‘Is it for this you widen your eye rings?’ Looking, Overlooking and Cold War Paranoia: the art of the voyeur in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the films of Alfred Hitchcock

Abstract

This exploration of the shared culture of suspicion of Cold War America centres on the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. A cinema enthusiast, American poet Sylvia Plath was invested in the dominant cultural conceit of domestic surveillance. Her late poems, the posthumous Ariel collection (1964), share much in common with Hitchcock’s films, Suspicion, Rear Window and Marnie—films in which the culturally rarefied experience of the home life is open to scrutiny—and found lacking. Both Plath and Hitchcock employ the figure of the voyeur whose penetrating angles unsettle the stability of the Ladies’ Home Journal view of domesticity. For Plath and Hitchcock domestic relations often descend into something more often resembling a Cold War tribunal: with suspicion leading the enquiry.