Absent Fathers, Abandonment, and Belonging

Absent Fathers, Abandonment, and Belonging is the pattern through which the novel links Norma Jeane Baker’s uncertain paternity to her need for recognition and a home in which she can claim her family openly. The search is not resolved by proof: a name and a possible connection to her mother’s past become enough to draw her toward an estranged father. Against that absence, she holds fast to a different promise—that Gladys Mortensen will one day live with her—and recognizes her own wound in Cass Chaplin’s account of paternal rejection.

The Father as a Question of Recognition

At the center of the motif is the painful possibility that Mr. Z is Norma Jeane’s father. In his private apartment, after he has pushed her toward a white fur rug and ordered her to lie down, the thought suddenly occurs to her. The moment binds the possibility of kinship to an immediate imbalance of power: the man she wonders about is not offering recognition or care, but issuing a sexual command. The novel thus makes the paternal question more than a mystery about identity. It exposes how the desire to be acknowledged can coexist with vulnerability to a man who has the power to define and use her.

Later, Norma Jeane waits in a borrowed Jaguar on El Canyon Drive, outside a secluded estate enclosed by a high stone wall and an iron gate. She has been given a name, but no proof. She does not claim certainty; instead, she frames the encounter as a wish to see her father’s face. The name may belong to a man who was her mother’s lover in 1925, and the narrative preserves the uncertainty even as it shows how readily she takes hold of the possibility. Her search resembles a hungry person rummaging through scraps for a treasure: the evidence is meager, but the need that gives it meaning is immense. In this account, belonging is sought through an imagined meeting as much as through any verifiable family history.

Gladys and the Promise of a Home

The search for a father unfolds alongside Norma Jeane’s effort to protect the bond with her mother. She recalls Gladys Mortensen as young and hopeful, admired by men who praised the beautiful baby she carried. Yet Norma Jeane knows that beauty cannot make their relationship legible to others: they do not share a surname, and she wonders who could recognize Gladys as her mother. The memory holds affection and concealment together. A visible resemblance or a shared past does not automatically provide the public acknowledgment that would make a family secure.

Norma Jeane has promised I. E. Shinn not to tell anyone that Gladys is hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital. She keeps that confidence while imagining a different future: Gladys will come to live with her, because Norma Jeane has sworn that she will. The promise is a counterweight to the father’s absence. Where paternal recognition remains a possibility she cannot establish, she imagines herself as the person who can offer her mother a home. Her hope is therefore both relational and practical: she wants Gladys to belong with her, not merely to be remembered as her mother.

Shared Wounds and Projected Kinship

The novel also gives this longing an echo in Cass Chaplin’s account of his own family. He describes his father, Charlie Chaplin, as having rejected and disinherited him, and presents that rejection as a denial of his right to exist. Norma Jeane immediately understands the feeling. Her agreement does not mean that their histories are identical; rather, his language gives form to something she already knows through her own unacknowledged parentage. The parallel makes their intimacy legible as recognition between two people who understand paternal absence as more than a missing name.

At the same time, Norma Jeane imagines that Charlie Chaplin might have loved her if they had met. Her fantasy is nourished by the admiration Gladys and Norma Jeane’s grandmother Della had for the screen figure, and by the images of him that hung in Gladys’s various residences. She reads those eyes as familiar and kindred, allowing the public image of an admired man to stand beside the unknown father she seeks. This is not evidence of a real relationship; it is a wish shaped by the stories, portraits, and films through which an absent father can be imagined. The contrast is stark: Cass speaks of a famous father who repudiated him, while Norma Jeane wonders whether that same father might have welcomed her.

The Gaze, the Body, and the Limits of Belonging

The motif becomes more painful in Otto öse’s recollection of photographing Norma Jeane. He understands that she has told him she is illegitimate, that her father lives near Hollywood and has never acknowledged her, and that her mother has paranoid schizophrenia and has been confined at Norwalk State Hospital for years. His account places these facts beside the commercial value of her exposed body: she is treated as something to sell, without family or social support to protect her. The distance between the tenderness she longs for and the objectifying attention she receives sharpens the novel’s critique of recognition that is conditional on appearance and marketability.

The image of paternal eyes returns when Norma Jeane remembers the posters and portraits that shaped her early imagination, including the framed photograph in Gladys’s bedroom. She had never told Cass how long she had been attached to the eyes in the film poster, or how they overlapped in memory with those of the unknown man in the photograph. The narrative joins screen image, family picture, and imagined father without resolving them into one person. That overlap conveys the emotional structure of her search: the wish to be protected and claimed attaches itself to images where a real relationship is unavailable. The recurring absence remains unresolved, but it is not empty. It organizes her hopes for Gladys, her sympathy with Cass, and her longing to find a place in which she can be acknowledged rather than merely looked at.