Alfred Hitchcock has always been considered a misogynous by critics, for his ethereal blonde hair and blue eyes women characters, portrayed as distant and sexually cold creatures, who very often end up to be evil and manipulator. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1977) Tania Modleski interprets Notorious according to the female point of view, as the film theorist Laura Mulvey had already done in her essay, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975). Mulvey argued that in classical Hollywood cinema the spectator is inevitably in a masculine subject position while the woman on screen is seen as the object of desire, constantly under "the male gaze".
Alicia, the female protagonist in Notorious, falls in love with …show more content…
Modleski argues that men are afraid of women who exploit their sexuality to achieve fame, because they feel threatened. In Notorious, we have Devlin himself proving that, when he says, “I’ve always been scared of women”, but the fact that Cary Grant’s character associates female sexuality with male peril does not necessarily mean that the film itself follows this misogynistic view. In other words, just because Devlin considers Alicia a femme fatale, that does not mean that Notorious is directing us toward the same opinion. Julie Grossman agrees with this idea, stating that women in film noir are not portrayed just as one-dimensional “bad girls” characters, like most critics believe they are, but rather as three-dimensional characters, wrongly ‘judged’ by male people who operate with them. By taking Alicia as example, Grossman believes that, despite her filtrating and allusive behaves, she is a thinking and sympathetic woman, surely not just one-dimensional character.
Alicia, the female protagonist in Notorious, falls in love with …show more content…
Modleski argues that men are afraid of women who exploit their sexuality to achieve fame, because they feel threatened. In Notorious, we have Devlin himself proving that, when he says, “I’ve always been scared of women”, but the fact that Cary Grant’s character associates female sexuality with male peril does not necessarily mean that the film itself follows this misogynistic view. In other words, just because Devlin considers Alicia a femme fatale, that does not mean that Notorious is directing us toward the same opinion. Julie Grossman agrees with this idea, stating that women in film noir are not portrayed just as one-dimensional “bad girls” characters, like most critics believe they are, but rather as three-dimensional characters, wrongly ‘judged’ by male people who operate with them. By taking Alicia as example, Grossman believes that, despite her filtrating and allusive behaves, she is a thinking and sympathetic woman, surely not just one-dimensional character.