H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Pcaaca@msu.edu (November, 1995)
Paula Marantz Cohen. ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE LEGACY OF
VICTORIANISM. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1995. $14.95 (paper); $34.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Leonard J. Leff, Oklahoma State University, for
H-Pcaaca.
In _Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema_ (U of
Illinois, 1986), Tom Ryall calls the director a hybrid, "a
marooned figure, too businesslike and commercial to be an
'artist,' yet too 'artistic' to be fitted comfortably into the
British entertainment cinema of the time" (183). Like Ryall,
like others, Paula Marantz Cohen has sensed the anomalies in
the director and his work. Unlike others, she has found an
unusual way to explain them.
Cohen links the subjectivity of the Victorian novel to
that of the cinema--inevitably a clash, since we associate
literature with the female point of view, movies with its
suppression. She then shows how the director of such utterly
contemporary pictures as _Psycho_ and _Notorious_ was in fact
locked in the nineteenth century and caught between two
strains of Victorianism: "the feminine legacy of feeling and
imagination associated with the domestic novel and the
masculine legacy of law and hierarchy--the world of the
schoolyard--associated with dominant institutions and values"
(3).
Cohen, who engages in close analysis of a dozen or so
films, not only visits such familiar sites as _Psycho_ and
_Sabotage_ but goes off trail to explore _Spellbound_, _The
Man Who Knew Too Much_, and (the richest section of the book,
its turning point and the key that unlocks much of _Vertigo_)
_The Wrong Man_. Her readable and intelligent study relies on
no one critical or theoretical methodology; instead, she uses
feminism, psychoanalysis, and especially family systems to
prove (among other things) how the father-daughter
relationship functions in Hitchcock as a romantic ideal.
Mainly, she succeeds: _Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of
Victorianism_ offers a new and bracing approach to an old
problem.
Now, one caveat. "Hitchcock's family of origin laid the
foundation for his identity," Cohen says in the introduction.
"Yet, in the context of his career, of more interest than that
childhood family was the family he 'made': his wife, Alma (nee
Reville), and his daughter, Patricia" (6). Cohen calls the
family "an evolving system," and while her comments on the
family in general have staying power, her analysis of the
Hitchcock menage per se appears forced. Bruno's murder of one
woman and "assault" by another in _Strangers on a Train_,
Cohen states, "can be said to trace the story of Hitchcock's
own journey with respect to his daughter as an autonomous
figure tied to him in essential ways" (84). Likewise, the
role of the secretary in _Psycho_ (Cohen infers) was
"conceived as revenge against Pat for marrying" (75). Since
Cohen has little access to the director called "Hitchcock,"
via personal letters or even memoranda he wrote, she must base
her assertions chiefly on the films, which, ultimately, are
ill constructed to bear the weight of such speculation.
Still, _Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism_
contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the director. It
not only positions Hitchcock in an unusual way but adds to the
cultural history of film.
Oklahoma State University Leonard J. Leff
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