Christian Science

Christian Science, as presented in the novel, is a religious teaching that Edith Mittelstadt offers to children she especially cherishes. Its central claims—that God is Mind, that matter is unreal, and that faith and prayer make healing possible—give Norma Jeane a language for hope and a way to imagine escape from suffering. Yet the doctrine also asks her to distrust bodily pain and illness. Its promise of spiritual harmony therefore becomes a source of both solace and conflict as Norma Jeane encounters experiences she cannot simply pray away.

Teaching and Introduction

Edith Mittelstadt is a devout Christian Scientist, but she does not press her beliefs indiscriminately on the children in her care. She offers them delicately, as nourishment to those she considers especially in need. For Norma Jeane, the teaching becomes personal when, four months before her eleventh birthday, Edith gives her a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. The gift bears a birthday inscription in Edith’s careful handwriting and a biblical verse about walking through the valley of death without fear. The book and its inscription join spiritual instruction to the child’s longing for reassurance.

Edith also introduces Norma Jeane to a special Christian Science prayer, which she regards as a gift. The scene emphasizes the care with which she guides the girl: Edith leans forward to lead her through the prayer, while the narration distinguishes this spiritual offering from physical affection. The doctrine reaches Norma Jeane not as an abstract system alone, but through a trusted adult’s attention, a birthday present, and a shared ritual.

Core Beliefs and Their Appeal

The teaching Norma Jeane takes from Edith is that God is Mind and Mind is all; matter has no ultimate reality. God heals through Jesus, but faith is essential. Edith reinforces the lesson with the Gospel account of the blind man whose sight is restored, presenting healing as possible through belief. Norma Jeane repeats the biblical declaration that she was blind and now sees, and holds to the assurance that only Mind can heal.

These ideas offer a counterstory to Fleece’s bleak belief that no one can escape the curse of blood. Norma Jeane privately feels that there is another way: not by accepting inherited suffering as destiny, but by trusting the spiritual account Edith has taught her. At school, she does not explain this faith to her friends. It remains a private resource, at once a belief and a means of imagining that the conditions of her life need not define her future.

The distinction between matter and Mind also shapes Norma Jeane’s response to her own body. During a school gym class, she experiences pain and realizes that she has begun menstruating. She tries to interpret the sensations as illusion or weakness, and continues to draw on the teaching that flesh is not reality. The effort does not make the symptoms disappear: her head continues to throb, and the physical experience presses against the certainty she has been given. The episode shows the gap between a doctrine of spiritual healing and a child’s need to understand and respond to an ordinary bodily change.

Prayer, Illness, and Institutional Power

Christian Science also affects how Norma Jeane understands the adults and institutions that shape her life. When Gladys Mortensen refuses permission for the Mounts to adopt her, Norma Jeane is devastated. She has prayed as Edith advised, yet the prayer has not changed her mother’s decision. Edith answers by rebuking what she calls Norma Jeane’s blind, selfish emotion: prayer, she explains, cannot alter the Science of being, but can help a person live in greater harmony with it. The distinction protects the doctrine from the failure Norma Jeane feels, but leaves her asking what prayer is for if it cannot change the outcome she desperately wants.

Edith then urges gratitude and positive thought, describing Gladys’s mind as clouded and her illness through the language of negative thinking. The novel sets that explanation beside a more concrete institutional account: Gladys is hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital, where records identify paranoid schizophrenia and possible neurological damage associated with alcohol and medication abuse. Years later, Norma Jeane learns that Gladys has undergone courses of electroshock treatment and is receiving medication to prevent depressive and manic episodes. The contrast does not erase Edith’s care for Norma Jeane, but it exposes the limits of a spiritual interpretation when illness is also described, treated, and managed by medical institutions.

The doctrine’s practical consequences extend into Norma Jeane’s decisions. At the orphanage she avoids asking for aspirin, as well as for menstrual supplies, because such remedies do not fit the principles she has absorbed. Later, after beginning work at the Radio Plane Aircraft factory, she sometimes takes aspirin to keep working through cramps, despite believing that medication is wrong and that it cannot bring genuine healing. Her need to hold on to her job brings belief into contact with economic pressure: the teaching remains important, but practice becomes less absolute when work and physical discomfort demand a response.

Later Tests and Narrative Significance

Norma Jeane’s faith is tested again through the story of Aimee Semple McPherson. At the factory, Norma Jeane sees a newspaper report that the evangelist, who had baptized her as a newborn at the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, died after taking a lethal dose of drugs; the report presents the death as suicide. The news unsettles Norma Jeane’s sense that Christian faith offers a secure refuge. McPherson’s public religious identity and reported death make faith seem like something that might be put on and discarded, rather than an unshakeable protection.

The novel also carries the teaching into adult relationships. During the first night of her marriage to Bucky Glazer, Norma Jeane silently returns to the assurance that only Mind is real and that God is love. The recurrence shows how deeply the lessons have entered her private language: they accompany her into an intimate situation in which she feels uncertain and exposed. Bucky, meanwhile, objects to what he regards as her taking Christian Science too seriously when she refuses ordinary medicine during menstrual episodes. Their disagreement turns an inward belief into a point of marital tension.

Christian Science thus functions less as a settled answer than as a recurring test of what belief can do. It gives Norma Jeane words for hope, offers an alternative to Fleece’s fatalism, and binds her to Edith through a book and a shared prayer. At the same time, its denial of matter conflicts with Norma Jeane’s bodily experience; its account of illness sits uneasily beside medical records and treatment; and prayer cannot secure the adoption or family recognition she wants. The novel’s attention to these contrasts preserves both the doctrine’s emotional appeal and the difficulty of relying on it when lived circumstances resist spiritual explanation.