Alfred Hitchcock had a complicated relationship to his female characters. While often multilayered active agents, women were rarely the point of view characters for his stories, and the active agency his female characters did possess was often what made them suspicious, dangerous, or criminal. The more control over the events of the story a woman held, the more likely she was to be punished by the narrative. The vilifying framing of female characters is generally correlated to the emotional and sexual availability they have for the male lead. It is not as black and white as that, though. Hitchcock specifically vilifies or criminalizes the behavior not for them being sexually or emotionally available to someone, but for being so for the “wrong” person in the narrative. This results in both narrative victim blaming of victimized women, such as in Blackmail, and queer coding of actively antagonistic women, such as in Rebecca.
Alice’s rape in Blackmail is explicitly framed as being a consequence of going into a mans apartment alone at night. Before entering the building she vocally states that it is a woman’s responsibility to determine if she can trust a man not to hurt her. Displaying that she knows this to be a course of action she should not take, but she does so anyway. When Crewe is attacking her he laughs at her resistance, as though she is ridiculous to have not expected this. However the mistake Alice made came sooner than when she simply entered Crewe’s apartment. It began with Frank Webber.
Alice is not just a promiscuous or flirtatious woman inappropriately engaging with men. She is in a romantic relationship with Frank, a relationship she is shown to actively shirk her responsibilities to. She is cold and distant towards Frank from the beginning, not letting him touch her when they exit the police station for their date. On their date she behaves in a way that could be described as a nuisance, complaining about where they are, not wanting to go with him to the movie theater. Alice actively denies Frank the emotional affection he is presumably “entitled” to as her partner. Instead of going to the movie theater with Frank, Alice chooses to go for a walk with Crewe, giving her emotional affection to the wrong person. Alice’s crimes are not only that she provided affection towards the wrong man, but also denied the right one.
Frank's tireless efforts to protect Alice from any consequences or legal repercussions after she kills Crewe, even when he lacks any context for what occurred, further frames him as a good man. As the man who Alice should have made her affection available for, had she gone to the movie theater with him, nothing bad would have happened to her.
Rebecca demonstrates similar messaging, but here it is more explicitly about sexual as well as emotional availability. The three prominent female characters of this film, the titular Rebecca de Winter, Mrs Danvers, and the Second Mrs. de Winter, all demonstrate varying types of emotional or sexual affection being provided to correct or incorrect parties.
Rebecca is an interesting case of a character. She is dead before the story even begins, the audience never gets to know her, learning about her entirely via second hand accounts from other characters. By the end of the film the overall take away on her was that she was callous, cruel, and manipulative to her last breath, primarily so towards men. Especially her husband. Rebecca is proven to demonstrate no loyalty to any of the men with whom she had affairs, denying any sexual or emotional affection to Maxim, even openly mocking him about it. She also denies any emotional attachment to Jack, the only one of her many lovers the audience actually meets. The closest person she appears to have had any emotional relationship to seems to have maybe been Mrs. Danvers, and even with her it is revealed she lied. What made Rebecca’s actions so criminal and cruel was not that she engaged in affairs with the wrong men, far more than that what made her cruel and evil was her denial of sexual and emotional intimacy with Maxim.
In direct contrast, the Second Mrs. de Winter is introduced to the audience committing an act of selfless kindness, stopping Maxim from killing himself. In all ways Mrs. de Winter is intended to directly contrast Rebecca. Right down to the audience never even learning Mrs. de Winter’s first name, whereas Rebecca’s is the title of the movie. This is fitting as Mrs. de Winter’s character struggle is the desire to live outside of Rebecca’s shadow. However, Mrs. de Winter’s polar opposite existence from Rebecca is ultimately her strength.
Mrs. de Winter is unambiguously framed as an innocent victim of the people around her. She is not vilified or criminalized for her actions, or sexual and romantic relationship with Maxim, because he is the person to whom she is supposed to be devoted. Unlike Rebecca, or Alice in Blackmail, Mrs. de Winter is a shy, quiet woman who commits her whole being to supporting and loving the man she is supposed to. While she is emotionally tormented throughout the whole film, she nevers wavers in her devotion to Maxim, and as a result she ends her story alive and ready to start a new life with Maxim. This is similar to the character of Lisa Fremont in Rear Window who’s character journey is to learn that she truly does want to settle down and live a quiet life with Jeff.
The final character to demonstrate this point with is Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers is almost inhuman in how terrifying she is framed. Crazed in her passionate love for and devotion to Rebecca, she sets fire to the entire house upon discovering she had been lied to. Mrs. Danvers fails to provide any form of emotional support to either Mrs. de Winter, and by extension to Maxim. Pining for Rebecca the entire film. Mrs. Danvers’ extremely passionate devotion to Rebecca is easily read as queer coding, from the way she delicately handles Rebecca’s langieri and reminisces of brushing her hair at night, to the noticeable lack of Mr. Danvers. This queerness drives her to be devoted to Rebecca, and never to the Second Mrs. de Winter, and certainly not to Maxim.
The way Hitchcock frames the criminality of women in these films is dependent on whether they express emotional and sexual devotion to the correct male lead, rather than to the “wrong” person. A woman’s willingness to devote herself to the man the narrative believes she should is the barometer by which their criminality is determined. As demonstrated by the treatment of characters like Alice, Rebecca, Lisa, Mrs. de Winter, and Mrs. Danvers.
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