Case Study . . . Marilyn Monroe
Every time I see Marilyn Monroe’s signature, I fall in love with her a little bit more. Her exuberance, passion, warmth and intelligence come shining through.
It also breaks my heart.
But first, what can you tell from a signature and why bother to analyze it?
In graphology, a signature represents your public self-image, meaning the social persona that you would like others to see and what you would like them to think of you. It contains both conscious and unconscious movements and shows a graphologist what you want to portray in public, what you want others to think of you and some of your underlying emotions.
Our signature is used to put our best foot forward. We sign it thousands of times in our lives. It is our calling card and when we use it, it commits us to legal endeavours, debts, contracts and messages.
It represents YOU, long after you have left the building.
So what did Marilyn Monroe want us to think of her? What did she include in her calling card?
The most striking element of her signature is the roomy, expansiveness of it. She wants us know that she is no shrinking violet and has a healthy self-confidence, publicly at least. Her large capital “M”s reflect a desire to achieve, to be seen and appreciated and the flow of the writing shows someone who moves quickly when inspired to do so.
Another distinctive feature of Marilyn’s capital “M”s is what is referred to as “worry loops”. We see the worry loops in abundance on the base of the “M”s where instead of tracing back over the original downward stroke, she makes a loop to the left. As the name indicates, this feature in handwriting indicates a person who worries and the more they appear, the more frequently they worry. So we can see that Marilyn was prone to worry.
Her writing is also markedly slanting to the right, which indicates someone who let’s their heart rule their head and is looking for connection to others. She publicly wanted to portray herself as a warm and passionate individual while letting us know she would not have done well with self-isolation.
We can also tell that she sets high goals for herself and challenges herself to reach them, and reach them she will even if it means pushing herself to exhaustion.
The part of Marilyn Monroe’s signature that breaks my heart, is her final “e”.
Notice how it pulls away from the rest of the letters and ends below the base line. This part of her signature is a subconscious movement that reveals to us that she is feeling distant or dissatisfied, weighed down with feelings of hopelessness. If you isolate the final “e” and look at it out of context, it looks more like an “x”. This trait in signatures reflects someone who is unhappy and does not want to fight back any more, they just want to give up.
Her private struggles were subconsciously reflected in her public signature.
Please note, this is not a complete handwriting analysis of Marilyn Monroe. To do that we would include her normal, private handwriting because her real personality would be revealed through her private handwriting.
Metaphorically speaking, by analyzing her signature only we are only looking at the cover of a book and forming an impression of whether the book. If we were to analyze her private handwriting, we would be reading the book.
