The Time Machine

The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s novel, enters Norma Jeane’s life as one of her mother’s old books and becomes more than a repeated childhood reading: its imagined journey through time gives shape to her attempts to escape distress. The book offers a lever for leaving the present, but it also carries its reader toward an image of a future in which Earth’s life has vanished. For Norma Jeane, that double movement—flight followed by confrontation with extinction—makes the novel both refuge and source of dread.

The Book and Its Journey

One night, long past midnight and unable to sleep, Norma Jeane turns frantically through the worn pages of her mother’s copy. She has read it dozens of times, yet follows the lines with her finger as though the events are unfolding before her anew. The story’s protagonist, the Time Traveller, enters the machine he has invented, works its lever, and plunges into the future. As the years sweep past, he sees suns and moons revolving overhead and watches the sun grow larger and dimmer above a dying Earth. In the farthest vision described in the passage, more than thirty million years have passed, and the sun’s enormous, heated dome covers almost a tenth of the dark sky.

The familiar book does not make this vision comforting. Norma Jeane reads with tears in her eyes and becomes unable to continue. The scene distinguishes the Traveller’s physical voyage from her own reading: he moves through time by operating a machine, while she remains beside the book, her finger tracking words that make remote time feel immediate. Repetition has not blunted the effect. If anything, knowing the story does not prevent dread; the printed future still has to be traversed line by line.

Reading Against the Present

The passage places this late-night reading after an assault by Mr. Z. In its aftermath, Norma Jeane cannot sleep, and the thought that Mr. Z might be her father is bound up with the secret pain of Gladys Mortensen and what Norma Jeane understands as the one happiness of her mother’s life. The book does not resolve that uncertainty or soften what has happened. Instead, its account of another person’s passage through time gives her attention a track to follow when the immediate present has become unbearable.

Yet the imagined journey does not remain a simple escape. Norma Jeane pauses over the Traveller’s progress until she can no longer go on, trembling at the thought that there will be a time when people no longer exist, just as there was a time before they existed. Her reading therefore brings her into contact with mortality even as it offers distance from the present. The imagined machine can carry its traveller elsewhere; the book cannot make its reader exempt from the future it depicts.

A Repeated Mechanism of Escape

The Time Machine returns as a way of describing Norma Jeane’s own dissociation. Later, after the man with tortoise-like eyes has been thrown out of a reception, she presses her fingertips against her eyelids, trying to erase those present from sight. The gesture is associated with a trick dating back to the orphanage, and the narration compares it to the Traveller working the lever of his magical machine. When Norma Jeane opens her eyes again, nearly a quarter of an hour has passed and she is outside the borrowed house on Montezuma Drive.

The recurrence makes the book’s function concrete: its imagined machine becomes a figure for an action Norma Jeane performs with her body, shutting her eyes and passing through a stretch of time she cannot bear to inhabit normally. But the movement has limits. She does not disappear into another era; she returns to a dark, unfamiliar present, trembling and hungry, with little money in her beaded purse. The literary image describes a temporary passage, not a cure or a permanent escape.

Time, Memory, and the Movies

The book’s distant future also sharpens Norma Jeane’s fear that neither fame nor film can guarantee survival. As she thinks about the end of human existence, she recalls performers whom she imagines might be preserved by cinema, only to recognize that even Rodolfo Valentino has been lost to oblivion. Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable enter the same reflection; she had wanted Clark Gable to be her father, and Gladys had often encouraged her to believe he was. Celebrity, the absent father, and the imagined permanence of movies consequently meet inside her reading of Wells: a face may endure on screen, but the screen cannot promise that its subject will remain remembered.

The Time Machine matters, then, not simply as a book Norma Jeane owns and rereads, but as a recurring structure for her experience. It gives her an image of escape that returns in moments of distress, while the novel’s terminal vision forces that escape to confront time’s larger passage. Its lever can be imagined as a route away from a painful scene; its future insists that even the Traveller, the famous, and the filmed belong to a world moving toward loss.