Would it be too much of a stretch if I saw a certain feminist theme in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a

Doubt? Let’s see into it a bit.

Sexuality is one of the main themes in the film, as seen from certain disquieting angles: the
loss of innocence, sexual repression (particularly in a small town where everybody knows you
and is on the lookout for what you do), hints at incestuous attractions, etc. Uncle Charlie
appears as the Vampire. He’s the Defiler, the Deflowerer, He who comes at night to take
innocence away. His method as a murderer is to seduce widows to then strangle them. He
seems to have some sort of way with women; in fact he puts all women in the film in a sort of
dazzle (he casts a spell over them, you might say), while it is the men of the town who, only at
first admittedly, seem rather distrustful of him. It is even so with his niece Charlotte, who after
she begins suspecting him of being the Merry Widow Murderer starts avoiding him as you’d
avoid a former lover, and who after being certain that he’s the murderer, and after he’s tried
to kill her several times, still refuses to deliver him to the police. Sure, the explanation is that
her mother wouldn’t take it, but there seems to be more to it, a certain feeling of not wanting
to betray him; plus her mother not bearing it is part of Uncle Charlie’s spell too.

So there are lots of readings to all of this, all very interesting in their own right, but the one
that strikes me as most intriguing is the possibility of the film being a kind of criticism towards
male-dominated society and the way men subdue their women. After all, all the women in the
film, with the partial exception of young Charlie, are sexually repressed. In this sense, I’d see
the final scene as some sort of breakthrough: Charlotte finally dispels the Vampire’s fascination
and fights him back: women rebelling against male dominance.

Other fascinating points of the film:

The way it is shot is wonderful. Asides from all the more evident vampire symbolism, which is
also excellent, there are lot of eerily shot scenes that help create the feeling of an imminent
and immediate evil lurking.

Joseph Cotten performance is one for the ages. He manages to be both charming and
disquieting at first, and disquietingly charming towards the end.

The whole feeling of “diseasedness” of the film is great, aided by such things as the
undercurrent of incest between the two Charlie’s, the whole theme of sexuality, the
terribleness of living in a small town where everybody knows you, Uncle Charlie’s constant
ambiguity and mood swings, the masterful bizarreness of certain shots.

(written a year later, on rewatch)

I like how the inhabitants of Santa Rosa, particularly Uncle Charlie’s family, with the exception
of young Charlie, of course, are all entirely alienated, and it is this alienation, together with his
perverse charm, that Uncle Charlie exploits as a method of survival among this people. He is
clearly anti social, an outcast, and uses society’s weaknesses in his favor and against it. He
fights from the inside, although for no other cause than himself. I like how he seems to be
tuned to a certain primordial side of women’s brains, he attacks them at a primordial level. He
truly is the vampire, he who comes to satisfy (sexually-)disaffected women; he speaks to them
in a language that neither them nor himself understand, but that is extremely efficient. And
yes, in the whole process, he might indeed kill a few of them, or deceive and break their
hearts, but you know, he gives them, momentarily at least, the time of their lives.

So, yeah, while I wrote the whole feminism thing earlier, I’m seeing the film under a different
light now, I guess. I don’t think Uncle Charlie’s painted in an entirely negative light. Although
the film does not condone his murdering attitude, neither towards the widows nor towards his
niece, I’d say that perhaps it does condone his antisocial attitudes, especially when it is society
that’s shown in a rather negative light. So while I guess that you could say that young Charlie
killing Uncle Charlie does represent a certain liberation from male domination, it could also
mean society’s dullness has claimed yet another victim. She chose living over breaking free.
And her becoming engaged to the detective might be a further sign of this. After all, the
detective and Uncle Charlie are opposite ends of a spectrum, and are pitted against each other
for the heart/body/soul/mind that constitute Young Charlie. So that, while it could be read as
the good guy beating the bad guy and getting the girl, society overcoming yet another danger
and marrying one of her most charming daughters to a nice, law-abiding young man, it could
also mean all that except presented in a rather negative tone: Young Charlie, a bright, non-
conformist young girl is forever lost. Consider the detective’s talk about average families and
being ordinary people and a nice girl and whatnot. Charlotte’s only fate seems to be becoming
her mother. After all, her mother “thinks girls ought to marry and settle down”. Charlotte even
has a little brother herself who can turn into a psychopath later.

I think I can make a synthesis between this reading and the previous one. Yes, women are
trapped in male society, but Uncle Charlie, although no messiah exactly, is closer to liberating
them than any other man in the film. Consider the whole “you will keep your mouth shut”
thing, said by the detective. Not exactly pleasant. He’s trying to dominate her. “The world
needs a lot of watching”, he says. So that, if we’re to see it with a feminist look, we’d have to
say that in man’s world, women are trapped between nice, hard-working men who’ll bore
them to death and render them stiff and dull, or fun, dark, dangerous bad-boys who will
actually harm them physically or spiritually. So I guess what Charlotte does, ultimately, is
making the safer, duller choice. There seems to be rather no escape by women. I don’t think
the film offers a solution to their problem. “You sort of forget you’re you… you’re your
husband’s wife”. Women are defined by the men they’re with.

Another point which makes Charles appear under an oddly positive light is how, although his
opposite, the detective, would seem to respect Charlotte and women in general, he’s actually
condescending and does not hesitate in asserting his male authority when needed. Uncle
Charlie is a misogynist, of course, but at least he’s honest and direct about it. His murders
seem to be a form of sincerity.

