Women in Dark Times (3 page)

What, for women, are the wages of fear? This is a question that has returned to recent feminism. If fear is something women experience, it is also something they are instructed to feel. ‘I don’t like the fact,’ Emily Birkenshaw stated at the UK Feminista summer school held in Birmingham in 2011, ‘that as a woman I have to feel scared.’
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Fear is not only a signal. It can also be a demand. Women
have
to feel scared. Birkenshaw is talking about the danger to women on the streets – women whose visible sexuality is seen as the real threat, thereby making women responsible for crimes committed against them. But her statement also beautifully captures the ambiguity of fear – the appropriate response to the threat of violence, but also an image of what women should be (weak, powerless, would be the accompanying cliché). If women are always or always potentially frightened then the illusion can be nurtured that no one else ever has to be. Let women be fearful so men can feel brave and safe. As with most projections, this neatly parcels off a fundamental problem of the heart. As if the world were not a frightening place. As if fear were not somewhere everyone has to go. If instead we think of fear as place or portion, then it can be seen as a component of mental life that everyone, by dint of being human, inextricably shares. For Luxemburg, Salomon and Monroe, fear is an intimate, a companion. It is part of their world or psychic repertoire, and a type of knowledge, something they are able to tolerate. Why do we talk of conquering fear, as if there would be no price to pay for such brutal inner defacement? We might take as a model of such defacement a defeated army – Germany after the First World War, for example – that will go to war once more and destroy the whole world rather than admit its own failures as a nation or face its own worst fears. The fact that it has to live these fears so totally at the end of the Second World War shows such denial to be as ineffective as it is absolute. Nothing, we might say, is more dangerous than the repudiation of fear – at which men (often) and nations (regularly) excel themselves.

When Salomon arrives in Auschwitz, she is five months pregnant. Her biographer, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, carefully unearths the figures which show that women were first in line for extermination (when Auschwitz was liberated, 17 per cent of the Jewish survivors were women to 83 per cent men). Witnesses have described how pregnant women were picked out, ostensibly for improved rations, and then immediately sent to their deaths. ‘Genocide’, writes Felstiner, ‘is the act of putting women and children first.’
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Her shocking claim simply underlines that it is the capacity of women to engender life that sparks the greatest fear. Not just the act of gestation and birth. This is not the idea of womb-envy used by some feminists to counter Freud’s infamous theory of penis-envy, which is seen as his greatest slur against women (overlooking the fact that for psychoanalysis there is no greater dupe than the man who holds on to his anatomy as his own ideal). Nor is this the argument that men always potentially hate the bodies to which they owe life, although that may also be true. Nor, more obviously perhaps, should this be taken to imply that all women are or must be mothers, or even – although this is more contested – that being a woman is something with which all women primordially self-identify, seeing themselves as a woman before and to the exclusion of anything else (as if that reality exhausts all the psychic options on offer). Rather, it is the question of what the possibility of birth represents, in Arendt’s terms, as unpredictable beginning. A new birth confronts us with the collapse of our omnipotence, creaturely life whose future – other than by magic – cannot be foretold.Totalitarian terror is needed, to cite Arendt again, ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’. ‘Totalitarianisms’, Margaret Atwood wrote on Obama’s 2012 re-election, ‘always try to control women’s bodies, one way or another.’
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(She was referring to laws against reproductive rights which remained in the pipeline, after his re-election, in individual states.)

Seen in this light, the fact of birth is a type of endless reminder of what escapes us, a living caution to our totalitarian dreams. In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Charlotte Salomon was accepted as the one Jewish student by the Berlin State Academy of Art. According to the minutes of the admissions committee, her reserved nature meant that she was not seen to pose the normal threat of ‘non-Aryan’ females to the Aryan male students. It was because her sexuality coiled back into itself that the state granted Salomon permission to paint (she was still a larva in shackles). The Nazi dread is of course that miscegenation will produce the wrong kind of racial life. Salomon, they surmised, was no danger. Were the context not so lethal, such reasoning would be laughable – as if to be reserved robs a woman of all sexual being (the idea of appearances as deceiving acquires an additional gendered gloss). But behind the inanity, we can discern the drive to control the bodies of women – to master the unmasterable – which is at the core of totalitarian logic. Or to put it more simply: a woman is terrifying because you never know what she is going to come up with.

*

The demand for perfection directed at women in modern times (everything in place, no flaw, no lines, no shadow) can therefore be seen as one of the places where terror of the unknown takes refuge. As the centre of gravity shifts across the Atlantic after the Second World War, no woman carries the weight of that demand more heavily than Marilyn Monroe. As if, like America itself, Monroe were being handed the keys of redemption to the dreadful story – for which Luxemburg’s and Salomon’s deaths can be taken as emblems – that came before.

