Architecture and Feminism: Woolf’s A room of one’s own, and Hitchcocks’s Vertigo

© Jason Nolan, 2002

A paper which intends to combine themes from the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Virginia Woolf cannot begin without some explanation. While Hitchcock, a male film maker, made mass-appeal thrillers for the post-war American market and Woolf, a feminist writer involved with the pre-World War Two intellectual circle of the elitist-humanist Bloomsbury group; both, through their interest in the individual mind, explored the relationships between the sexes. Hitchcock's works center on male heros and often explore the patriarchal mechanisms of society which the hero can no longer control. Woolf, on the other hand, focuses on the role of the female struggling to establish an identity as an artist and an individual independent of patriarchal control. They both recognized the male power complex as the impetus for the development of Western culture and, in the twentieth century, its hindrance.

In Hitchcock's Vertigo and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, architecture is made the symbol of male dominance and power playing a central part in the thematic development of both works. Hitchcock and Woolf confront the ideas of patriarchy, represented by architecture in these works, and the impact of male dominated society on the creative or self-determining mechanisms of the female characters. Neither forgets the effect that the loss of patriarchal control has on the male ego. Hitchcock extends the portrayal of the dominating influence of patriarchy to fashion, particularly the design of brassiére, while Woolf considers the role which food plays in exposing the power-differential between the sexes.

Architecture is a part of society the roots of which extend back beyond the foundations of western culture itself. It is a product human life and its various manifestations are considered as indications of a cultures growth and development. Architecture is the memorial which a culture builds for itself, a symbol of man's triumph over the forces of entropy and nature. It contains in it a simple oversight which renders half of the human race marginal by exclusion. Women never designed, built or commissioned these monuments of cultural achievement. In the few instances where she was in a position of responsibility, such as being a queen, there is no indication that any architectural works were constructed according to any feminine cultural or aesthetic considerations. No, the history of architecture is a purely male one. And as architecture is a symbol of the male conquest over nature--a female symbol in western culture--architecture is, for mankind, a symbol of the domination of the male over the female. This is the state of architecture and its relation to the sexes that is present at the beginning of the twentieth century and it is part of the crisis of culture which is confronted by both Woolf and Hitchcock.

In A Room of One's Own, it is clear from the title that Woolf intends to discuss at least some aspect of physical structures and their relation to women. She starts to develop her theme of architecture's relationship to women by noting its existence in the place of nature: Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rooted.... Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stand on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rooted (Woolf 9-10).

Woolf makes clear the concept that architecture is something imposed upon nature. These structures are descriptive of the university which is the world of immediate relevance to her apparent audience. She refers to bridges, the enclosed lawns of the university colleges, refectories, chapels and libraries including all of the institutions created by men in her observation. Woolf also makes the importance of the patriarchal endowment of these institutions explicit:

...I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind the plain china of which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes? (Woolf 19).

Woolf allies the women's college, Fernham, with natural elements through its "gallant" plainness and wildness. I think, remembering the oppressive atmosphere of the Victorian era, that a queen does not represent a positive female influence on those male institutions. A queen is, more likely, a symbol of female power co-opted by male interests in a manner similar to the medieval cult of chivalry which had been revived in nineteenth century England. Woolf ties the imposition of male will over nature in the form of these architectural edifices with their domination over women:

\&...the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses (Woolf 10).

Her key concepts at this point are that male control over women and nature are identical in kind, and that this control is manifest in the types of structures that they build to house their institutions:

Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself (Woolf 35).

Hitchcock also makes use of architecture as a symbol of male dominance over nature and women, or rather, that dominance in crisis. The film Vertigo opens with a view of a city. In this scene,

...the camers moves back, the focus deepens, to reveal a city spread out beneath the night: suggestions of clinging and falling set against a great wilderness of rooftops. ...[and] we are made aware that the Vertigo of the title is to be more than a literal fear of heights (Woods 73).

This architecture has a definite role in setting the theme for the text. It is imposing and dangerous; always a barrier. The thematic development of the text centers around imposing architectural barriers, monuments, and backdrops. Scottie's first appearance in the film ends with him hanging from one of these rooftops, `Madeleine' jumps off part of the San Francisco bridge in to the Bay, and the real Madeleine is pushed off a bell tower from which Judy later falls. The building from which Scottie is suspended at the end of the first scene, the shipbuilding yards behind Elster's office, the opulent restaurant called Ernie's, the apartment in which the Elster's live, the Golden Gate Bridge, the art gallery, the graveyard in the Mission Delores, along with the bell tower, all command our attention. They are the dominant factors in the mis-en-scene which obstruct the characters and control the narrative development.

