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Rear Window From A Feminist Perspective

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Rear Window (1954) has been viewed from a feminist perspective by critics. Laura Mulvey the feminist film theorist and the author of Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975) calls Lisa Fremont a “passive image of visual perfection” (qtd in Keith 1). 1950s is a period marked by the rise in consumer culture, Beatniks at its zenith and the beginning of cold war. The period was struggling hard to find a harmony between innovation and progress on one side and conformity and tradition on the other. Sticking to gender roles was the only solution to achieve a happy and secured life thought politicians and creators of popular culture. Lisa Fremont can be viewd as one such women-a professional unwilling to return to the prewar status of confinement …show more content…

It is rather difficult to critique his films from a patriarchal perspective as he questions and undermines the system which is very evident from his creation of Lisa Fremont. It also suggests Hitchcock’s ideology that female independence and equality are no no longer detrimental or harmful to marriage. At the same time Hitchcock forsees danger in maintaining the tradition of male authority. Spoto opines that “the highly moralistic Hithcock describes the devastating effect of crime on the victim; his real contempt is for the victimizer, in every case a man. In most Hithcock romances, the woman is courageous precisely because she is willing to risk so much for love—something alien to the manipulative, ungrownupman” (qtd in Keith 1). This aspect of Hithcock films undermine the efforts of some critics to treat him as misogynist. Lisa displays her mettle by climbing the balcony onto a second story window ledge, like a sleuth to win the heart of Jeff. This is one instance where she behaves contrary to the female passivity in narrative cinema which Mulvey talks about. Lisa is brave, active and powerful woman (Keith 1-2). It is seen that Hithcock’s most successful female characters are the ones who challenge traditional gender roles and having a strong sense of self that exists outside male

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Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window has several themes. One major theme is relationships. The lead character, Jeff Jeffries, a photographer and committed bachelor, is involved in a relationship with Lisa Fremont, a model, although the relationship has some tension due to Jeff’s lack of commitment. When Jeff is confined to his apartment recovering from a broken leg, he begins spying through his rear window on his neighbors in a nearby apartment. Through her frequent visits, Lisa is drawn into this spying as well.

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Rear Window Argues that people should mind their own business. Do you agree? Rear Window, a 1954 romance/murder-mystery by the renowned golden age director Alfred Hitchcock, is a film that explores a multitude of themes and genres through the voyeuristic gaze of protagonist L.B. Jefferies. Jefferies, or ‘Jeff’ as he commonly known throughout the film, is a middle-aged bachelor recently hospitalised due to his high-risk career as a photojournalist. This hindered condition serves as an important foundation on which the movie is built upon as Jeff’s forced lifestyle being in a wheelchair causes an abrupt stop in his usual high intensity way of life and causes him to quench his boredom in other ways, predominantly watching the other residents in his apartment complex through the ‘rear window’ of his apartment.

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Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock is a fillm full of symbolism and motifs that provides viewers with a bigger meaning. It shows these rhetorical appeals through Hitchcok’s eyes that would not be recognized if not analyzed. Through these appeals I have recognized the window as being a symbol and marriage and binoculars as motifs. After understanding much more than what the eye anitially sees when viewing this film there is a fine line between understanding what is going on in the film and observing what the protagonist Jeff is viewing.

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This is suggested by Helen Simpson who stated that Carter centralises ‘latent content of fairy-tale’ is that women are objects of male desire hence patriarchal discourse establishes male supremacy to which Carter does this to challenge contemporary perspectives on the place of women by revealing the oppression that society inflicted. The Marquis is an overt example of male ownership of female bodies. Similarly, where Atwood exposes the harsh realities of oppressive patriarchy through the female body, Carter utilises the construct of the Marquis in the eponymous story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as a grotesque embodiment of patriarchal control. In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey coined the feminist term ‘male gaze.’ She argues that men are the audience and women are to embody the male perspective of women as objects of satisfaction.

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