Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2014) - The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire
Details
- article: The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire
- author(s): David Greven
- journal: Studies in Gender and Sexuality (03/Jul/2014)
- issue: volume 15, issue 3, pages 167-181
- DOI: 10.1080/15240657.2014.939005
- journal ISSN: 1524-0657
- publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- keywords: "Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze" - by William Rothman, "Psycho: The Institutionalization of Female Sexuality" - by Barbara Klinger, "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion" - by Raymond Bellour, "The Women Who Knew Too Much" - by Tania Modleski, A Hitchcock Reader (1989) edited by Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland A. Poague, Alexander Doty, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Barbara Klinger, Bates Motel, Bernard Herrmann, Brian De Palma, Chicago, Illinois, Claude Rains, Content analysis, David Greven, Edgar Allan Poe, Femininity, Janet Leigh, John Gavin, John McIntire, Lee Edelman, Leopoldine Konstantin, Lurene Tuttle, Marion Crane, Marnie (1964), Martin Balsam, Michel Chion, Milton Arbogast, Motion picture directors & producers, Motion pictures, New York City, New York, Norma Bates, Norman Bates, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Psycho (1960), Raymond Bellour, Rebecca (1940), Robert Bloch, Robin Wood, Sexuality, Simon Oakland, Slavoj Žižek, Strangers on a Train (1951), Tania Modleski, The Birds (1963), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Vera Miles, Vertigo (1958), William Friedkin, William Rothman
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Abstract
Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho (1960) is a significant work on many levels-to Hitchcock's career, to film history, to the horror genre. I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho's design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the "death-mother." A distinction between Mrs. Bates/"Mother," on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother -- which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications -- is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock's oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity. I develop the concept of the death-mother from the writings of Freud, Nietzsche, and Andre Green and from feminist psychoanalytic theory: Barbara Creed, in her reworking of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Diane Jonte-Pace, in her analysis of Freud's work. My analysis focuses on the relevance of the death-mother to issues of femininity and queer sexuality crucial to and enduringly controversial within Psycho.