The main supporting characters in the text are the arch, corridor and tower which comment on the actions of the main characters:

Think seriously about Vertigo... and you will find themes of profound and universal significance; think again, and you will find these themes expressed in the form and style of the film as much as in any extractable "content" (Wood 19).

The apartments of Scottie, Midge, Judy and `Madeleine' all indicate a specific relation between the character and the narrative of the text. Scottie's is full of antiques implying an unconscious connection to the past; Midge's is modern; Judy's hotel room is without any real character; `Madeleine's' room in the hotel is dark, mysterious and also evokes memories of the past. Vertigo itself, as a psychological condition, is tied also to the architectural themes of the text:

The "Vertigo" of the title... expands from one of man's fear of heights into a metaphysical principle, and the metaphysic of the film is "peculiarly terrifying".... The world--human life, relationships, individual identity--becomes a quicksand, unstable, constantly shifting, into which we may sink at any step in any direction, illusion and reality constantly ambiguous, even interchangeable (Wood 90-91).

Scottie's condition is linked to both physical and symbolic manifestations of architecture. Each character and their accompanying physical surroundings has a relationship to the crisis of Scottie's deeper `metaphysical Vertigo.' The diverse presentation of female characters, as indicated in part by their surroundings, forms the basic pattern for Scottie's confusion. A stable relationship between Scottie and one of the female characters does not develop because of this Vertigo manifest in the diversity of female types. There is a strong sense of uncertainty as to Scottie's ability to play the dominant male role. This too is part of his Vertigo, the crisis of the modern male.

It is not startling to see that artists as diverse as Hitchcock and Woolf used architecture as the symbol of male dominance in western culture, nor that it becomes the metaphor for power and freedom. What is unnerving, is that they both use these conclusions to comment on the crisis of modern culture. The point of crisis is the fact that the power structure which is manifest in architecture is crumbling and as we see Woolf presenting women's attempt to gain a foot hold amid this upheaval, Hitchcock documents man stumbling and crashing headlong into the future.

Woolf recounts a fictional afternoon at Oxford during which she describes the doors which are closed to women's bodies and minds:

\&...while in the midst of excited contemplation, "It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and eventing shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me... (Woolf 6).

Males not only physically oppose the free movement of females, but this restriction impacts on the intellectual processes or development of women:

The only charge I could bring... was that in protection of their turf, which had been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish [idea] into hiding. ...but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction... (Woolf 7).

The impediments even extend so far as to place limits on a woman's access to spiritual institution, forcing her to remain a stranger to all aspects of culture which are prized by men:

The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. ...I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, of a letter of introduction from the Dean. But The outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside (Woolf 8).

The power of the males is complete. They can bar or control access to the worlds of ideas and learning. Woolf cannot help but lament the impact of this exclusion on the creative and intellectual development of her own sex:

...and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I though at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society (Woolf 24).

The power which allowed men the freedom and leisure to construct their architectural monuments to culture has a cost, but according to Woolf, the prosperity of males results in the poverty of the other sex. Women were just beginning to correct this imbalance at that time. Women's creative power had previously been spent in support of the male ego, nurturing his need to dominate and control:

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle (Woolf 35).

And the servitude of women is indicated by her sphere of influence, the home, and her architectural realm--the sitting-room:

...the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them... If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,--"women never have an half hour... that they can call their own"--she was always interrupted (Woolf 66).

According to Woolf, despite their constant harassment by the patriarchy from time immemorial, the `sitting-room,' small and undramatic as it is has been imbued by women with all the creative power of her kind. Their creative power distinct, almost alien from that of the ruling sex, has its own aesthetic and sensibility:

...one may feel ...the nature of this intricacy and the power of this highly developed creative faculty among women. One goes into the room--but the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a women could say what happens when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are clam or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horse hair of soft as feathers--one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of infinity to fly in one's face. How should it be otherwise? For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortars that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pitties if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place (Woolf 87-88).

Woolf's contends that the creativity present in females is constrained, contained and subverted to male interests. There is no room for women to develop her own creative style. The patriarchy demands conformity and accepts women's creativity only in the form of a trained monkey, a curiosity, to be awarded for her ingenuity but not to be taken seriously. Woolf laments the fate of creative women of the past, known and unknown, who have been twisted and destroyed by male indifference or open hostility towards their creative gifts. She feels that those gifts are not lost, for they potentially exist in each generation, but even now they are most often ignored while women carry out their roles appointed by men:

Shakespeare had a sister... She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried opposite the Elephant and Castle. ...[but] She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. ...if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves... (Woolf 113).

The female voice is just beginning to be heard.

