rilyn myth seems to be belied by the vast range of interpretations visited on the image. But, as Barthes says, meanings shift, "everything is not expressed at the same time" and myths come and go, so that "some objects become the prey of mythical speech for a while, then they disappear [and] others take their place and attain the status of myth" (110). Indeed the image of Marilyn Monroe may have undergone a number of mythic permutations since her untimely death initiated its intensive exploitation.
Certainly the apparent degree of difference among these views of Marilyn seems to disguise a deeper agreement. Popular biographers cover her from different ideological slants. Norman Mailer, for example, viewed Marilyn primarily in sexual terms, as a phenomenon related almost exclusively to male consumption. In doing so he employed the image of Marilyn as a means of "bolstering his mythologising of the American dream" in which the image of the star was a promise delivered to the masses (Donald 50). As Mailer put it, in one of his kinder assessments, Marilyn was "deliverance, a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin (15). Gloria Steinem, on the other hand, argued that Monroe was an icon of the female desire to please--a response to the pressure of patriarchal society--and noted her "terrible openness [which] made a connection with strangers [that] seems never to end" (6).
Writers in popular magazines similarly analyze Monroe as phenomenon. Schwarzbaum offers the standard rhetoric about "the unobtainable, doubt-tormented woman [who] signif[ied] everything sexy and vulnerable, glamorous and tragic in Hollywood, a star who mirrored as many different desires as there are desirers" (24). There are even those who argue that it is simply too much to place all this weight on the image and cla...