The United States during World War II

The United States during World War II is presented as a country in which ordinary life has been overtaken by the prospect of catastrophe and the urgency of deciding what comes next. For Norma Jeane, the war is at once a reason adults press her toward early marriage, a danger she fears may erase any future, and a force that awakens a desire to travel and help others. Through her conversations with Bucky Glazer, the novel also shows how national fear enters courtship: reassurance about America’s defenses cannot entirely quiet the questions she asks about what the war will bring.

Pearl Harbor and the sense of an uncertain future

The wartime atmosphere is described as beginning with the trauma of Pearl Harbor. Afterward, each day seems capable of bringing another upheaval: enormous headlines and special news broadcasts make events in the Pacific and Europe feel immediate rather than distant. The period is frightening, but it is also exciting. That combination matters to Norma Jeane’s experience of adolescence. The war does not simply interrupt a stable life; it makes the future itself seem unsettled, while lending urgency and possibility to choices that might otherwise have been postponed.

At fifteen, Norma Jeane is engaged and expects to marry as soon as she turns sixteen. She remembers the prospect with exhilaration: she is to be married, her friends envy her, and she will not have to return to high school for two more years. The possibility that wartime upheaval might leave no future at all helps explain the emotional force of that expectation. Her private milestone sits within a larger public uncertainty, although she says she was too absorbed in her own happiness at the time to hear warnings about what might happen to her later.

The adults around her turn the war into an argument for marriage. Elsie Pirig says that young, healthy men may soon be sent to the front, so Norma Jeane should secure a respectable husband while she can. The advice is also tied to the Pirig household’s reputation: Warren Pirig worries that a foster girl’s romantic entanglements could damage the family standing built through years of taking children placed by social services. Norma Jeane objects that she is too young and wants to finish school, but Elsie answers from her own experience, having married before completing high school. Wartime urgency thus reinforces domestic control, while the adults’ concern about reputation makes marriage a remedy not only for danger but for a feared social scandal.

A competing wish to serve and escape

Norma Jeane’s own response to the marriage pressure points in a different direction. She wants to enlist in the aviation auxiliaries, travel abroad, and help people who are suffering. Her attention turns especially to English children injured by bombing, buried beneath rubble, and left without parents or anyone to love them. The imagined children’s abandonment echoes the novel’s wider concern with belonging, but here the war gives that concern a public object: she imagines care extending beyond her immediate household and across the ocean.

Her aspiration is not merely a refusal of marriage. It offers a picture of adulthood organized around movement, service, and contact with the world beyond Van Nuys. The contrast is sharp: Elsie urges her to secure a husband before the war removes eligible men, while Norma Jeane imagines going overseas to help those already harmed by it. The text does not show her carrying out this wish in these passages; it establishes it as a sincere alternative to the future being arranged for her.

Courtship under the pressure of war

Bucky Glazer’s courtship unfolds amid the same unsettled conditions. He takes Norma Jeane to the cinema, dancing, fishing, walking, and canoeing. Around his older friends she is shy and mostly quiet, but she listens closely and laughs readily. The narration presents her as attractive and socially at ease despite her reserve, with dark-blond curls, a heart-shaped face, and clothes that emphasize her figure. Women wearing trousers in public are part of the changing wartime scene as well: the description links personal appearance and courtship to a society in which the boundaries of public life are shifting.

In conversation, Norma Jeane asks Bucky whether the United States will win, how long the war will last, whether enemies will bomb the country, and what might happen to them, especially in Southern California. Her concern is not abstract strategy but the fate of a shared future. Bucky enjoys her unusual way of speaking about fate, even when her questions make her sound, to him, like a radio announcer. He answers by imagining a sequence of defenses: American antiaircraft weapons would destroy attacking aircraft, the Navy would stop an approach by sea, and civilians would fight an invasion. He also claims that Lockheed makes secret missiles. His confidence offers Norma Jeane a reassuring account of national protection, but the repeated need for reassurance reveals how thoroughly the possibility of attack has entered their private life.

News, memory, and the limits of reassurance

A conversation about The War of the Worlds exposes how wartime fears mingle with remembered mass panic. Norma Jeane says she has read it as a book by H. G. Wells; Bucky explains that it was a radio program associated with Orson Welles, not a book by that author. He recalls that his family heard the broadcast when he was young and that his grandfather believed it was real, while his mother remained frightened despite hearing that it was a simulated bulletin. Bucky describes the episode as a childhood experience in which even knowing something was fictional did not entirely prevent fear. The anecdote gives the novel a compact parallel for wartime listening: a warning can be understood as unreal and still be felt as an immediate threat.

The account also distinguishes older generations’ memories of military service from the present conflict. Men around forty are described as having served without the chance to fight, or as having fought in the First World War so long ago that it had nearly passed from living memory. What is happening in the Pacific and Europe, by contrast, belongs to the present tense. War therefore alters not only expectations but the perceived distance between news and experience: distant theaters become the central facts against which people measure their own safety.

From wartime unity to postwar scrutiny

The novel places wartime experience beside its political aftermath rather than treating the end of combat as the end of wartime pressure. In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 requires federal employees to swear loyalty and participate in security programs; private companies are also pressed to demand loyalty oaths. A Hollywood actor who had spoken in defense of constitutional freedoms and participated in Screen Actors Guild labor negotiations comes under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee. His status as a veteran who fought in Germany is part of the account, but it does not shield him from the risk of investigation, public denunciation, boycotts, and a blacklist.

The later Hollywood gesture of pressing a finger to the lips makes this legacy visible in the body. It can be performed with fluttering eyebrows as if it were comic, yet the fear behind it is genuine. When Norma Jeane asks what another commission is and says she has nothing more to do with Otto Öse, I. E. Shinn redirects her attention: the matter, he indicates, is not Öse or Charlie Chaplin Jr., but Marilyn herself. The scene belongs to the later political climate, not to the wartime years, but it extends the book’s portrait of a nation in which public danger and private vulnerability repeatedly converge.

A later set of headlines—American losses in Korea, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s death sentences, and reports of Soviet nuclear tests—forms another, distinct postwar backdrop. It accompanies the exposure of a scandal around Norma Jeane and the news of favorable reviews for her performance in La tua bocca brucia. The contrast between international crisis and celebrity coverage shows how the novel’s wartime frame develops into a broader account of public attention: political fear persists, while a woman’s image and work are also scrutinized. The United States during World War II is thus both a specific historical setting and the beginning of a continuing atmosphere of uncertainty, in which promises of safety coexist with pressures that follow people into their homes, relationships, and careers.