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Film Studies Books: The Women Who Knew Too Much by Tania Modleski
Published in 1989 by  Routledge
In this volume Modleski claims that critical interpretations of Hitchcock have wrongly seen him as either a misogynist or as sympathetic to women and their plight in patriarchy. Modleski argues that Hitchcock was deeply ambivalent toward femininity and his female characters. The Women Who Knew Too Much investigates this ambivalence and explores its implications.
Modleski uses Mulvey's theory of visual pleasure and the concept of the gaze, Robin Wood's politics of castration, and her own unique and fascinating analyses and
observations to blur the line between the masochistic pleasure of the female spectator
as theorized by feminist theory and the alternatively sadistic pleasure of the male viewer. This complicates the sexual politics in Hitchcocks films through a fascinating and compelling blend of psychoanalysis, theories of mass culture, and feminist film criticism. The Women who Knew Too Much covers
seven films: Blackmail, Murder!, Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Frenzy.--Summary submitted to SCREENsite by D. Fonda
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