Alfred Hitchcock famously admitted that his formula for good film narrative was “Torture the women” (Fawell 680). He probably didn’t realize how far the implications of this statement might be metaphorically extended into an analysis of his own works. Given the implications of scopophilia as outlined by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and the feminine corollary articulated by Doane in “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” there seems to be no satisfying identity for the female cinema viewer. In “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)” Mulvey suggests that women can only occupy the subjective viewing position as cinema spectators (or within the diegesis of a film) during the occasional identification with the male gaze in a trans-gendered moment of sexual identity slippage. It appears that Hitchcock made an effort to provide at least two women with a semi-subjective perspective in his 1954 thriller Rear Window. Along with the blatantly scopophilic character Jeffries (James Setwart), Lisa (Grace Kelly) and Stella (Thelma Ritter) participate in his rear window voyeurism. Ultimately, however, the women are unable to maintain a subjective viewing position in the narrative of Rear Window and are otherwise coded as mere fodder for marriage, or for viewing pleasure, and little else. As such, Rear Window is a meta-scopophilic cinematic excursion in which the characters on screen act out the very gendered scopophilia that Mulvey and Doane assign to the cinematic viewer. Rear Window constructs femininity in a way that relegates the woman to the exclusively objective position as a signifier in the fulfillment of masculine marital relations or domestic needs, and as an object of the male gaze.
The opening scene of Rear Window establishes the movies two motifs: male scopophilic voyeurism, and an appropriate position for women in marriage and domestic pursuits. The roguish and dashing reporter Jeffries has sustained a leg injury and is convalescent in his apartment home. To pass the time he makes a habit of observing his neighbours in the courtyard and apartments adjacent his rear window. The panning long-shot which opens the film frames a young blonde beauty in the ludicrous posture of putting on her brassiere in front of a large picture window followed by her dance/exercise routine which frequently affords an ample view of her backside as she bends over facing perpendicularly away from the camera. The rest of the visible neighbours establish a fable of the feminine role in appropriate and desirable marriage. The scene pans across at least two married couples in different stages of wedlock – one pair of newlyweds, and a couple apparently longer established; a lonely woman pining for companionship whom Jeffries labels “Miss Lonelyheart” (She actually enacts the rituals of a goodly domestic wife with an imaginary husband in her desperate longing for a male companion.); an upper-class debutante socialite entertaining various suitors whom Jeffries describes as “a queen bee with her pick of the drones”; and another couple that breaches these illusions of marital bliss – a sedentary wife in the throes of “nagging” her husband while he carries out domestic duties (Rear Window). To clarify any ambiguity in the marital myth that might arise from the last couple, the wife, Mrs. Thorwald, is promptly eliminated from the narrative. It is later revealed that she was murdered. With the exception of Mrs. Thorwald and the half-naked blonde beauty (who is later absorbed into the marital domain of normalcy when her husband returns from his military absence), all women in the narrative are coded as appropriately hungry for marriage.
Enter Jeffries’ home-care nurse, Stella, to articulate these motifs. She scoffs at Jeffries’ resistance to marrying a woman that he describes as admittedly “too talented, too beautiful, too perfect” in her upper class lifestyle (Rear Window). Although Jeffries seems to feel that Lisa is above his class station, she is clearly coded as both fashionable and easy too look at. Stella behaves as an expert on marriage while poor Jeffries seems to be clueless, albeit confidently condescending, making comic of poor Stella’s authoritative posture. Stella at verbalizes an attempt to naturalize the marital myth regarding a fantasy past that never existed. She informs Jeffries that “every man is ready for marriage when the right girl comes along,” and laments the loss of the days when a person would simply “see someone, get excited, get married” (Rear Window). Hitchcock presents her nostalgic description as common-sensical, but considering arranged marriages and class-based marriages remained common in Western culture until as late as the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, one wonders to what mythical past she refers.
Enter the heroine, Lisa, to exemplify the woman as both an object for viewing, and as a mere signifier in the male narrative of bachelorhood to marriage. Initially, Jeffries describes Lisa to his nurse-maid as a woman who expects him to marry her. To that point in the film, however, Lisa has not yet been present. Her motivations are narrated entirely by Jeffries’ voice of masculine authority. Lisa is given almost no agency in this regard and she is entirely objectified before she even appears on-screen. When she finally does appear she is framed in a soft-celled lens as a vision of beauty followed by a cut-shot of Jeffries’ eyes opening from his slumber to view her. His gaze is steady. Hers is distracted. Lisa becomes the metonymic microcosm of the scenes depicted in the courtyard – the appropriately subordinate object in the masculine narrative of marriage and the feminine object of the male gaze. Lisa voices her blatant acceptance of this objectified position. When Jeffries expresses concern that Thorwald might see them spying on him, she dismissively states, “I’m not afraid. I’ve been looked at before” (Rear Window). In this statement she characterizes women as in a submissive position in which they should delicately repress their feminine fear of the powerful male gaze, as foolishly naïve to the dangers of the outside world, and specifically as objects for viewing.
