine him. He would be waiting for her in the movie dream; this was
her secret happiness.
22 It was what we did together instead of church. Our worship. On Sundays when Gladys Page 55
had money to buy gas or a man friend to supply it, she drive with Norma Jeane to see
the homes of the “stars”.
23 It would not be the Dark Prince who came for my mother. All the rest of my life, the Page 61
horror that one day strangers would also come for me to bear me away naked and raving
and a spectacle of pity.
 Narrative Analysis
By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

24 Scalding-hot cleansing water rushing into the tub. She’d stripped the child naked and Page 62
was herself naked. She’d half carried the child, tried to lift her and force her into the
water, but the child resisted, screaming. In the confusion of her thoughts, which were
mixed with the acrid taste of smoke and jeering voices too muffled by drugs to be heard
clearly, she’d been thinking the child was much younger, it was an earlier time in their
lives and the child was only two or three years old weighing only — what? — thirty
pounds, and not distrustful of her mother, and not suspicious, cringing and shoving away
and beginning to scream No! No! this child so grown, so strong and willful, possessed
of a will contrary to her mother’s, refusing to be led and lifted and set into the scalding-
hot cleansing water, fighting free, running from the steamy bathroom and out of her
mother’s bare clutching arms. “You. You’re the reason. He went away. He didn’t want
you” — these words, almost calmly uttered, flung after the terrified child like a handful
of stinging pebbles.

Reference
“Blonde” by Joyce Carol Oates. 2000. 4th Estate: London, UK.