Gender Analysis of “The 39 Steps” by Alfred Hitchcock
In 1935, Hitchcock introduced to a numerous amount of characters in his film, “The 39 Steps.” Each character having a different story and reason for being involved in this mess really leaves room for gender and feminism analysis. There are many characters that you can analyze and really see how women and men were portrayed in 1935. There are some aspects challenging the stereotypes of both men and women, but this film also spends a lot of time conforming to gender rules. “The 39 Steps,” is the perfect movie for analyzing the gender conformity for its time.
The film begins with show at the music hall. During the performance, a fight breaks out between the drunk men, and people who
…show more content…
appear to look like ushers. This really conforms to the stereotype that men are aggressive, and that put in the situation will fight other men. While this follows the stereotype of men, it also discredits the idea that men will always portray themselves as gentlemen in front of women. This is important to look at from the gender view point, because this showcases toxic masculinity. Toxic Masculinity is the idea that true men are the stereotype of masculine, whether it be in 1935 or 2018, there is a societal pressure to be masculine, and this bar fight portrays it well. Along with the fight portraying men as their stereotype, the fight shows a great deal of woman stereotypes. After a gunshot rings out during the fight, everyone tries to evacuate the hall. There is only one sound coming from the film at this point, the sounds of women screaming in terror. This plays on the idea that women are scared, vulnerable creatures, while men are strong, fearless characters. Questions to ask oneself would be, “Why couldn’t the men be screaming as well?”, “Why were the women the most scared in the crowd?” The answer to these questions is simply society. Men were supposed to be fearless and protect the women, who might not even need saving. The film also challenges feminism, because when it shows the gun being fired, it is a woman’s hand. This would have been VERY taboo for its time period, because as stated before, society wanted women to remain dainty and pure, and in this case conformity to society was completely broken. As the crowds are leaving the fight, our main character, Richard Hanney, end up practically carrying Annabella Smith out of the hall. Smith is an agent, who corrects Hanney from calling her a spy, that brings Richard Hanney into the conflict. Her story begins with allowing her to seem vulnerable and weak when Richard carries her out musical hall, fleeing from the gun shots. Then without missing a cue, Annabella breaks all signs of gender conformity for the time. She asks Hanney if she can go back to his house. This would have NEVER happened in this time-period. Actually, it would have happened and when other people saw this behavior, Annabella would have been labeled as a floozy. Annabella then finds herself in Richard’s apartment parading her non-conformity even more. In the 1930’s and even into today, women are seen as vain, and very into themselves. This is completely shattered when Annabella asks Richard to turn the mirror around so she cannot see herself. After he does that, and Annabella is comfortable again, he gets her a drink. It is not the fact that she drank, but instead the fact that she drank the alcohol very quickly, one might even say, chugged. She then asked for another drink, which for the time, was also not a lady’s place to do. She then brings up her career. Richard simplifies her explanation as simply, “a spy,” to which she counters, “I prefer agent.” Once again, women at this time were not supposed to speak to men in this manner. Women were also not supposed to have dangerous jobs like being an agent either. Most women at this time, if they worked, worked secretarial job. It was not until World War II, that women were working in “men’s jobs.” As stated time and time again, women were supposed to be dainty, and Annabella admits to being the one who fired the gun at the bar. Women’s rights and gender conformity have been an issue for thousands of years, and this movie definitely brought to light, that women are just as strong and daring as men and can be in any situation. Richard Hanney is definitely an interesting character.
I would define him as a typical man, caught up in an atypical situation. For starters, he dresses in the usual menswear of the time, and treats women how they were supposed to be treated in the time. This is seen in the bar fight seen when he carries Annabella Smith out of the Music Hall. Previously mentioned, one sees Annabella chugging the alcohol that was given to her, and in this moment to show that women were not supposed to behave this way, and to show that men, like Richard, truly believed this, you see a shocked look on his face. Puzzled by Annabella’s behavior, Richard begins to question who she is, and what she …show more content…
does. Societal Gender Issues have been a problem for years, and have only become more prominent in recent years, due to the hundreds of thousands of people having enough of the pressure to be what society wants you to be. This is NOT a woman’s issue, this is a people’s issue. Thankfully we have tons of trail blazers, like Annabella Smith, leading the way! Afterword I chose the gender analysis method because I wanted to watch this movie, paying attention to details about how men and women in this time period were supposed to act. The 1920’s to the 1940’s were always time periods I have been interested in and done countless amounts of research on. This really allowed to me to have the memory of the ways women, specifically, were supposed to look like, act, and behave in public. Gender issues are an important topic to me, because I feel like there is no right and wrong way to be a woman, or to be a man. Stereotypes play a huge impact on this. People expect women to be soft, gentile, and submissive to men, and that is NOT how it should be. Although this film was made in 1935, some of the same issues it addresses are still relevant today. I really enjoyed working with this critical strategy, because it allowed me to dive deeper into controversial topics. It is 2018 and women are still treated like docile creatures, and in reality, women can do ANYTHING that men can. We have women in so many different occupations, that were once seemed as taboo, like police officer, doctor, and politicians. Some women want to conform to the old standards of womanhood, and that is perfectly fine, but it is time for a change, for the women who do not want to. Gender issues are also relevant in men’s culture too.
