Scienza e salute nella chiave della Scrittura

Scienza e salute nella chiave della Scrittura is a book of Christian Science teaching that Edith Mittelstadt gave to Norma Jeane Baker on her eleventh birthday. Its importance in the novel rests both on its religious ideas and on the tenderness of the gift: for a child separated from her mother and living in an orphanage, the volume became a lasting token of affection and a text she returned to each night.

The Birthday Gift

Four months before a later conversation about Norma Jeane’s mother, Edith Mittelstadt summoned her to the office for her eleventh birthday and gave her a copy of Scienza e salute nella chiave della Scrittura by Mary Baker Eddy. Mittelstadt wrote a personal dedication on the first blank page. It included a reference to Psalm 23:4, an assurance of protection through danger, and her belief that the book’s wisdom could change Norma Jeane’s life as it had changed her own. The inscription was signed and dated June 10, 1937.

The object mattered beyond its religious content. Norma Jeane remembered the birthday as the happiest day she had experienced since entering the orphanage, and she would regard the book as the first genuine gift of her life. Its handwritten dedication made it specifically hers: a text received not as an impersonal lesson but from an adult who offered it with care.

Reading and Instruction

Norma Jeane read the book every night before falling asleep, repeating Mittelstadt’s dedication softly to herself. The regularity of this ritual joined the book to the moment of going to bed and to the hope embodied in the doctor’s words. Mittelstadt, a devoted Christian Scientist, shared her faith selectively with children she especially favored, and did so gently, as though offering food to someone hungry.

The book also accompanied instruction. When Mittelstadt and Norma Jeane read it together, especially the section on prayer, Norma Jeane felt she understood its teaching, though only partly. The ideas included the claim that matter was not reality and that mind alone was God. The book therefore gave her language for a religious account of the world, while the doctor’s lessons connected that account to the practical act of praying together for strength and for a decision concerning Norma Jeane’s mother.

The Limits of Its Consolation

The novel sets this faith beside experiences that do not settle into its reassuring order. Alone, Norma Jeane found her thoughts as scattered as pieces of a puzzle: she sensed that an order existed but could not find it. During a painful walk back to the orphanage, she tried to understand her headache through the teaching that pain was an illusion or weakness, yet her head throbbed so violently that she was nearly blind, and she longed for an aspirin. The contrast does not erase the book’s comfort; it shows the distance between a doctrine she could follow with Mittelstadt and the bodily distress she could not simply think away.

That tension also surrounds Gladys Mortensen’s illness. When Norma Jeane later visited her at Norwalk Hospital, the medical account described a long institutional history, electroshock treatments that had reduced her crises, and ongoing medication to prevent depressive and manic episodes. The book does not resolve this history or replace the material facts of Gladys’s treatment. Instead, its language of prayer and spiritual understanding exists beside the medical system governing her mother’s life, leaving the limits of consolation visible.

Meaning in Norma Jeane’s Story

Scienza e salute nella chiave della Scrittura is both a religious text and a keepsake of a rare, affirming relationship. Mittelstadt’s gift gave Norma Jeane a repeated bedtime ritual and a memory of being singled out with affection; the doctor’s later prayers continued the association between the book, care, and hope. Norma Jeane’s attachment to it thus survives the limits of what its teachings can explain. The volume offers an order to seek, but the novel preserves the confusion, physical pain, and family suffering that remain beyond that order.