Picturing Minds in Blonde

【Abstract】As a prolific contemporary American writer, Joyce Carol Oates has created many works with comprehensive and inclusive topics covering race, ethnicity, violence, historical events and politic. Her novel Blonde (2000), a fictional depiction of Marilyn Monroes life, demonstrates the ups and downs of Marilyn Monroes inner self. This article aims to examine and decipher the construction of protagonists consciousness variation and redemption, highlighting the process self-construction.

【Key words】Consciousness ; Self-construction

【作者簡介】春迎，西南大學。

Joyce Carol Oates is the most productive and creative American novelist in 20th century American Literature since Faulkner. Oates prolific extends in comprehensive panoramic view of American daily life, having brought out more than fifty novels and the collections of “Balzac-prize-honored” short stories. Oates distinguishes at exploring the different but familiar world in American social life, and she has strived to prove that how people cope with the situation they confronting. Oates works brilliantly illumines the emotional lives of her characters, be they migrant workers or wealthy farmers, suburban executives or lower class urbanites, and evokes an overwhelming sense of Americans which produce our obsessions and frustrations, our dreams of love and power, our struggles to understand the life and ourselves.

Blonde is her longest novel. She explained to Greg Johnson (Carrard, 7) that she wrote on “give life to a lost, lone girl” in a photograph, a seventeen-year-old Norma Jeane Baker.(Kouvoros,6) Oates demonstrate the childhood and adolescent of Norma Jeane who used the studio name Marilyn Monroe, who seemed not to enjoy much better – neither in fact definitely nor in fiction, she was transformed from attractive young woman into blonde bombshell, the most enchanting one in Hollywood. And what Oates finally produced is that “quasi autobiography of Monroe”. While, Monroes rather sad, vulnerable and alternately girlish and sex-pot large screen presence remains vivid not only in playboy coverage but in the culture at large.

Marilyn Monroes life: the mad mother, the orphanage, the foster homes, early films, the husbands, the abuse of the drugs, and suspicious suicidal death. However, what we fail to know and could only imagine is what Joyce Carol Oates creates in her mesmerizing novel: the inner struggle of Norma Jeane or character called Marilyn Monroe. She is the perfect subject for Oates. In Marilyn she has found a character, and the depiction of Marilyns mental life has been brilliantly demonstrated.

Approaching the Blonde as textual constructs, I will address several issues that concern the character Marilyn Monroes consciousness variation. In Transparent Minds, Cohn (Carrard, 34) distinguishes the patterns for unfolding consciousness in fiction: the characters consciousness and the characters mental discourse. Oates is very careful in her employ of psycho-narration. Most of her description of Monroes consciousness is scrupulously referred to her thorough insides. Although Monroe led an independent life in the glistening Hollywood movie world, she has lost herself in this “screen life”, but Monroe herself should persuade her inner self to live forward and being irresistible. Oates has been exploring Marilyns inner life in depth, and sometimes extrapolating upon it, because Monroe herself valued that life and sought to integrate it into her lifes work.

It is sometimes difficult to tell whether Blonde is a fictionalized biography or the creation of a totally new character, but what is certain is that Oates, through rather masterful shifts in psychological approaches, delivers not only her character interior self but also the cultures psychological changes and development. Ultimately, though, Blonde makes the reader extraordinary empathetic toward the character Marilyn Monroe and her longing for acceptance and a home of her own. Maybe unintentionally, it also has the effect of striking the same feeling of us when confronting and solving identical psychological variation in our current life.

References：

[1]Carrard, Philippe. Picturing Minds: Biography and the Representation of Consciousness[M]. Ohio: Ohio State University Press,2010.

[2]Johnson, Greg. Blonde Ambition: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates[M]. Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press,2015.

[3]Kouvaros,George. The Misfits: What Happened Around The Camera[M]. Carlifornia: University of California Press,2002.

[4]Oates, Joyce Carol. Blonde[J]. New York:Harper Perennial, 2000.