Marilyn Monroe Impact on Society: Analytical Essay

The mention of Marilyn Monroe seems almost impossible not to associate with her legendary image of a billowing dress, her platinum blonde hair, and her rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Popular culture has crowned Marilyn Monroe as the definitive example of Hollywood’s sex symbol, embodying the epitome of feminine beauty and vulnerability during the 1950s era. To simplify Monroe into this type of stereotype is to ignore a much more complex and important, cultural legacy. Though Monroe is often remembered by main stream memory as a naive creation of the male dominated studio system, a more complex analysis of her career reveals a woman actively building her own career, pushing back against racial segregation, and redefining femininity, in mid-twentieth-century America. This essay argues that Monroe's legacy is greater than merely the "sex-symbol"; she was an important model in her work as a successful businesswoman, in her contributions to the civil rights movement, and in setting precedent for the discussion of female agency.

The Manufactured Sex Symbol and Its Cultural Context

In order to appreciate the impact of Monroe on society, one must first appreciate the machinery used to build up a public image. Carl Rollyson chronicles the carefully crafted path to stardom that Twentieth Century-Fox generated, employing Monroe's physical charms in suggestive poses through still photography and through strategically provocative characterization. Films like Niagara (1953) used tracking shots to appreciate her body, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) gave her a persona as the 'dumb blonde', someone who was so naïve that he could be fooled, and somehow knew how to manipulate how men feel. Director Henry Hathaway, as Rollyson (2023) notes, was "the first movie director to employ the full resources of the cinema to showcase Monroe as a sex symbol," using wide-angle lenses and tight close-ups to present her sensuality as "a force of nature."

What set Monroe apart from her imitators, Mamie Van Doren, Jayne Mansfield, and many others whose careers mirror hers, however, was the way she made her image look so hard. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as feminist Johanna M. Wagner notes in her examination of the film's long and complicated legacy, the Monroe Lorelei Lee personifies and defies the gold digger role. Wagner writes that Lorelei "is simultaneously clever and clueless, which has a destabilizing effect on the upkeep of conventional heterosexual readings of the text" (Wagner, 2022). This indeterminacy (that is, the failure to conclude definitively whether Monroe's characters were manipulated or victimized) opened up a room for audiences to read empowerment where it did not seem to be present. The long-standing song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," which, as it is first heard in the context of Lorelei's love relationship with Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), turns out to be actually a song about female solidarity and self-preservation.

Beyond the Persona: Monroe as Business Pioneer

Among the most crucial, but under-appreciated, parts of Monroe's legacy are the fact that she was one of the first female performers in Hollywood to assert freedom from the Hollywood studio system's control over her persona. Frustrated by the limited roles Fox gave her and the studio's lack of credence in her artistic abilities, in 1955, Monroe established Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP). Freya Rogers describes this as "an audacious step at the time", as Monroe was one of the first female actors to establish her own production company in a move to gain greater control over her career (Rogers, 2023). The creation of MMP was far from being a celebrity vanity; it was a conscious legal and financial move to carve out independence from a system that saw actors as interchangeable products.

The entrepreneurial action was a very symbolic action. In a time when women in Hollywood were seen to be passive receivers of male direction, both literally and figuratively, Monroe demanded project selection, contract negotiation, and the shaping of her craft. She has attended the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, proving herself a devotee to Method acting, despite being a "dumb blonde" caricature. From her own books, as Rogers lays out, serious and extensive, including Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a book of poetry and literature, one can discern her intellectual interiority, one she was keen to hide behind her gleaming screen eyes (Rogers, 2023). Monroe captured her paradoxical view through the popular slogan: " I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it," for she would not feign maleness to earn respect from men, but rather she would emphasize that femininity among women "can" coexist with men's professional elevation and creative power.

Civil Rights Activism and Friendship Politics

While Marilyn Monroe exerted much of her influence in Hollywood, she was influential in a larger context of civil rights that has often been overlooked by many biographers, yet is proving to be significant. One of such examples is her close friendship with jazz artist Ella Fitzgerald. The early 1950s were plagued by racial discrimination in the entertainment industry, as it made it impossible for Fitzgerald to perform in popular venues because of her color such as Hollywood's Mocambo club, a favorite among whites. However, then, at the peak of her box-office strength, Monroe stepped in herself. She communicated with the club owner and stipulated that she would sit at a front-row table every night if he hired Fitzgerald, which was a type of publicity that the owner could not refuse. (Rogers 2023) With great thankfulness, Fitzgerald remembered that Monroe helped put her on mainstream success through her actions.

This is just one of the many occasions Monroe defended racial equality, though quite subtly. According to Rogers, “Monroe actively campaigned against matters such as racial segregation and reportedly was an advocate of the LGBTQIA+ community, which can be regarded as a rather progressive move during her time” (Rogers, 2023). In an era where being a part of a civil rights movement meant jeopardizing one’s career prospects, more so if one was a sex symbol with broad appeal, Monroe risked all by aligning herself with marginalized individuals. Her openness to forming friendships with LGBTQIA+ people and speaking out against segregation also gives a glimpse of her moral clarity, making it difficult to describe Monroe as a mere victim of patriarchy instead.

Feminist Reappraisals and the Problem of Representation

The feminist reception of Monroe has always been ambivalent, and is in line with the general feminist debate about assessing a female celebrity who succeeds in the mainstream conformity of beauty ideals. As Rollyson points out, while Steinem saw "the obvious need [of Monroe] to please men" as a problem, at the same time, she "was fascinated by Monroe's energy and the shrewdness that she displayed in some of her films" (Rollyson, 2023). This ambivalence is fruitful because Marilyn Monroe does not easily become a symbol of feminism or patriarchy. She was a woman who used her physical appearance to get ahead in her career – and an artist who resented the restrictions such appearance placed.

Judith Mayne's prescient question-"Marilyn Monroe be saved for feminism?"—captures the stakes of this interpretive challenge (Wagner, 2022). Wagner's answer, drawn from her analysis of "Diamonds" adaptations, is affirmative but conditional: empowering representations of Monroe must "consider the nuances and complexities that reflect Monroe's unique Lorelei Lee character, not the simplistic, imagined persona of Monroe, manufactured and projected to and by the public" (2022). In other words, Monroe's feminist weight is not in her being a perfect model, but in the indeterminacy of her image that gives her the ability to be read in so many ways -sometimes even diametrically different ways.

Conclusion

Marilyn Monroe's influence on society cannot be properly summed up as a sex symbol, as the image has become iconic, but nevertheless. Her legacy involves the role that she played as one of the first women filmmakers who dared to challenge the systems established by Hollywood, her bravery in being an advocate of civil rights despite experiencing many difficulties along the way, and her complex relationship with the idea of female empowerment within the film industry. The focus on Monroe as a tragedy as a beautiful star who died due to her ingestion of barbiturates in 1962 fails to see that what should be celebrated is the story of a strong woman who fought all along the way, the oppression imposed by the sexist system, in order to establish herself as an actress. This is a story that still rings true to this day because of issues regarding women's representation in films, celebrity activism, and the male gaze. As Rogers writes, "she was 'so much more than a star'” a woman who remains as complex and illuminates the possibilities and dangers of fame as a woman in modern America.