Rattlesnakes

Rattlesnakes are an unseen but unsettling presence in this scene: although Norma Jeane Baker says there are none where she is, talk of them draws her from a passing startle into an anxious private vision. The shift makes the rattlesnake less a creature encountered than an image through which the scene exposes the strain beneath her practiced humor.

Seasonal Talk and Social Performance

After a glimpse of cockroaches makes her heart race, W teases Norma Jeane Baker for seeming to daydream. She responds by improvising a joke about the relief of not having rattlesnakes nearby, especially the possibility of one appearing as someone gets into bed. Her speech is made up of hurried questions rather than assertions; the narration presents this as a way of softening what she says around powerful men, under the conventions of feminine politeness.

W laughs and begins telling an anecdote about rattlesnakes. The season supplies a familiar subject for men to trade unusual stories about, while women are generally expected to listen. Norma Jeane Baker joins the exchange with comic timing, and W enjoys her humor. The rattlesnake thus first belongs to a social performance: it gives her a chance to amuse a powerful man while conforming to the role of audience that the conversation assigns to women.

From Joke to Private Fear

The anecdote does not hold her attention. As W speaks, the rattlesnake becomes an imagined threat to Norma Jeane Baker’s body, displacing her earlier thoughts about Debra Mae. The narrative keeps the snake outside the actual setting while allowing its imagined presence to become more disturbing than the harmless cockroaches that first startled her. A joke about what might be under the bed opens onto a deeper, private fear.

She tries to keep listening and to arrange her face so W will understand that she has not drifted away. That effort sits beside the increasingly intimate force of the image: the rattlesnake is no longer merely a seasonal anecdote but a figure for vulnerability and anxiety. The scene’s movement from comic improvisation to inward alarm gives the creature its significance without requiring an actual encounter.

Narrative Significance

Rattlesnakes recur here as a subject men can turn into entertainment, but Norma Jeane Baker’s response unsettles that easy exchange. Her humor wins W’s laughter, yet it does not protect her from the fear the conversation awakens. The contrast between her outwardly light performance and her inward distress makes the rattlesnake a compact image of the scene’s broader tension between social ease and private unease.