Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses

Abstract

It is often said that Marilyn Monroe was even more brilliant in posing for still photography than for cinematic performances. She posed for a range of remarkable photographers creating a secondary archive of ‘still Monroe’. Eve Arnold was one of the only women who contributed to this archive. Does gender inflect the images she made of this complex modernist woman of the 1950s? The photo-shoot that brought Arnold and Monroe together in 1955 has incited comment from both cultural and literary scholars because of the seemingly bizarre combination of the sex-goddess reading the most challenging modernist text, Ulysses by James Joyce. As part of the author’s current project to re-‘read’ the Monroe still and moving image archive using the tools of a Warburgian art history focusing on gestures and affects, a postcolonial feminist class analysis of modern women as creative agents within/against sexist and racist cultural institutions, and as a feminist cultural theorist using psychoanalytically-inflected image analysis within historical specificity, this article seeks to revisit and re-read the double agency of the two women at work together making images mediated by what was offered to Baker-Monroe – and knowingly incorporated by her – by the gendered voice of Penelope-Molly in the final section of Ulysses.

Keywords

class Eve Arnold gender James Joyce Marilyn Monroe Molly Bloom parallaxing literature and film

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