At Fernham, its simple red brick construction indicates a departure from the male norm. It is the same with the college gardens which are described in opposition to the manicured lawns of the other colleges:

The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots (Woolf 16).

Just as the sitting room, the historical architectural center of female creativity, according to Woolf, is radically different from the colleges, chapel, libraries, and laboratories she has been describing as male architectural edifices, Fernham is also different. Woolf makes no attempt to pull down the male architecture which she admires. She is leading her argument up to a justification of the necessity of a room of one's own as the architectural manifestation of the creative female mind.

Hitchcock, on the other hand, is interested in the impact which the crisis of modernity has on the male and the influence of this impact on the female. The entire film consists of depicting the effect upon females of the male's struggle to gain some level of internal equilibrium in the metaphysically unstable modern world:

...the thematic organisation of the film can be seen in the transition from the smart modernity of Midge's apartment to the discussion about the past in Elster's office. Behind Elster we see shipbuilding in progress, ...carrying a suggestion of escape. The walls are covered with prints of San Francisco in the "old days": Scottie and Elster examine one as they talk. Elster bears a clear thematic relationship to Scottie... he has a nostalgia for the past, where a man had "freedom" and "power"... We shall see how important for Scottie are a nostalgia for the past and a desire for "freedom" and "power" (Wood 76-77).

This desire for power colours the treatment of women in most of Hitchcock's films. In Rear Window for example the hero's gaze,

gives him a sense of power over those he watches, but without any accompanying responsibility.... He watches the occupants of the flats opposite as a means to escape from his problems... Jefferies regards Lisa as an encumbrance, and their relationship as a threat to his freedom, to his irresponsibility... We watch a woman become a mannequin, or even a magazine illustration: it is all Jefferies can accept. She turns herself into a public performance, a spectacle to be watched from the other side of the footlights (Wood 64-66).

This desire for power and freedom is explicitly stated by Elster, who goes so far as to murder his wife to achieve it. This act represents the ultimate form of oppression, one which is echoed by Scottie who first psychologically obliterates and then, depending on the interpretation, murders--causes the suicide--participates in the accident--which kills Judy.

The archetype of oppression in Vertigo is found in the San Francisco of the nineteenth century. The story of Carlotte Valdez, recounted by the bookseller, is about a poor girl from a mission settlement who is found dancing in a tavern. She becomes the mistress of a `rich and powerful' man who built a great house for her and also made her pregnant. When the man looses interest in the relationship, he takes the child, abandoning Carlotte to loneliness and later madness and suicide. Those were the days of male power and freedom for which Elster longs and which Scottie becomes involved with through his obsession with recreating Madeleine, who was actually just a construct of Elster's conception of who his wife actually was.

Scottie's Vertigo is tied to the ideas of power and freedom. He has lost his freedom to climb to the heights he pleases and fulfill his chosen vocation as a detective--he has lost his power over his own life. His fear of heights is always in relation to buildings (architecture), highlighting his psychological problem as a conflict between his physical reality and his supposed place in the patriarchal world. More than recognizing a mere fear of heights in Scottie's psyche, Elster is aware of a deeper psychological conflict in Scottie which is why he uses him in his murder plot. He knows that Scottie's desire for something larger then life, something dramatic, will cause him to believe the story of `Madeleine's' madness once he is provided with some tangeable evidence. Midge, on the other hand, does not fall for the story, and she is also aware of Scottie's instabilities, of his irresponsibility, as is visible in her expression at the reminder that it was she who broke off her engagement with Scottie. His "rejection of life for an unattainable Idea is something fundamental in [male] nature, his sickness still, potentially, our sickness" notes Wood (94). Wood recognizes Scottie as a manifestation of the `everyman' archetype, both a victim and a perpetrator of the social forces which victimize females. Hitchcock does not ask us to condemn Scottie but perhaps, as males, recognize him as part of our social consciousness, and, as females, to realize that the impact of patriarchally dominated culture is a straight-jacket from which both sexes need to escape.

Hitchcock's Vertigo, with its post-war modernism balanced by male nostalgia for the old days of freedom and power is close in its criticism to Woolf's Three Guineas and its exploration of the "causal link between masculine domination and war" (Zwerdling 262). The crisis of modernism is a crisis of sex, power, freedom--or the male, that is. For Elster, like the professors of A Room of One's Own, the past represents a world of unquestioned power and freedom. The contemporary manifestation of this desire is the murder of Elster's wife and his manipulation of the legal system of the all-male inquest. It is important to note that the inquest is presided over by and attended solely by males, with the exception of the nuns who have an obvious non-gender related interest. The men are Elster's peers. Madeline is not represented, her concerns are merely paid lip-service to by the inquisitor in his address to the jury. She is described as a mere possession, a wife, who was not sufficiently protected from herself. It is the acceptance of this stereo-typed presentation, by all of the males present, which indicates the full measure of the powerlessness of women in this world. The acceptance of Elster's carefully orchestrated `suicide' murder of his wife is a sign that the old days of power and freedom are not gone, they merely have been institutionalized.

