Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
Anne Carson
New Directions Publishing, 2020
Review by Natalie Podaima
Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, first staged at the Shed Theatre in New York City, is a poetic performance piece that retells Euripides’ Helen, “casting” starlet Marilyn Monroe as star-crossed Helen of Troy. This pairing is impeccable—both Monroe and Helen carry a certain mysticism, are monumental to their respective eras, and are simultaneously revered and tormented for their beauty. Carson alters chronologies and relocates these two figures of overt femininity into a singular time and space. She scatters in various other characters that populate the public consciousness of Ancient Greece and old Hollywood, too—including, for example, the playwright Arthur Miller, who Carson has appointed as Menelaus, King of Sparta. The text is sparse and elusive; book reviewers have suggested that perhaps Carson’s work is more successful on stage, while theatre critics have suggested the exact opposite. Perhaps this feeling of hesitancy that the work evokes—the fear of dipping one’s toe in, of something flying over one’s head—is not only the most palpable response, but part of its ontology.
Each act of the play is punctuated by a brief interlude of cultural observation on the history of war, styled like chapters in a history textbook. These grant moments of grounding for an otherwise disorienting narrative. Carson uses each section to define a word, tracing its etymology from Latin to Greek to English, and fleshing out these concepts using a wide breadth of case studies. In one excerpt, she investigates the idea of likeness, explaining that in order to trick someone into believing that a replica is the real thing, one must alter the optics off the situation, generating an alternative version of the truth, “which then stand[s] alongside the facts like a cloud in the shape of a woman, or a golden Hollywood idol in the place of a mousy pinup girl from LA.” Carson switches between the names Norma Jeane and Marilyn, differentiating between the two facets of one identity while simultaneously shrinking the division between them. Despite her warnings, we fall for the illusion every time.
Revisiting Euripedes’ Helen, you’ll recall that Helen was not even present for the battle of Troy. Instead, she had been co-opted by a phantom version of herself, a perfect likeness: an eidolon, created by Hera—the real Helen spent the entirety of the Trojan War locked away, out of sight. Yet despite her absence, she is still considered the “casus belli,” the reason that the battle of Troy began in the first place. In Carson’s telling, Marilyn too has a simulacrum: “a cloud in the shape of Norma Jeane Baker.” In fact, she writes, the entirety of the Trojan War was nothing but a hoax created by MGM—Marilyn has actually been hiding out in the Chateau Marmont! We realize we’ve been duped—who really is the woman before us? “We fought ten years over a cloud,” Arthur says, bursting into flames when he eventually learns of the switch. He is extinguished with a bathrobe.
These apparitions act as allegory for the ways in which negative public opinion has informed Helen and Marilyn’s lives and legacies. In both cases, these fictitious doublings, created without the individual’s aid or intervention, have tarnished their reputations and dominated how each woman is presented and perceived. Norma Jeane, housewife and factory-worker, is reinvented into the Hollywood starlet: sexy, alluring, and as her career begins to falter, depraved. In truth, her phantom twin is comprised of light, projected three-stories tall on the silver screen—cinema, baby!
This multiplicity of the body suggests a kind of fragmentation (or perhaps, compartmentalization) of the self—in this case, as a result of trauma. But it’s difficult to discuss the overlap in Marilyn and Helen’s stories without mention of the sexual violence enacted by the exploitative men who were too oft-portrayed as saviours. A Greek soldier refers to Norma Jeane as WMD—a slight aimed at her Hollywood “discovery” working at a munitions factory during World War II, as well as her ability to weaponize (i.e. profit) from her beauty. He curses and spits upon her, and Norma Jeane allows him to unload, demonstrating that trait of explicit vulnerability for which she’s been so celebrated. This kind of violence emerges time and time again throughout Helen and Marilyn’s stories, from tarnished reputation to physical assault. Whether in 400 BC Greece or 1950s Hollywood, “War is the context and God is a boy…Truth is, it’s a disaster to be a girl.”
“War creates two categories: those who outlive, and those who don’t. Both carry wounds,” Carson writes. It’s obvious that Helen and Marilyn fall firmly into the former category, and not unscathed. By holding these two women against each other, their multiplicities feel prismatic, their similarities refracting in their proximity. Carson connects Marilyn and Helen and Norma Jeane and all of their multitudes—both real and fabricated—until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.
Natalie Podaima is a writer from Winnipeg, living in Montreal. Her work has appeared in Vallum, The Capilano Review, CV2, and elsewhere.