“Marilyn Monroe” as a Role: Performance and Divided Identity

Marilyn Monroe is both a part Norma Jeane Baker is expected to perform and an identity that begins to shape how she understands herself. The name is chosen for her by studio men, and the image attached to it is built from clothes, hair, gestures, and screen roles. Yet acting also becomes a discipline through which Norma Jeane tries to control herself and make a place in the film world. The tension between the public figure and the person who performs her is not resolved by success: the role can attract attention and open a career, but it cannot simply stand in for a whole person.

Naming and the making of a role

When Norma Jeane is cast in her first film, she is summoned to an office where I. E. Shinn and a studio executive are discussing a new name for her. They consider several possibilities without asking her opinion. She is hurt not only by their dismissal of Norma Jeane as unsuitable, but by being treated as if she were absent from a conversation about her own identity. She tries to preserve at least Norma, a name she has lived with, and objects that the suggested surname Miller is no better than Baker. The name Monroe comes from her grandmother’s surname; the men settle on Marilyn Monroe after saying it aloud and liking its sound.

The choice therefore combines a personal fragment with a commercial decision, but the decision is not hers. Marilyn does not appeal to her: it recalls an assistant at the orphanage whom she disliked, while the whole process recalls the imposition of a name on Debra Mae. The episode makes the new identity a role from its beginning—something selected and shaped by other people, even as Norma Jeane is expected to inhabit it. Her later sense that Marilyn is not a real person but a part she hopes to play with dignity grows from this first act of being named without consent.

The public stage and the manufactured image

At Schwab’s, Norma Jeane experiences an ordinary public gathering as if she has entered a scene. She reminds herself that she is an actress and that good acting requires self-control. Her carefully ironed white satin dress and new hairstyle draw attention, but the reactions divide: some people smile or greet her, a few men look admiringly, and many seem disappointed when they recognize her as a little-known newcomer rather than the important person they had hoped to see. The room’s changing attention gives her a measure of how public identity depends on expectation. She is looked at, assessed, and then dismissed according to the fame she does or does not yet possess.

That gap between a person and the image expected of her is sharpened by the studio’s treatment of Marilyn. Norma Jeane dislikes the artificial blonde hair, doll-like clothes, affected mannerisms, and pin-up parts assigned to the star. She had hoped, with I. E. Shinn’s encouragement, to receive a serious role and make a respectable beginning in films. When she is asked to pose nude, the demand exposes how little control she has over the image being made of her; in her despair, the name Marilyn itself becomes newly important, despite her dislike of its artificiality. The persona is not merely a costume she can remove without consequence. It is also the career and recognition she has been waiting for.

A first screen appearance and layered identities

Before the public premiere of The Asphalt Jungle, Norma Jeane does not expect her name to appear in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promotional material. Her two brief scenes have not been considered important enough to merit that mention, and she is prepared to be satisfied with appearing in the film’s credits as Marilyn Monroe. The name is not, in her understanding, the name of a real person; it is the role she hopes to perform honorably. Yet after the premiere, people ask who the blonde is, and I. E. Shinn identifies her as his client. The audience’s question marks a change: the small screen presence has become recognizable enough to provoke curiosity, even though the publicity has not prepared the audience to know her name.

A later acting scene gives the divided identity a more intricate form. Seeing Louis Calhern, Norma Jeane recognizes in him a resemblance to the older Clive Pearce, whose face and voice belong to her remembered past. Her response folds several parts together: Norma Jeane plays Marilyn, who in turn plays Angela. The image is compared to nested dolls, with smaller figures enclosed within a larger one. The connection does not make the identities interchangeable; instead, it lets memory feed a performance. Her change is visible enough that Calhern and the director notice it, although she cannot explain what has happened even to herself. The scene presents acting as a capacity to transform private recognition into a role, while leaving the boundary between the layers unsettled.

Shinn, success, and the limits of the persona

Norma Jeane’s dependence on I. E. Shinn makes the distinction between person and role especially painful. When he speaks of Marilyn’s career and happiness, she answers that Marilyn is only a role and therefore cannot be happy. She tells him that another person knows she is not Marilyn and calls her Norma; in that moment, being recognized by her own name matters more than being celebrated as the star. Shinn responds that he understands her, but the scene also shows how easily a manager can treat the persona as his creation and career project. His support is real within their relationship, yet it does not erase the imbalance involved in helping shape an identity that Norma Jeane must live inside.

At a premiere, the role brings a rush of triumph. I. E. Shinn takes her by the hand through the crowd, and she feels as if she has become Cinderella and the glass slipper fits. Photographers favor the young blonde over the film’s leading actress, Jean Hagen, while remarks about her acting ability sit beside attention to her appearance. The success is thus double-edged: Marilyn is being noticed, but much of the attention fixes on the surface the studio has manufactured. Norma Jeane can experience the evening as magical and still know that the figure being applauded was invented for public use.

That mixture of achievement and exposure helps explain why the role remains unstable rather than simply liberating. Before her debut, she imagines Marilyn Monroe dying again if the film fails or the studio rejects her, and remembers the earlier disappointment of Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! The career attached to the persona can be withdrawn, so the role offers no secure self apart from the institutions and audiences that recognize it.

Acting as immersion and division

As Norma Jeane works on La tua bocca brucia, her performance as Nell becomes so absorbing that she scarcely notices I. E. Shinn or the other people watching the set. Between takes she runs away to hide; she does not present herself for interviews, and the other actors are unsure how to approach her. Shinn advises her not to push herself so intensely. The episode shows the cost as well as the power of her method: she can enter a role with unusual concentration, but the work separates her from ordinary professional sociability and makes the distinction between performed life and daily conduct harder to maintain.

Across these episodes, Marilyn Monroe is neither simply a false mask nor a settled second self. The name and image are imposed, marketed, and judged by others, but Norma Jeane also uses acting to shape experience, draw on memory, and pursue meaningful work. Her insistence that a role cannot be happy identifies the limit of the studio’s invention: a character can be watched, promoted, and applauded, but feeling and personhood belong to the woman performing it. The novel keeps both truths in view—the role is a source of opportunity and a structure of control, while the act of performing it is also a craft through which Norma Jeane tries to make herself visible on her own terms.