Beyond the Blonde: The Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock

Abstract

Beyond the Blonde: The Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock Elisabeth Karlin (bio) Iris Henderson, about to embark on a train that will take her straight to a featureless fiancé, sighs with resignation, “I’ve been everywhere, I’ve done everything . . . what is left for me but marriage?” (fig. 1). She then gets clunked on the head, wakes up, and in the course of The Lady Vanishes (1938), disrupts the lives of her fellow passengers, exposes some Nazis, saves a life, and possibly the world. Along the way, she discovers that love and marriage need not be a dead-end but instead, another part of the great adventure. Iris is not alone. The films of Alfred Hitchcock are abounding with some of the most active and dynamic female characters to be found in twentieth-century cinema. The ladies don’t vanish in Hitchcock: they are front and center, making trouble and making things right. Of course, other directors have shown women as dimensional figures of action but none have accomplished it as consistently, as naturally, or as deeply as Hitchcock. To travel through the oeuvre is to wonder how this director who kept his leading ladies (and their supporting sisters) vital and bursting with character, could be so carelessly accused of misogyny. A Hitchcock woman is never just a wife, just a girlfriend, just a mother, and certainly, never just a blonde. The trope of the “Hitchcock Blonde” has devolved into something now defined by popular culture as an icy icon, often duplicitous and shrouded in mystery, guarding her sexuality like classified information. She is remote and lacquered. Flaxen-haired and frigid. Without soul or humor. [End Page 32] And nowhere in Hitchcock does she actually exist in that way. Yet, this moribund concept is still the first stop, and sadly often the only stop, when characterizing Hitchcock heroines. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Largely responsible for perpetrating this myth of the Hitchcock Blonde, is Hitchcock himself. In his conversations with Francois Truffaut he said: “You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.”1 He goes on to speak of English and Nordic women as more sexually interesting than Latin, Italian, and French women. He does contradict his own dictum in The Paradine Case (1947), where Ann Todd’s demure English rose pales against the powerful allure of Italian Alida Valli. But there is no denying he had a type, as exemplified by his fascination with Grace Kelly, and later, Tippi Hedren. At the same time, his words to Truffaut not only disregard the vast majority of his heroines but reduce the Hitchcock woman to a sexual sort. And for whatever went on in Hitchcock’s head (none of us can have any idea of that) I believe we can only judge his attitudes toward women by his work. That is what I choose to do. [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Though blondes appeared in his films from the beginning—in The Lodger (1927) “golden curls” are the designated trait for the film’s victims—one might say that the definitive image of the Hitchcock Blonde, as we have come to know her, was inaugurated with Madeleine Carroll’s Pamela in The 39 Steps (1935) (fig. 2). Pamela is one of among several women who have a bearing on a plot triggered by the murder of a female spy, sending protagonist Richard Hannay off on one of Hitchcock’s exculpatory tours where the “wrong man” meets the right woman en route to proving his innocence. There is no denying that Pamela meets all of the superficial traits of that overused epithet, but her elegant fair beauty is hardly her defining characteristic, for she is also smart and forthright. “I like your pluck” Hannay tells her. What Carroll is really introducing is not the Hitchcock Blonde but the dynamic Hitchcock woman. Carroll comes back, just as plucky in Secret Agent (1936), as Elsa Carrington, a witty and eager spy who wanted “to do something worthwhile.” Already, we can see in the...