Decades after Marilyn Monroe's death, there was a ...

Decades after Marilyn Monroe's death, there was a burst of speculation about what she might have been doing if (and it is a very big if) she had not met a premature end from an overdose in 1962, at the age of 36. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates, whose recent novel B/on& is a fictionalized version of Marilyn's life, thinks she might have left Hollywood for a successful career in the theatre. The feminist commentator Gloria Steinem, who has also written a book about the actress, imagines her living in the country and running an animal sanctuary. I have to say that these imaginary careers, and many other things that have been suggested about Marilyn in recent years, fall into the category of rescue fantasies. The point about her life is that it went hideously and predictably wrong, with self-destruction always a more likely outcome than a revival of her acting career as an interpreter of Chekhov or an early conversion to the animal rights movement.

This is not to denigrate the woman herself, whose story seems to me genuinely tragic. Hers is a dread/ul catalogue of abandonment, abuse and a desperate re-invention of .the self in terms that successfully courted fame and disaster in just about equal measure. Fragile egos often invited other people's projections and Marilyn came to see herself, in her own words, as "some kind of mirror instead of a person". This is half-perceptive, in that what she actually became in her lifetime was a blank screen on which men could project their fantasies and anyone who wants to understand what kind of fantasies they were has only to look at Norman Mailer's creepy biography, with its drooling images of Marilyn as a vulnerable child, incapable of saying no.

What she is unlikely to have anticipated is that, four decades later, thoughtful women would look at her image and see, perversely, a reflection of themselves. Ms. Steinem has been reported as saying that she thinks Marilyn's experiences might have pushed her into embracing the women's movement. But Marilyn was a male-identified woman, a product of a virulently misogynist culture that was erotically stimulated by the pairing of beauty and brains -- but only as long as women did the beauty while men got to direct movies, write plays and run the country. That Marilyn played this role to perfection, then loathed it and rebelled against its limitations, hardly needs saying.

The author implies at the beginning that

A．Marilyn's tragic death was difficult to avoid.

B．Marilyn could have died earlier than 1962.

C．people are no longer interested in how Marilyn died.

D．Marilyn was to be blamed for her death.