The figure of the daydreamer is a central component of Freud’s 1909 essay Family Romances: This may indeed be Hitchcock’s family romance – in the Freudian sense, of course. The opening scenes of Shadow of a Doubt lay out the coordinates of a family plot that plays itself out in subsequent Hitchcock films. Cohen examines the significant father-daughter relationship which is a structuring device here, as it would be in Stage Fright (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951) in which Patricia Hitchcock would play supporting roles. Joe is more or less unimportant in Young Charlie’s emotional life and is entirely sidelined by Uncle Charlie, who replaces him in every sense and considers his niece the family figurehead. While she doesn’t engage in a dissection of the Hitchcock dynamic, she claimsīecause Hitchcock’s family evolved while his career as a filmmaker evolved, he was positioned to give cinematic expression to tensions inherent in the conventional life cycle of the nuclear family. It has been the subject of many Freudian and Oedipal readings in the context of its predecessor, Rebecca and other paranoid women’s films of the era.Ĭohen finds that the film relates to Hitchcock’s exploration of a Victorian family ideal and believes that the director considered himself a Victorian bourgeois (Cohen, 1995: 68). He claims that, “to read the film as a feminist film requires the recognition that in destroying her uncle, Charlie denies the validity of bother her earlier-held patriarchal visions: man as knightly rescue from family oppression and man as satanic destroyer of transgressing women” (Hemmeter: 228). A notable exception is Thomas Hemmeter, who reads Shadow of a Doubt “as a critique of the patriarchal ideology it represents” (Hemmeter: 221).

The Hitchcock oeuvre has regularly been debated as the site of patriarchal ideology. The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Part Two, Gone Girlīy Elaine Lennon Volume 27, Issue 1-2 / February 2023 78 minutes (19414 words)

Shadow of a doubt 1943 fan art