Pandora in Blue Jeans
Grace Metalious. Photo: Larry Smith.
The photograph captioned “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is one of the most widely circulated portraits of a woman in history. Like most people, I first saw it on the back of a pulpy paperback book. A black-and-white fifties author photo that seems like a snapshot, it is a side view of a solidly built young woman in a prehipster buffalo plaid shirt and men’s jeans, sitting at a table with a typewriter on it in what looks like a kitchen. She’s not wearing makeup, her hair is pulled back in a lumpy ponytail, and she’s leaning forward with her hands folded anxiously or pensively in front of her face, so we can’t really see what she looks like. There’s a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray next to her typewriter and a messy stack of papers behind it. She is staring at what she’s writing, and she seems not to know or care that the photographer is there.
Some author photos develop a life of their own, and those are often the ones that bend a gender or pose a challenge. Perhaps the first of these was the engraved. The book didn’t disclose Whitman’s name on the title page, but it included his full-page frontispiece portrait as a personal welcome, his shirt unbuttoned and his undershirt showing, a hand on his hip, a hand in his pocket, his gaze direct, his head cocked. “I look so damned flamboyant,” he later said about this image, “as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!” Flamboyant, yes, without a doubt, but the direction of the defiance is harder to read. Is he really saying to hell with us, or is he defying us to look away? Does he want his lightning bolt to fatally pierce us, or does he just want to electrify us?
