Rape versus Mans/laughter: Hitchcock's Blackmail and Feminist Interpretation

Abstract

In film studies the work of Alfred Hitchcock has often been considered misogynist, and feminist critics have assumed that the female spectator can enjoy the films only by adopting the position of a masochist or the perspective of a man. An analysis of Blackmail, however, reveals that women's relation to the text is much more complicated than has generally been supposed. The film is constructed as an elaborate joke on the heroine, who, as in the Freudian paradigm, is ultimately transformed into an object between two male subjects; nevertheless, because much of the film stresses her subjectivity, a reading that insists on woman's point of view and experience becomes possible. This reading, which activates the word rape—a term seldom used in analytical discussions of the film's central episode—has serious implications for feminist critics in their struggle for interpretive truth.