Woolf develops her argument about the relative power afforded to each sex by observing the role of food as a manifestation of the wealth and luxuries which each sex possesses. The patriarchy which used the strengths of female creativity in building their cultural monuments and institutions maintains, through the endowment unavailable to women, the level of luxury denied to the female institutions. Women have been dependent on male indulgence for the measure of recognition they have received in the past:

...dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable: "...female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex." (Woolf 75).

But now, in the twentieth century, as women develop institutions and creative standards of their own, they have neither wealth or a cultural or financial legacy from which to draw:

For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it (Woolf 22).

Western culture has channelled its resources into male endevours and consequently, women must start from scratch. The spartan lifestyle of students at Fernham, in opposition to the luxury of the other colleges, is for Woolf, an indication of this new beginning; a hard won start.

Food is the symbol of women's second class status in society. Woolf compares the sumptuous luncheon she has at the male college with the spartan meal she has at Fernham:

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? (Woolf 25).

The quality of food is represented as an indicator of the social value placed on the individual and her creative ability. Food is also a symbol of the financial and cultural legacy which males have to draw upon and of the leisure time afforded to the sexes.

Hitchcock uses the idea of fashion to highlight the direct influence of the power manifest in architecture over females. As architecture imposes a male ideal upon nature, fashion is imposed upon women. As we first see Judy impersonating Madeleine, we do not see a woman but an artificial construct. Hitchcock presents her as part of the description of the decor of a restaurant. In Ernie's, an image of the past,

The camera swings over in a slow, graceful movement disclosing the décor of the restaurant, which evokes immediately the gracious living of the past, then tracks slowly towards the table, gradually focusing our attention on the bare back of a woman in evening dress leaning in a graceful attitude, almost statuesque (Wood 77).

The description of `Madeleine' is impersonal:

We see a woman's face; the camera moves in first to lips, then to eyes. The face is blank, mask-like, representing the inscrutability of the appearances: the impossibility of knowing what goes on behind the mask. But the eyes dart nervously form side to side: beneath the mask are imprisoned unknown emotions, fears, desperation (Wood 73).

The woman is described as an object d'art--a male creation, not an individual. The full force of this disregard for women's individuality is made explicit during Scottie's obsessive shopping spree. Judy's desires, individuality and creativity are ignored while Scottie satisfies his fetishistic desire to build his perfect woman. Judy is a pawn in Scottie's game just as she was in Elster's. Her desire for love, a natural desire, is bartered against his desire in total disregard for her feelings. His obsession forces love in to a commodity and her individuality is the hidden price.

The depth to which this obsession with fashion control's woman's lives is shown in the life of Midge. Not only is her artistic creativity subverted in to a commodity, the brassiéres she draws are designed by males. More revealing is the fact that brassiéres are designed by males according to the architectural principal of the cantilever bridge. Hitchcock ingeniously combines the two themes of architecture and fashion into a single metaphor of control over nature and woman.

Woolf's description of archetypal women are those of women such as Shakespeare's sister whose basic nature is at odds with the male dominating structure of society, and whose creativity drove her to madness:

She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brothers, for the tune of words.... --who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body...

Lady Winchilsea who wrote in bitterness and hostility or Margaret of Newcastle (Woolf 48, 58, 61). Woolf's solution is deceptively simple, the step to intellectual freedom is physical and financial independence for individual women:

...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. ...that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things... (Woolf 4, 106).

She gives the example of Mary Carmichael who, though without genius, is able to write as a woman but as a woman unconscious of the limitations and burdens of an awareness of her sexuality. She exhibits the ability to write on topics of interest to women, topics overlooked by men:

She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle (Woolf 88).

Such a writer is able to fill out our cultural experience, providing a balance between the sexes which has never before existed. Female creativity, which is different from that of males, is, for Woolf, necessary to create cultural stability by undermining the patriarchal strangle-hold on cultural expression. The male voice,

\&...now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone...

need not be silenced, but redirected through exposure to the female experience to allow the sexes to interact in equality:

Moreover, in a hundred years... women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop woman will drive and engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared... (Woolf 75, 40).

