Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy is presented as the founder of Christian Science and, in Norma Jeane Baker’s childhood, as both the author of a cherished book and the imagined grandmother who might connect her to a family history. Her importance in the novel rests less on direct action than on how Norma Jeane turns a historical name and a shared surname into sources of consolation and belonging.

Historical Identity and the Gift

When Norma Jeane was eleven, Edith Mittelstadt gave her a copy of Scienza e salute nella chiave della Scrittura, Mary Baker Eddy’s book, inscribing it as a birthday present on June 10, 1937. The gift came while Norma Jeane was living in the orphanage; she would remember that birthday as the happiest day she had experienced since arriving there. Each night she read the book before going to sleep and repeated the dedication to herself. She regarded the volume as the first real gift of her life, making Mary Baker Eddy present to her not simply as a distant religious figure but through an object she could return to in private.

Edith Mittelstadt’s own religious devotion shaped the gift’s significance. She shared her faith selectively and gently with the children she favored, and she offered to pray with Norma Jeane about her mother’s decision concerning her future. The book and its promise of spiritual guidance thus entered a life marked by uncertainty over whether a family would take her in.

The Imagined Family Connection

At school, Norma Jeane looked Mary Baker Eddy up in an encyclopedia and learned that she had been born in 1821 and died in 1910. She also learned that Eddy had not been born in California, but treated that distance as unimportant: trains and airplanes made travel commonplace. Instead, the name Baker caught her attention. Gladys Mortensen’s first husband, Baker, had disappeared from Gladys’s life, while Baker was also Norma Jeane’s own surname. Norma Jeane speculated that the two Bakers might be related, using that possibility to explain the coincidence of Eddy’s name.

The novel gives no confirmation of a family connection. Norma Jeane’s conclusion that Mary Baker Eddy was her grandmother is an imaginative claim, built from a surname and a missing branch of family history rather than established fact. Her reasoning gives the coincidence emotional force: she sees the name not as an accidental resemblance but as a clue that she belongs to a larger lineage.

Narrative Role

Mary Baker Eddy therefore functions as a figure through whom Norma Jeane tries to make abandonment intelligible. The book offers a repeated bedtime ritual, while the imagined kinship offers a place for Norma Jeane within a family story that otherwise contains absence and unanswered questions. Her private conviction that the universe contains no coincidences turns a biographical detail into reassurance: the name Baker can seem to connect her to someone she admires and to a history beyond her own unstable childhood.

That imagined inheritance remains distinct from the novel’s account of Eddy herself. Eddy is identified through her dates, her book, and her role as founder of Christian Science; the grandmother relationship belongs to Norma Jeane’s interpretation. The contrast makes the episode revealing: historical knowledge supplies the raw detail, but the longing for belonging shapes what that detail comes to mean.