'Penelope': Marilyn Monroe reads James Joyce's Ulysses

Marilyn Monroe reads Ulysses: crafting the postmodern Penelope

There’s a beautiful picture of Marilyn Monroe, captured by Eve Arnold in a colourful striped bathing suit with her infamous short blond hair messy in loose curls. Her face is focused, caught off-guard as she’s engrossed in the book in her hand. On a bench in Long Island, the famed actor and sadly even more famed sex symbol was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses; a text that even the brightest scholars have struggled with.

Monroe made her name by playing the industry back at herself. To get famous, she transformed herself into exactly the kind of woman they wanted her to be, which was blonde, beautiful, seductive and dumb. The problem is that she played it too well, and people stopped realising that they were the butt of the joke. Her character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the perfect example of this, as her role, Lorelei Lee, feels like a meta moment.

In front of men, Lee is airheaded and helpless. Behind the scenes, she’s cunning, with her plan carefully plotted out as she vies for money and power, while Monroe plays her with expert comedic timing that only comes from genuine acting talent. But people forget that. Instead, they trapped Monroe into her character and refused to accept that she could be any more than a dumb blonde.

So with an image like this, of Monroe cradling a notoriously difficult book, the reaction is to doubt it. Ever since the photo was published in 1955, people have said that there was no way Monroe was reading that book. That Arnold surely put it in her hand and posed her with it, that the actor couldn’t possibly be reading a Joyce novel, she was simply too dim, too girlish for that. 

But they’re wrong. Not only was Monroe a smart and intelligent woman who boasted a personal library of over 400 books, spanning from classic novels and poems to philosophical essays and modern findings on psychology, but the photographer stepped in to put the doubts to bed. “We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten, the poet,” Arnold recalled.

“As far as I remember (it is some 30 years ago) I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it- but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively,” she added. Note that this way of reading Ulysses slowly, chapter by chapter, is the method advised by Joycian academics. The photographer continued, “When we stopped at a local playground to photograph, she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.”

However, beyond the classically boring fact that the voices raising doubt against the authenticity of this image or against the suggestion that Monroe could possibly manage to read such a revered yet tough text are simply misogynistic. What’s so interesting, so beautiful and so apt about the image is where it appears that Monroe is in the text. From where the book is opened, she’s nearing the end, seemingly in the final chapter, titled ‘Penelope’.

While all the other chapters of Ulysses wander around Dublin, around Leopold Bloom’s life through a series of increasingly hard-to-read passages as Joyce plays with structure and form more so than any plot, the ‘Penelope’ chapter is bedbound. The voice of the text shifts and simplifies. The cacophony of voices heard across the majority of the 732 pages quietens to only only; Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. The chapter is solely her internal monologue as she lays in bed, meandering from small momentary distractions to big thoughts about the various loves of her life and romantic encounters she’s had, including the memory of her engagement with the stunning line “he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” which inspired the Kate Bush track ‘The Sensual World’.

However, academics are conflicted on the chapter. On one hand, it could be read as a deeply anti-feminist moment. Molly Bloom is the only significant female character in the book, yet we only encounter her own thoughts for such a brief moment right at the end, in a chapter that’s fully removed from the rest of the text, almost like an afterthought. She’s also bed-bound and spends the majority of the chapter thinking almost entirely about sex, love or relationships as if that’s all Joyce thinks women do or as if to say that a woman’s realm is only a domestic one or one built for pleasure. On the other hand, some argue that the sexual nature of the chapter and the fact that Molly Bloom is so forthcoming about her desire for pleasure is an empowering one, presenting the character as bold and defiant of a society that would have women be polite and have their sexuality only be in service to men.

This image of Monroe reading that chapter, with that debate in mind, makes for such a moving image. In a lot of ways, Marilyn Monroe was Hollywood’s Molly Bloom; she can be read as a trailblazing, empowering figure who took beauty standards and used them against the people who set them to grasp success and take charge of her life after a difficult childhood. Or, she can be read as a woman living in the shadow of men’s desires, expectations and limiting views of women. Her status as a sex symbol can be freedom or a trap, just as how Molly Bloom’s internal monologue can be defiant or nothing more than stereotypical fodder written from the mind of a man.

“My body is my body, every part of it”, Marilyn Monroe once wrote in her diary. It’s a line that could be assigned to Molly Bloom if you took the punctuation out. Sadly, the world will never know where Monroe landed on the debate or how she perceived the character as she finally finished the book she’d been chipping away at for years. But this image and the debate surrounding it become such a fascinating side-piece to the debate held in the text in her hands.

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