Marilyn Monroe in Three Girls

      The time period of this short story was really interesting to me in conjunction with Marilyn Monroe's appearance in the bookstore. When we think of celebrities nowadays it is much harder for them to go out and about in urban areas without some sort of security. I constantly find trending pictures on social media of celebrities and influencers of every list that paparazzi has taken and which seems to be invading their privacy on a normal day. This is concerning for multiple reasons but it satisfied me to read that the two girls in the store were not thinking of the internet when approached with a hidden Marilyn Monroe, their reverence for her as a celebrity seemed respectful and wholesome as compared to certain situations that happen today. I appreciated the detailed description of her ungendered and masking outfit for multiple reasons. One of them was the sense of knowing that she was the same as the girls in the bookstores and that there were many parallels in their personhood as women who enjoyed reading and absorbing information.

   

      In a broader sense and connecting to my own life, I liked the theme that a woman is not one thing or the other. I don't know much about her but I would hope that Marilyn loved her career, her beauty, and her existence as an icon, the short story implied that that was not nearly all of her identity and all the women in the story were clearly multi-dimensional. I myself am usually perceived as a modest girl by western society and maybe a little rebellious by my cultural and religious community- which in a strange way is my own form of having many dimensions. The presence of a male gaze, but no speaking male characters is also something that I feel connected to with all of the characters. For me, it feels as though men themselves and women with their internalized male gaze see me as trying to protect myself with hijab, or that I'm always on the defensive and have to adhere to physical gender roles. That assumption is something that bothers me constantly, I'm almost in a position of reinforcing those ideas when I assure people I am not a subject of any man- I have to address the male gaze in order to deny it. After reading Three Girls, I so badly wanted to be in the narrator's shoes, eagerly looking through books only to be confronted with Marilyn Monroe herself.