Rear Window provides two types of scopophilia for the male viewer. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey defines these types. The first “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image” (Mulvey 62). The male viewer is able to enjoy the objectified beauty of such marriageable women as Lisa and the exercising beauty. The male viewer is also able to identify with the dashing but injured Jeffries as the driving force of the narrative and the central character. Within the diegetic confines of the film, Jeffries too exercises the voyeuristic scopophilia that Mulvey delineates. He enjoys viewing the micro-narratives of marriage and beauty that unfold before his rear window creating a cinematic meta-scopohilia. “In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen” (Mulvey 66, 67). Indeed the cinematic choices of framing and the diegetic performances of the tenants adjacent his rear window, particularly the scantily clad young beauty who regularly dances and performs in front of a ludicrously revealing picture window, clearly indicate a screen-framed performance space. Both the windows he looks into and the window out of which he looks create a framing of what he observes that is identical to that of the frame of the movie screen. Jeffries regularly pulls back from the window and into darkness out of his concern that he too might be seen emphasizing how the frame of his window might limit his field of view. The male viewer of the movie is provided the opportunity to identify with Jeffries in both the narrative of his relationship and as he engages in his own screen-framed voyeurism.
In Rear Window women are excluded from the subjective viewing position. Mulvey summarily excludes women from scopophilic positions when she states that “pleasure has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure” (62). Perhaps anticipating the need to reconcile the female viewer with scopophilic identification, Hitchcock initially locates two female characters in the subjective viewing position in Rear Window. Jeffries coaxes both Lisa and Stella to share in his voyeurism. Specifically Lisa becomes involved in the viewing as part of her ploy to move into Jeffries’ apartment. However, Hitchcock cannot maintain her position as viewer and must move her from the viewing arena (in Jeffries’ apartment) to the viewed stage (the courtyard and the apartment of the killer). Likewise, Stella is moved from her viewing perspective to the stage as well when she assists Lisa in digging up the garden. The subjective viewing position that Hitchcock initially establishes for these women succumbs to the narrative need to reposition them into an objective position of being viewed by Jeffries before they are absorbed back into their appropriate domestic settings.
Hitchcock uses the convention of woman as a mere signifier in the male narrative to highlight a masculine-work/feminine-domestic binary in Rear Window. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Claire Johnston observes that “woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus … [W]oman as woman is largely absent” (Johnston 33). Lisa fulfills this condition in two ways. Firstly, she represents an absence in that the details of her private life are left vague and are absent from the on-screen narrative. She is a socialite debutante but never seen in that environment on her own. She is only represented as an extension of Jeffries’ life – the nagging girlfriend that is pushing him towards fulfilling his masculine role as husband. He makes clear that he wishes to remain the other archetype available to men – dashing in his exciting career and vehemently independent (Johnston 35). Secondly, While Jeffries is debilitated from a leg injury, in the ‘incorrect’ positioning of Jeffries’ purgatory in the domestic space when he cannot fulfill his manly duties of working, he cannot escape effeminized emotional paranoia and curiosity. His male confidante, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) tries to placate him but Lisa continues to fuel his suspicions. In turn, he projects his phallus onto Lisa. She must perform the dangerous ‘work’ that he cannot. It is she who digs up the garden and it is she who infiltrates Thorwald’s apartment. For appropriating Jeffries’ masculine role, she is duly punished. She suffers an assault at the hands of Thorwald’s rage when he catches her in his apartment.
There is a sexual fetishism to Lisa’s movement into the objective viewing space (Mulvey 66, 67). At the beginning of Rear Window, Jeffries has little interest in the marriage that Lisa desperately wants with him. As she engages with him in the viewing of the courtyard, she manages to arouse enough interest in Jeffries that he allows her to spend the night. Johnston again accurately observes that “in order to be accepted into the male universe, the woman must become a man” (Johnston 35). However, Hitchcock does not wish to maintain this identity for Lisa and he safeguards her feminine role by highlighting her sexuality. She unpacks a tiny suitcase that seems to hold only lingerie. Once she moves into the courtyard and becomes the object of Jeffries’ male gaze, her peril allows Jeffries to feel a concern for her of which he was previously unaware. She is no longer the independently capable uptown socialite, but rather the vulnerable damsel in distress. In this ‘corrected’ position for her, as object rather than subject, Jeffries’ sexual interest is activated. The narrative ends with the intimation of her more permanent residence in his apartment – a 1950s allusion to sexual activity. The scopophilic objectification of Lisa is tied into her coding as sexual, marriageable.
Rear Window codes the feminine as an object for viewing or as an object for marrying. Doane states that “films demonstrate that the woman as subject of the gaze is clearly an impossible sign” (Doane 141). When Lisa takes up her position as viewer with Jeffries, she gets herself into trouble. Lisa is allowed to live but she is first assaulted, and then arrested before she is returned safely to Jeffries’ domestic sphere. In the closure of the film, even the micro-narratives valorize the feminine role in the masculinised romantic narrative. “Mrs. Lonelyheart” is ‘rewarded’ with male companionship for her behaviour-appropriate marital longing. The otherwise inexplicably single beautiful exercise-dancer sees the return of her male partner, who was apparently absent for military reasons. To signify feminine complicity with this codification the film ends with a scene that naturalizes Lisa within a male-work/female-marriage binary. Lisa reads an adventure magazine which momentarily locates her sensibilities in the sphere of masculinised activity. It is clear, however, that this magazine is only a ruse to mollify Jeffries against his concerns regarding their marital compatibility. As Jeffries slumbers, she discards the first magazine and takes up a fashion magazine, re-locating herself in a constellation of signifiers that codes women as passively feminine, fashionable, available for viewing, and marriageable. In this way, Hitchcock may have inadvertently tortured the women characters in Rear Window by relegating them to an objective position from which there appears to be no cinematic escape, at least not within the confines of 1950s popular cinema.
Works Cited
De Lauretis, Teresa. “Oedipus Interruptus.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 83-96. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 131-145. Print.
Fawell, John. Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 122-130. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 58-69. Print.
Rich, B. Ruby. “The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 41-47. Print.
Thornham, Sue. “Introduction to Part II.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 53-57. Print.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34. Print.
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