War as a force of liberation

War as a force of liberation names one of the novel’s sharpest contradictions: the conflict devastates lives, yet loosens the domestic and social constraints that had kept Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe) dependent. The war takes Bucky Glazer away from their marriage, but its demand for labor gives Norma Jeane a wage, a room of her own, and the first sense that her life might truly begin. Liberation arrives not in spite of history but through its upheaval—and remains shadowed by the destruction on which it depends.

A departure that opens a door

Bucky tells Norma Jeane that he has enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine and expects to sail within a month, probably for Australia. He has wanted to enlist for some time; he frames his decision as service to the country during a historic period, while insisting that he loves her and has been happy with her. What he wants, however, is more than a honeymoon. His departure is therefore both patriotic commitment and personal escape. He feels guilty at the sight of her pain, but also exhilarated: he will be free not only of the marriage but of Mission Hills, his parents, the Lockheed assembly line, and the embalming fluid at the workplace where he had been handling corpses.

For Norma Jeane, the separation is not simply a loss. She does not return to the Glazers’ home or stay at Verdugo Gardens. A week after Bucky leaves aboard a Liberty ship, she takes a job at the Radio Plane Aircraft Factory in Burbank and rents a furnished room near a streetcar stop. By her eighteenth birthday, she is living independently. In exhaustion and bewilderment, she recognizes that she is no longer a minor under Los Angeles County social-services guardianship; the next morning, the realization comes back with renewed force, followed by the question of whether that was why she married Bucky. The departure that threatens her security also marks the beginning of an adulthood she has entered through marriage but only now begins to experience as her own.

Work, wages, and the limits of freedom

The factory makes the war’s economic effect tangible. Shortages of male workers bring women into jobs driving trucks and streetcars, operating cranes, and doing construction and painting. At Radio Plane, Norma Jeane estimates that women outnumber men eight to one, although women are absent from management. The disparity makes clear that wartime opportunity does not undo the workplace hierarchy. Still, her own position changes quickly: after three months, her conscientious and efficient work earns her a promotion and a raise of twenty-five cents an hour. She is assigned to the more delicate work of spraying liquid plastic onto aircraft fuselages.

The promotion carries a physical cost. The paint’s strong, nauseating odor penetrates her head; her face drains of color, her vision blurs, and her tongue seems suddenly too large for her mouth. When the foreman tells her to go outside for air, she insists that she has no time, afraid that failing at the new task will send her back to the assembly line or get her dismissed. War has made the job and the wage possible, but the factory’s demands expose how precarious that freedom remains. Her urgency is at once evidence of ambition and a measure of the risk attached to earning her place.

A public world against loneliness

War also changes the terms of social life. Apart from the dead, the wounded, and the world reduced to smoking ruins, Norma Jeane finds the war oddly dependable: it supplies a subject for conversation, continual news, and occasions for strangers to share grief, consolation, or opinion. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she feels, loneliness has receded. On streetcars, in shops, and at work, anyone can ask whether anything has happened today, confident that the answer will concern some new offensive or report from the European or Pacific fronts.

After sunset, the shared atmosphere becomes especially vivid. Car headlights are screened, shop windows and signs go dark, and air-raid sirens and invasion rumors interrupt the evening. In this altered public space, Norma Jeane discovers a confidence she had not found with her in-laws and sometimes not even with Bucky: she rarely stammers when speaking to kind strangers. Men’s attention reassures her when she is in public, though she declines invitations by smiling and showing her wedding ring. When asked about her husband, she says he is in the service and in Australia; other people supply imagined fates for him, from missing in action to death at Iwo Jima. The war creates a broad, temporary fellowship, but even an ordinary exchange about Bucky can turn into a projection of danger and loss.

The paradox of war and evil

The novel does not let this experience settle into a simple celebration. Its questions about whether evil exists, whether war might be a form of non-evil, or evil a form of non-war, set the moral problem beside Norma Jeane’s material gains. The war is attractive to her because it is everywhere and makes conversation possible; at the same time, the narrative explicitly places that attraction against the dead, the wounded, and the ruined world. What liberates her is not an innocent force. It is a catastrophe whose demands temporarily unsettle the ordinary arrangements of work, gender, marriage, and isolation.

Her private wish that the war might continue forever sharpens the irony. Most strangers want it to end because it has disrupted their lives; Norma Jeane’s factory work, income, and independence depend on the labor shortage it creates. Her freedom is genuine, but its conditions are not hers to control. In that dependence, the war becomes less a solution than an opening: a historical rupture she can use, without being able to make its costs disappear.

After the war: reinvention and recurrence

The end of the war does not end the pattern of upheaval. Norma Jeane later sees Los Angeles, the city of the film industry, remaking itself: trees have been cut along Hollywood Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard, hills near Westwood have been leveled, and new buildings and roads rise amid the noise of cranes, bulldozers, and pneumatic hammers. She remembers Venice Beach, where Norma Jeane spent her childhood, as changed too. Otto’s prediction that capitalism will require new wars, with the enemy changing each time, turns the visible construction into a more unsettling image of renewal: the city invents itself by moving forward, but the forces that drive history may return under another name.

Norma Jeane embraces that urban reinvention as a model for her own. She feels herself to be a child of the city and imagines inventing herself without having to think about the past. The wartime break had shown her that a changed world could make a changed life possible; the postwar city offers that possibility again, while its promised renewal remains noisy, disruptive, and built over what came before. War’s liberation is thus both decisive and incomplete: it gives Norma Jeane a first foothold in independence, but not a guarantee that freedom can be separated from the upheavals that produced it.