Men are expected to be tough, competitive, and masculine. I feel as if men showing a feminine side has become an even larger issue than women being masculine. In an ever-changing world, men have decided that, I would rather play with makeup than power tools and that is OKAY! I cannot stress this enough. Makeup artist and Youtubers, James Charles and MannyMUA, have really paved the path for men to be masculine in makeup. They can wear “men’s clothes,” and makeup and still feel comfortable in their own bodies, and that is what this is all about. Things like makeup and even your child’s toy choices do not define who they
are. After working at McDonald’s for years and listening to people order, you really get tired of people saying, “It’s for a boy,” when it comes to happy meals. McDonalds has really made an effort to stopping this by making most of their toys gender neutral and when they are “not,” the employees now ask which toy, rather than “is this for a boy or a girl?”. One thing I would really like to know about this strategy is if people who believe that men and women should act certain ways, use this method. I would be vey interested in reading how this critical strategy would be approached from opposing standpoints. Another thing is to see what other questions can be answered from this style. You can look at the obvious stereotypes, but someone who is trained in this type of critical analysis method, what kinds of topics to they look for in this movie. What kinds of things do they write about? Do they relate issues from 1935 to the issues of 2015? What are their views on feminism?
Both Deborah Blum’s The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over? and Aaron Devor’s “Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes” challenges the concept of how gender behavior is socially constructed. Blum resides on the idea that gender behavior is developed mainly through adolescence and societal expectations of a gender. Based on reference from personal experiences to back her argument up, Blum explains that each individual develops their expected traits as they grow up, while she also claims that genes and testosterones also play a role into establishing the differentiation of gender behavior. Whereas, Devor focuses mainly on the idea that gender behavior is portrayed mainly among two different categories: masculinity and femininity, the expectation that society has put upon male and female disregarding any biological traits. Furthermore, both could agree with the idea that society has an effect on how an individual should act based on their gender. Yet, additionally Devor would most likely disagree with Blum regarding the assumption that a biological factor is involved in this following case, but I reside on Blum’s case. Although society is indeed one of the major contributions as to how one should act, as Devor states, biology is somewhat like a foundation that leads to how one should behave as they grow and acknowledge their gender difference as well, residing on Blum’s argument.
At first glance, women's films or family melodramas such as Now Voyager seem to reverse such spectator roles as one is made to identify with a female protagonist. Yet as E. Ann Kaplan suggests, by using psychoanalysis one can deconstruct these films in order to show how they only work to reinstate the dominant patriarchal order of man as subject and woman as object. She suggests that "the family melodrama, as a genre geared specifically to women, functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalist nuclear family impose...
The female characters in Young Frankenstein and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are, stereotypically, satiric and parodic renditions of oppressed or emotionally unstable feminine personalities. The theme of the treatment of women is not only played out in the external relationships the women interact within but also in the basic mentality and roles they embody within their personality. The women of Young Frankenstein add a comical element to the film which a direct contrast to the insignificance of the female in Mary Shelley’s novel. The women of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are either almost terrifying when thinking of the potential evil lurking just beneath the surface or effectual props in the healing of those who need it.
To understand why Hitchcock’s portrayal of female characters is crucial to fully understanding the film, it is important to consider the way society worked for women in the fifties. Women “were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents” (Friedman, 16). It was completely wrong for women to try and get male dominated jobs. They were supposed to be housewives who did not have any power in society. “They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions” (Friedman, 18). In her book, Friedman continues to explain how most of the women she had interviewed who were housewives felt dissatisfaction with their lives and were ashamed that they felt this way.
Firstly, Raymond Bellours work, as written in ‘Psychosis, neurosis, perversion’, from Camera Obscura, has taken a physiological understanding of sexual difference in Hollywood cinema claiming a space for female desire. (Stacey,1994, p24) By investigating the dialogue of Hitchcock films, Bellour discovered an analysis of the way the gaze is created. Bellour stated “The mechanisms for eliminating the threat of sexual difference represented by the figure of a woman, are built into the apparatus of the cinema” (Bellour, 1979, p97) Although, his version is a very pessimistic ideology for the female desire, Bell...
