Washington, D.C. -- Elvis is everywhere, and Marilyn is often with him.
At least that’s how it seemed to the scholars who gathered at Georgetown University last month for a conference called “Icons of Popular Culture I: Elvis and Marilyn.” The conference was designed to explore some of the ways in which images of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe function in American culture.
The jumping-off point was a shared belief that both Elvis and Marilyn are so closely identified with American culture that the way they are represented speaks directly of America itself. In the papers presented, purported sightings of Elvis say something about American religion, Elvis’s quivering lip foreshadows sensitive 70’s masculinity, and the view of Marilyn as a mindless sex symbol reflects limits placed on American women.
“I was doing research on Virginia Woolf, and I kept running into these comparisons between Virginia Woolf and Marilyn Monroe,” said Brenda Silver, professor of English at Dartmouth College. “It was so bizarre that I thought, I have to write about this.”
Ms. Silver tied her reflections together in a paper, “Who’s Afraid of Marilyn Monroe?” in which she discussed each woman in terms of the mind/body dichotomy, with brainy Virginia balancing out sexy Marilyn.
The conference attracted artists, curators, and scholars from across the humanities, many of whom, like Ms. Silver, were engaged in other projects when the hand of Elvis or Marilyn reached down and tapped them on the shoulder. According to the coordinators of the conference, many more closet Elvis and Marilyn scholars are out there.
Even after the deadline for submissions, conference organizers continued to receive papers, brought as news of the meeting traveled on the academic grapevine. And books and articles on Elvis and Marilyn seem to appear every month.
EducArt Projects, a non-profit group dedicated to interdisciplinary education through the visual arts, coordinated the conference to accompany an exhibition, “2 X Immortal: Elvis and Marilyn,” which will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston later this year. The conference had to be almost entirely self-supporting, since the only grant the meeting received was $5,000 from the Elvis Presley Memorial Foundation, an organization that works to keep the memory of the King alive.
A theme running through the papers presented at the conference was the opinion that such a conference would not have been possible until very recently.
“If you had predicted that we would be sitting here five years ago, people would have laughed,” said Lucinda Ebersole, an independent scholar and co-editor of Mondo Elvis (St. Martin’s Press, 1994) and the forthcoming Mondo Marilyn. Both are collections of short literary works featuring the two icons.
But to say Elvis and Marilyn scholarship is now widely accepted is to overstate the case. When Diane Apostolos-Capadonna, the conference chair, sent out notices announcing a call for papers, several academic journals called to verify that the meeting was in fact an academic conference.
While popular-culture studies such as the ones presented at Georgetown are gaining more acceptance for blurring the line between highbrow and lowbrow, many scholars seem fearful of sliding into real low culture. “There is always the fear when you are talking of Elvis or Marilyn, who will you be talking to? Is it groupies?” says Ms. Apostolos-Capadonna, a lecturer in liberal studies at Georgetown.
At the conference, one of the ways in which fear manifested itself was in the distinction made again and again between the conference-goer and the “middle-aged woman with a beehive,” who, according to Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, was the typical Graceland tourist.
One attendee, who did not deliver a paper but who had written about Elvis fans for her dissertation, finally raised her hand during a question-and-answer period to remind the speaker that there was no need to scorn the Elvis fan to prove that one’s work was legitimate and worthwhile.
The distinction between fan and scholar was made despite the fact that many of those presenting papers had themselves visited Graceland -- sometimes many times -- and spoke glowingly of their early memories of Elvis and Marilyn. One scholar introduced his paper by reading a letter he had written to Time magazine in 1956 when he was 17 years old, defending the music of “this cat,” Elvis Presley.
Mr. Vikan believes the “nuanced and self-protected” nature of most scholarship is “all the more reason to tie it to something real” -- things people encounter in their everyday lives. In his case, that means Elvis. Mr. Vikan presented a paper, “Graceland as Locus Sanctus,” which compared the visitors to Graceland with medieval pilgrims.
Among several parallels, Mr. Vikan noted that religious pilgrims had traveled to holy sites on holy days, while fans travel to Graceland on the anniversary of Elvis’s death; pilgrims stopped at other holy shrines, while fans visit many sites in Elvis’s life; and pilgrims collected holy relics, while fans pick up anything tangentially related to Elvis.
Ms. Ebersole believes that interdisciplinary studies of popular culture will continue to gain legitimacy as a new generation begins to fill academic posts.
“You are in some ways looking at a paradigm shift. You’re looking at a new generation that doesn’t see a difference between high and low culture,” says Ms. Ebersole, who works outside academe as a writer, film maker, and anthologist.
Eric Lott, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, garnered wide praise last year for his book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press), which used antebellum minstrel shows to examine racial attitudes of the time. These days, Mr. Lott has chosen another vehicle to study race and class: Elvis impersonators.
Mr. Lott, who didn’t attend the Georgetown conference, has kept the latest theme of his research a little quieter than usual. While he acknowledges that “people schooled in Victorian poetry look askant at this sort of work,” he says his main reason for lying low has not been embarrassment but his growing feeling that Elvis’s appropriation of black music for a white audience makes any study of the King “politically retrograde work.”
Paige Baty, a professor of political science at Williams College, is spending this year at Harvard University as a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. As part of her application, she presented a section of her forthcoming book, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (University of California Press), in which she argues that the Marilyn icon is “a site upon which American political culture is written and exchanged.”
“Her story has been made to tell the story of America,” Ms. Baty says. Thus, Marilyn exists as an icon simultaneously representing the female victim, the sex goddess, the consumer, the object consumed, the innocence of the 1960’s, the corruption of those same years -- all depending on one’s ideology.
Asked whether she faced any skepticism about the validity of her research, she confirms that she did, but then qualifies that statement.
“They couldn’t have been that skeptical, though,” she observes. “They gave me the job.”