Thesis (M.A.)--University of Manitoba, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol). Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to a perceived intimacy between the star and her fans. Monroe’s persona developed through her roles in films about marriage. We’re Not Married (1952) and Niagara (1953) expose the pitfalls of marriage. In response to fan criticism of Monroe’s aggressive persona in these films, however, Darryl F. Zanuck, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), consciously distanced Monroe both from her aggressive persona and her implicit criticism of marriage. Monroe’s films, in particular, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like it Hot (1959), also revealed the tensions inherent in postwar understandings of female sexuality. Monroe’s role in her final completed film, The Misfits (1960), both acknowledges and resists her status as a symbol. This film unites Monroe’s screen persona and off-screen life in resistance to conventional values: her character embraces divorce, lives with a man who is not her husband, and openly criticizes men who betray trust. This film most extensively interweaves Monroe as an icon, an index, and a symbol. In so doing, it reveals how Monroe embodied the contradictions inherent in both postwar culture and Hollywood stardom.

Pin-up images have played an important role in American culture, in both their illustrated and photographic configurations. The pin-up is viewed as a significant representational cultural artifact of idealistic and aspirational femininity and of consumerism and material wealth, especially reflective of the mid-twentieth century period in America spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. These images not only reflect great shifts in social mores and women’s social status, but also affected changes in both areas in turn. Furthermore, pin-up images internationally circulated in magazines, advertising and promotional material, contributed to the manner in which America was idealized in Europe and beyond. Crucially, they influenced how an eroticized and glamorous, yet unrealistic, example of femininity came to be generalized as a desirous model of femininity. In recent years there has been vital, though limited, scholarly research into the cultural and social impact of pin-up imagery, to which this thesis adds to. This thesis takes a genealogical approach, charting the development of popular female-centric “pin-up” imagery in America since the 1860s and up to the 1960s, and its resurgence since the 1980s onwards. In doing so this thesis aims to provide a social, political and cultural context to the emergence of a specific archetypal sexualized femininity, with the aim of challenging the tendency to dismiss sexualized imagery as “anti-feminist” or as trivial. Toward that end, I examine the complexity of intentions behind the production of “pin-up” images. In taking this revisionist approach I am better able to conclusively analyze the reasons for the resurgence and reappropriation of pin-up imagery in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century popular culture, and consider what the gendered cultural implications may be.