Myers mentioned in his article that this generation of young discouraged, angry men feels abandoned with the today’s norms. Male movie stars and athletes have further influenced the masculine norms. In males perspective, liking a feminine color, doing feminine actions, listening to specified girl music is considered to be less manly. These have greatly affected the likes and dislikes of many men. The entertainment industry has created a big gap between what is masculine or feminine. This has caused a big separation and it's getting worse. Male are taught to be man of the house, strong, and powerful, but sometimes they’re belittled by society that they can’t do certain things and all the power is
...are influenced by Although the uneasiness of relationships at the conclusion of Hitchcock’s films is a common theme, it is the deformation of sound and language by Hitchcock that creates the suspense and anxiety that his films are infamous for, allowing the female to become the centre of the discrimination, meaning that its only solution is the pursuit of “human communication”, an ideal that through careful analysis of both films, seems impossible for the female to ascertain.
Gender roles are a major theme in the novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, in the main ways being what is expected of proper Southern lady, the critcization of women because of their hypocrisy, and the distrust of masculinity as whole. The novel is set in the 1930s during the Depression in the small traditional town of Maycomb, Alabama. Scout is the main female protagonist in the novel and Scout herself faces the gender conformity, as does many others, like Tom Robinson and other men, and the female gender as a whole.
Gender roles can be comprehended through studying human society and the individual relationships among people in that society. Different aspects of society such as politics, economics, and the social aspects of society, are interlinked with gender roles. This paper will look at the gender roles and stereotypes from a modern and a traditional society perspective. The three different areas will be compared by looking at the traditional and modern societies, in order to understand how many changes have occurred and whether or not anything has really changed. Generally speaking, a traditional society is more conservative while a modern society leans toward being more liberal. The conservative nature of a traditional society is mainly a result of assigning certain roles depending on the gender of individuals. These roles have created gendered stereotypes which traditional society and even modern society have abided by. These roles and stereotypes have created a society in which one individual becomes dominant and the other becomes a subordinate. Modern society, however, has started to “level out the playing field” by allowing males AND females to succeed through accepting the identity of individuals’. Even though de facto segregation still exists, equality is emerging in society more and more each day.
Hitchcock’s filming style revolves around immersing the audience and making them work when they enter a theater and watch one of his films. The ways in which cinematic elements are used like: camera placement, editing, point of view, subjectivity and objectivity work together in ways that evoke certain emotions, while also making choices that make you question why and wonder what in the world Hitchcock is getting at. In 39 Steps, there are shadows of the young Hitchcock’s budding brilliance, and meticulous decision making, causing the audience to become spellbound. Meanwhile Shadow of a Doubt takes clear steps to snatch the moviegoer from their seat, placing them right in the center, helpless against evil.
Section 1: What is your topic, and why is it important to study this topic?
Kristeva’s analysis on Freud’s castration, and theory of abjection is the very vehicle that moves the film’s understanding of feminism through the help of the horror genre. This scene is very important because it not only broadcasts a male gaze to objectify women, but also displays how these women will treat other women. The film suggests that it will not be just men who will lead to the collapse of female empowerment, but women themselves will contribute to the fall of feminism. The mise-en-scene in the film builds up the horror genre, and the film’s understanding of feminism through the use of wardrobe, props, and blood.
The internet as helpful as it is, is contributing to the backfire of changing the stereotype of men from hyper masculinity to just being human. The significance of this movement is letting men know its okay to enjoy the feminine things in life, you don’t need to be a lumberjack 24/7. The internet isn’t going anywhere and it’s going to make it hard for men and women to bring the awareness to stubborn internet users. Although there is still hope for the movement, maybe people will be open to leave the stereotype of men, and perhaps in the future we’ll see men blogging about facial products or maybe YouTube videos of men explaining how to conceal or contour their face. It won’t be easy though, we still need to let people know that the stereotype of men is outdated, it will take one article, one photo, and one comment at a time.
The terms sex, gender and sexuality relate with one another, however, sociologists had to distinguish these terms because it has it’s own individual meaning. Sex is the biological identity of a person when they are first born, like being a male or female. Gender is the socially learned behaviors and expectations associated with men and women like being masculine or feminine. Gender can differentiate like being a man, woman, transgender, intersex, etcetera. Sexuality refers to desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior (1). Sexuality can differentiate as well like being homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etcetera. Like all social identities, gender is socially constructed. In the Social Construction of Gender, this theory shows
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.