Unveiling Maternal Desires Hitchcock And American Domesticity

Abstract

Abstract Hoover’s comments suggest the importance of the mother as a figure who, in keeping the household going, maintains both the family and a patriotic image of America. In this paper I analyze the way the mother is the vehicle for but also resists such an idyllic image of the domestic sphere in two Hitchcock films, one made in the era of Hoover’s comments, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the other in the postwar period, the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). These two films differ from the rest of the Hitchcock canon because in them the mother is represented not critically, as in films like Psycho, Notorious, The Birds, and even North by Northwest, but positively. Ronnie Scheib’s lyrical description of Emma Newton (Patricia Collinge), the mother in Shadow of a Doubt, could equally well be applied to Jo McKenna (Doris Day), the mother in The Man Who Knew Too Much, “She seems to move through a flow of energy which is both feeling and action, identity and instinct, obeying an inner necessity of domestic security.”