For Hitchcock, as he presents a view of the relation between the sexes in Vertigo, there appears to be no solution for women. The instability of Scottie, the subterfuge of Elster, the indifference to women exhibited by the inquest suggest that there is no place for the modern woman in the patriarchy which is trying to maintain its retrospective view of the world. Midge represents the modern woman in Vertigo. Apparently emancipated with a room of her own, her own source of income, a university education, Midge is the model of a woman with a limited level of freedom. Post-war reality, however, with its economic concerns, provides no avenue for a woman to have a truly independent source of income as Woolf cites as requisite for creative freedom. Midge's creative skills, revealed in her perceptively witty and artistically sophisticated satirical version of the painting of Carlotta Veldez, are subordinated to economic necessity. She wastes her talent as a commercial artist in the pay of the patriarchal economic machine.

Hitchcock depicts her creative independence as co-opted for her physical independence, and he also shows her emotional desires to be incompatible with the irresponsible ideals central to Scottie's character:

Midge and her apartment... represents one of the possibilities before Scottie. ...Midge is practical, realistic, emancipated, eminently sane, positive and healthy in her outlook... A trained artist, she devotes her energies to sketching advertisements for brassiéres... (Wood 75).

Her unwillingness to accept Scottie's vision of the world and his inability to accept hers results in the lack of any real passion in their relationship, leaving her frustrated and alone. It is Scottie's immaturity, not hers, which forces their relationship into a grotesque parody of a mother-son scenerio. He cannot shed his illusions and passion for adventure, while she is unwilling to shed her independence to become another victim such as the younger and less experienced Judy becomes. Midge and Judy's `Madeleine' are opposites, while Judy is a character inbetween:

[`Madeleine'] represents a completely different sexuality from Midge's: one has only to compare Midge's demonstrating the latest brassiére "based on the principle of the Cantilever Bridge", with Madeline's hesitant face of movement and attitude later as she comes to stand in the doorway of Scottie's sitting room... (Wood 78).

Midge's life is out of balance because she is further developed emotionally than the male characters. Males are unable to accept her almost harsh honesty and matter of fact apprehension of reality. Since she cannot be silenced, she is ignored by Scottie and, after the death of Madeleine, she disappears from his life.

Architecture as it represents the historicity of man's dominance over nature, all aspects of nature which are not male, becomes the metaphor for the subjugation of women. Accordingly, the importance of `a room of one's own and 500 a year' is that is presents the possibility for women of erect structures of her own design, her own words and her own history. Hitchcock does allow for hope of mature relations between the sexes beyond the scope of the film. This hope is illustrated in Scottie's exorcism of the past. He destroys his illusions, and though it is unlikely he will ever recover, the emancipation of the male ego from the drive for power and freedom indicates that the male is capable of functioning on a level comparable to that of Midge:

The film ends with the magnificent image of Scottie looking down from a great height to where Judy has fallen: magnificent, because it so perfectly crystalises our complexity of response. Scottie is cured; yet his cure has destroyed at a blow both the reality and the illusion of Judy/Madeleine, has made the illusion of Madeleine's death real. He is cured, but empty, desolate. Triumph and tragedy are indistinguishably fused (Wood 97).

What is he cured of? the past? the male desire for power and freedom? love? When the heroic figure of which Scottie can be seen as a type appears in Marniethe transformation is clearly visible. In Marnie,

If Mark is Scottie, then he is Scottie without the Vertigo: a Scottie become mature, responsible and aware. Perhaps the most striking thing about Marnie is this new development in the Hitchcock hero, for all of Hitchcock's male protagonists, Mark is the one most in charge... In a sense, he is the reverse of Scottie: where Scottie struggled to re-create the dream of Madeleine--the illusory Idea--Mark struggles to destroy the unreal shell of Marnie--the protective exterior--in order to release the real woman imprisoned within it (Wood 164).

For both Woolf and Hitchcock, a balance between the sexes is possible. Women can assert themselves effectively, and males are capable of understanding. Both artists recognized, however, how rare the meeting of these two attributes is in a relationship, and how often an irreconcilable conflict separates partners. The brilliance of the use of architecture as the metaphor for power and freedom is in the realisation that though the patriarchy is clearly the possessor of such power and luxuries, they are not intrinsic attributes to a single sex. Architecture, as it represents a relationship between the sexes, and also between humanity and nature--something external to humans--it is clear that what it represents can be wielded by either sex, or both the sexes in mutual understanding, or in conflict. The crisis, therefore, is not so much the wielding of that power, but that power shifting to a new equalibrium in the twentieth century.

Works Cited

Hitchcock, Alfred. Vertigo.With James Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bal Geddes. Paramount, 1958, 128 minutes.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films. New York: Barnes, 1969.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's own. 1981 ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.