Another thing is how Charlotte, at the beginning of the film, is bitching about how boring and
stiff everyone in her family is, and expects her Uncle Charlie to solve that. However, once she
finds out the truth about her uncle, what she wants is peace and quiet, wants to be normal.
She can’t take her uncle’s antisocialness. The price to pay is too big. So I guess there’s two
readings to this. You could say she chickens out, that being different is not something she was
made for, or we can consider that there are forms of antisocialness that are less extreme than
murder, and that since she seems to have become entirely aghast of any antisocial behavior,
her uncle’s intensity ultimately doomed her to a life of dullness, which means that if the film
has certain antisocial undertones, and I think it does, Uncle Charlie would seem to be
ultimately harmful to the “cause”. Which would put him again under a negative light. It is only
one of many possible readings, though, and as I said before, what he does he doesn’t do for a
“cause”, but for himself. So I don’t think he would give a damn.

The way Louise the waitress says “I never thought I’d see you here Charlie” set my mind
careening. What she means I guess is that Charlie always seemed so much the nice-family type
of girl, the girl that marries young and raises children, that she’d never thought she would see
her mingle with the more socially-backward characters. However, she seems disaffected and
dulled too. The way she says she would die for a ring like Charlotte’s is pretty telling that she
wishes she would have a better station in life. I’m thinking that this means that she’s sort of
Charlotte’s opposite: Charlotte is “common-place” and disaffected, Louise is uncommon and
still disaffected. So it might be that there’s no satisfaction to be found, that you’ll always long
for another kind of life, or that is more of a matter of finding your place, of being lucky enough
to find it, really, of being lucky enough to having been born there, I guess.

“Whether Miss Rose married the rich guy or the one she was in love with”. Although I do not
get the literary reference, it is pretty evident that what’s being represented, besides what the
detective intends (that is, whether Charlotte will help them or her uncle), is Charlotte’s and all
women’s position in this world of men, torn between the dull and the bad guys.

Of course, something entirely different came to my mind now. Yes, Charlotte becomes
absorbed into society, becomes a dull, common-place married woman. But at what cost? She
murders someone. Of course, it is in self-defense, and half-accidental, but society’s getting rid
of the evil plaguing her seems to come at a rather high cost indeed. Something against death
penalty? Perhaps, but not really what I want to point out. Rather I’d say that what this could
mean is that both Charlies are united by blood, they have the same name, they’re “like twins”,
and now they’ve both killed. Could it be that, although Charlotte’s a nice married girl in the
outside, although apparently society did get rid of the evil threatening it, Uncle Charlie still
lurks somehow, still is around in Charlotte’s person? Could it be that she never really broke
free from his influence? That this influence goes much farther than we imagined?

It’s true that Charlotte’s family is far from being an “ordinary family”, what with her half-crazy
mother, her father’s bizarre hobby, and her murderous uncle. However, the counterpoint I’m
trying to make stands, since what I mean by common place, and average or ordinary, is
conforming to society’s outward form to the point of not having a thought of their own, or, in
other words, alienation, which really cannot be said this family is not a victim of. What with the
mother feeling that she’s her “husband’s wife”, the father’s average clerk job at the bank, etc.
Middle-class, mediocre, although yes, bizarre in many manners. Which adds yet another
duality to the film, and a theme of how even most norm-conforming people have their quirks,
and put on masks when taking part in social events like going to work or to church or to a
party.

Now, I don’t think there’s one of these variegated theories that’s truer than the rest. I’d say
they form rather a fan of theories and that all are applicable, which is proof of how great this
wonderful, multi-levelled work of art is.
A really quick something else. Another theme in the film is “opposites meet”, and it happens,
as I say, in the two Charlies figures. They are exact opposites, the cold-blooded murderer and
the innocent, cheerful young gal. But they also have several things in common, things that
almost make them the same character, in fact. The spectrum is bent and the extremes meet.
This has a bearing on the possibility of psychopathy sort of being passed to young Charlie,
especially if we consider she seems, on the whole, pretty cool about having caused her uncle
death. Of course, under the circumstances is understandable, but there’s no denying that she’s
not anymore the bright, happy, innocent young thing she used to be. Again, this could have
two interpretations: the “society won over her one”, or the “darkness has been transmitted to
her” one.

It is interesting to note how all the inhabitants of the town, but particularly the men, are
driven by their superegos. They are extremely moralistic, stiff, even, and appear as devoted to
social order and their families, to the point of their own detriment. In contrast, Uncle Charlie
appears as a man essentially driven by his id: he does what he wants, he gives free rein to his
impulses and desires, and, certainly of no less significance, he doesn’t work and yet manages
to live comfortably and carelessly. This is related to the idea of him as the Vampire, for after
all, what does the Vampire represent, particularly in the male psyche, if not that which we
never dared to become, and yet always wished we could? Who is he if not he who comes at
night and, driven by his lust, rapes our virgins and gives our wives what we cannot even dream
of giving them due to how social conventions have even seeped into our sexual lives? I’d say
that the envy and mistrust that the men show for Uncle Charlie throughout the film is based
precisely in these aspects.

If I ever make a scene-by-scene analysis of this film, I think I should focus on all aspects of the
film, but mainly on these points:

 How the two Charlies are the same.

 How they’re opposite.
 How Uncle Charlie is shown under a negative light.
 How he’s shown under a positive light.
 How the detective is shown under a negative light.
 How, if at all, he’s shown under a positive light.
 How the detective and Uncle Charlie are opposite.
 How, if at all, they’re the same.
 Any other pairing or opposition that might appear.
 Impact of social life on the individual.
 How women appear as repressed.
 How men appear as repressors.
 Pointing out incest innuendo.
 Pointing out sexual innuendos of variegated nature.
 Pointing out influence of German Expressionism.

Great film entirely.

(refer to Hitch for a commentary on the pairing of sex and violence in this film)