Journal of Gender Studies (2005) - How to be a Hero: Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 Steps
Details
- article: How to be a Hero: Space, Place and MAsculinity in The 39 Steps
- author(s): Angela Devas
- journal: Journal of Gender Studies (31/Mar/2005)
- issue: volume 14, issue 1, page 45
- journal ISSN: 0958-9236
- keywords: "The Women Who Knew Too Much" - by Tania Modleski, Alfred Hitchcock, Angela Devas, Feminism, Forth Bridge, Scotland, John Buchan, Madeleine Carroll, Marlene Dietrich, Marnie (1964), Men, Modernism, Motion picture criticism, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Robert Donat, Sex roles, Social identity, Tania Modleski, The 39 Steps (1935), Vertigo (1958), Womens studies
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Abstract
This paper explores the representation of the hero in the 1935 Hitchcock classic The 39 Steps. The film, while drawing on the original adventure story of The Thirty Nine Steps, adopts a modernist sensibility in its cinematic depiction of technology and its representation of a bantering heterosexual couple. However, this does not displace the gendered, classed and racialised role of the hero. I examine the construction of the hero via discourses of masculinity, linked to the notion of the flaneur, that is, the right of the male hero to wander, gaze and appropriate different space and place for his own use. Hannay, as the hero, also has the correct credentials of class and 'race'. This permits him a particular imperialist position which allows him the right of disguise and dissimulation. This freedom assures him a final bourgeois romantic union, consolidating his position as the hero. The role of the hero is one that is not available to women, who are either punished or only permitted to take up the role of heroine, the complementary and lesser partner to the hero.