America had been Europe’s saviour, first militarily through its 1941 intervention and then economically through the Marshall Plan. As the continent struggled to emerge from the catastrophe of the war, America took up its position as bastion of freedom and new dawn. In that role, Hollywood will be one of its strongest suits (American cinema was wildly popular in post-war Europe at least partly because most American films had been banned under the Nazis, under Mussolini and by the Pétain regime in France).
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This was America, in the words of film critic Laura Mulvey, as ‘the world’s image of a new democracy of glamour’ which ‘proclaimed the desirability of capitalism to the outside world’.
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Monroe is the face and emissary of that desire. In 1953’s
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, one of her most successful films, the two dazzling showgirls sail across the Atlantic ferrying American beauty to a still war-scarred Europe.
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Europe’s catastrophe was America’s opportunity, allowing it to resume fully a cultural and economic colonisation of Europe which dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, and which had merely been interrupted by the war: between 1947 and 1949, Coca-Cola plants opened in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy. News of a target of 240 million bottles for France in 1951 provoked an outcry in the country.
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Monroe, we could say, was America’s answer to the war, its greatest boast, and a covert – or not so covert – weapon in the Cold War that follows. One of her most famous moments is her singing to US troops in Korea in 1954 (she herself said later that nothing had ever made her so happy). When Khrushchev asks to meet Monroe on a visit to the US in 1959, his aides explain that, for the USSR, America
is
Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself put it rather differently. ‘I don’t look at myself as a commodity,’ she said in her last interview, ‘but I’m sure a lot of people have.’
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Monroe was a child of the post-war Depression – she was born in 1926, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. According to the latest count, she moved during her childhood between eleven different foster homes, apart from the short periods of time she lived with her mother’s closest friend and also briefly with her mother before watching her being carried off to a mental home. She will be the most photographed woman in the world, as well as one of its most gifted cinematic performers, as is now, sometimes grudgingly, being recognised. But there is always something wrong. Not just because the back story of her life is so grim, nor because of her early death (whether accidental or suicide or indeed something far more sinister is to this day unclear); but also because both of these realities are the bleak undertow, the always hovering B movie to the triumphant tale which a newly dominant America, spreading its goods and money across the globe after the war, will try to tell the world and itself. She is far more aware, more critical, more resistant to everything that moment stands for – to all that she herself is meant to stand for – than we have been allowed to see.

Monroe’s life shadows the transition of America from Roosevelt’s New Deal, which saved the nation from Depression, through the Second World War, and from there into the 1950s Cold War, Korea and McCarthy’s witch-hunt of suspected communists which was one of its ugliest legacies. To such moral decay, Monroe’s beauty was the perfect foil. Her flawlessness was a type of magical thinking, America’s dream of itself come true (no limp, no stutter; in fact Monroe stuttered all her life). As we will see, despite her Korean moment, she surrounded herself with people who provided some of the most searing commentary on any such delusion and on the decline of America’s liberal ideals which accompanied it. Monroe may have embodied the perfection of America, its most dazzling image of itself, but she did not believe in it. She was suspicious of the official line. In May 1960, at the height of the Cold War, a CIA U2 plane was shot down by the Soviets. A few weeks later, when a second plane was spotted trespassing in the same airspace, Monroe phoned an aide to ask why. He told her it was not spying but merely carrying out an oceanic survey. ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t trust us,’ she replied. The fact that the sentence grammatically defies all logic makes the political point all the more strongly (how can ‘I’ distrust ‘us’ in which ‘I’ is syntactically included?).
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Monroe was a rebel spirit. Her close friend Norman Rosten tells the somewhat unlikely story of how in 1960 she tried to persuade Arthur Miller to offer their home as a safe haven to Indonesian President Sukarno, who had led his country’s struggle for independence, when he faced an imminent coup. He was eventually overthrown by Suharto with the backing of the CIA.
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‘My nightmare is the H Bomb,’ Monroe wrote in her notes for an interview in 1962, ‘What’s yours?’
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None of this of course is well known. Monroe’s politics are like a hidden life behind the screen. There is a lesson here too that feminism can make use of. No woman is ever as bad as her own worst cliché.

It is, I will argue, at least partly because her own belief in the American dream was so precarious, her hold on what she was meant to personify so fragile, that Monroe became the object of such mania. Monroe was too close – remained too close even as a star – to the other side of her own story. As those who knew her insisted, the audience she most cared about were the workers, down-and-outs and misfits whose investment in her as a fantasy she understood only too well. Her mother was a film cutter in Hollywood; Monroe had gazed at the RKO neon signs out of the window of the orphanage she had briefly inhabited as a child. She was a champion of the underdog. There was, observed Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln who became a close friend at the end of her life, ‘something democratic about her’.
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In 1960, she wrote to Lester Markel, a senior
New York Times
editor and friend, protesting about the US government’s policy towards Fidel Castro. ‘You see, Lester,’ she writes, ‘I was brought up to believe in democracy, and when the Cubans finally threw out Battista with so much bloodshed, the United States doesn’t even stand behind them and give them help or support even to develop democracy.’
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Democracy is of course the ultimate, potentially threatening, new beginning – as recent events across the globe, starting with the Arab Spring of summer 2011 and its painful aftermath, have once again made all too clear. For Rosa Luxemburg, it was the lode star and litmus test of all political life. ‘The elimination of democracy,’ she wrote when Lenin and Trotsky decided to abolish it in Russia in 1917, ‘is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure: for it stops up the living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.’
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There is a historical irony here which links the two women. Monroe is coolly observing that, in the aftermath of a war waged on behalf of democratic freedom, America was turning out not to be the unqualified champion of democracy after all (a fact even more obvious to any observer of US foreign policy today). The CIA’s first major overseas operation was the ousting of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (the year of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
), which ushered in the reign of the Shah. In fact, there were no lengths to which America would be unwilling to go to stifle democracy when faced with the prospect of socialism – the only condition, for Luxemburg, under which true democracy could flourish.

In moments like this, Monroe rips the cover off what she herself was meant, as if by nature, to personify. In fact if Monroe was a natural, it is only in the sense that the one who appears most natural, like the clown or fall-about comic, is mistress of her craft. ‘It was almost as if she were the shooter and the subject,’ writes Lawrence Schiller, called in to photograph her on the set of
Something’s Got to Give,
her unfinished last film.
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She had shown him ‘what other photographers knew: that when she turned herself on to the camera, the photographer didn’t have to be more than a mechanic’.
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For Eve Arnold, this power extended into the processing room. Once she had taken the picture, Monroe’s images seemed to grow almost organically; they came into being, under their own momentum, out of the dark: