Edward Anderson - writing sample - Anti-Gone

Edward Anderson
PhD candidate in Literary Studies, Georgia State University
Professional Writing Sample
Portions delivered at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention, 2012
Anti-Gone -or- Every Little Girl Has Mommy Issues: A Psychoanalytic Reading of
Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)
It was common for film trailers of the mid-20th
Century to attempt to crystallize their
subjects in purpose statements, words boldly printed right on the screen that trumpeted the deep
social significance of that particular piece: ‘the frankest motion picture ever made’, ‘the most
important event in a decade of entertainment’, or even ‘a story that daringly meets the challenge
of today’s most vital controversy,’. Hitchcock films were no different in being subject to such
simplification, and oftentimes even more so; Rope was described as Hitchcock’s ‘most startling
adventure in suspense’, Rebecca was hailed by its announcer as ‘the most exciting love story of
our time’, while, The Trouble With Harry was reduced to being ‘a comedy about a body.’
Just as Hitchcock was keen to defy convention in his films, however, so their trailers
would often be crafted to match. Such was the case with Marnie, in which Hitchcock
approached a number of contemporary tenets of love, sex, and relationships as so many
manifestations of an underlying negotiation of power between genders. But, just as social
convention was not yet comfortable with such a diagnostic view of ‘romance’ being expressed
directly, so the trailer asks what Marnie must be if it cannot be itself: ‘Is Alfred Hitchcock’s
Marnie a sex story? A mystery? A detective story? A romance? A story of a thief? A love
story? Yes and more!”

Anderson – Anti-Gone 2
Ultimately, ‘and more’ is as close as the trailer can come to an accurate abstract. By
turns, Hitchcock symbolizes, inverts, shuffles, and sets the phallic power structure ‘straight’, all
the while exposing its psychoanalytical foundations. In this close reading of key scenes of the
film—and the character relationships that those scenes concern—we will employ the
psychoanalytic texts and methods of Lacan, Źiźek, and Mulvey to identify and analyze the role
and dynamics of phallic power as manifested in the social icons of sex and money, as well as
more overtly, in ways that expose the underlying qualities of that power.
By way of establishing what exactly the phallus is, we can first dispense with what it is
not, and Źiźek himself unwittingly assists. While his philosophies will contribute considerably
to our understanding of how various characters try for and wield the power of the phallus, he
makes a particularly relevant error in defining it as “an organ of insemination or as the organ of
urination (Living 26).” Although the phallus might manifest itself in such ways in specific
narrative contexts, such as urophilic pornography, Źiźek here conflates signified and signifier,
and in so doing exposes a common misunderstanding of the nature and parameters of the phallus.
In ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Lacan notes that it is not “as such an object (part-, internal,
good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as ‘object’ tends to gauge the reality involved in a relationship. Still
less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes (“Signification” 579).” In fact, rather
than being simply a signifier, we might consider the phallus as the ultimate signified, as “the
signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier
conditions them by its presence as signifier (“Signification” 579).” As the only thing all
scientifically-defined work has in common is the exertion of energy, and the phallus is identified
most accurately though the force it exerts, so Lacan effectively posits the phallus as exertion

itself, manifested in the human psyche as desire and exercised through the drives (“Seminar” 39-
42).
Further, as the child begins to differentiate himself and other objects in the mirror stage,
so he begins to assign value demarcations to those things he can identify, such as the mother who
constitutes the center of his attentions. Indeed, as he no longer feels himself to be part of the
mother, so he beings to fantasize about a ‘re-melding’, and adapts his behaviors to best
approximate that lost feeling of oneness through the gaining of the mother’s favor; meaning
rather than simply being1
. This emerging motivation finds an environment conducive to growth
in the Symbolic Order, which is, among other things, an all-encompassing collection of
differentially-valued distinctions. The Order, an artificial structure created by and for the power
of the phallus, is so utterly dependent on that power for its continuing integrity that it has
arranged itself as essentially centerless, ready to accommodate phallic manifestations wherever
and how ever they may occur2
. Accordingly, the way to best mean, so the child eventually
comes to learn, is to gain, maintain, and display phallic power—the same power that allows the
1
“Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is demand for a presence or an
absence. This is what the primordial relationship with the mother manifests, replete as it is with that Other who must
be situated shy of the needs that Other can fulfill (Écrits 579-80),” or, at least, so the Other—often in the body of the
father or father-figure—is situated within the perceptions of the child, thereby creating, really, an institutional gap, a
lack that is the natural product of the social structure and that which the child sees themselves as being born to fill,
thereby foregoing any call to mean rather than simply be (the material by which the gap is filled). It is only once the
child has come to terms with the fact that they will not (rather than cannot) fulfill the phallic gap for the mother
better than the father ever could that they decide to take the next best option (and the only actual one): to mean. Yet,
even being able to conceive of phallic power posits one within the linguistic structure it has facilitated, rendering
man the material of a de-maternalized, socially-acceptable phallic power, the most prominent and effective outlet
through which said power is exerted. And, as everything that affects the psyche must be categorized relative to that
psyche’s own context (Freud 9-11), phallic power is thus expressed most fundamentally as the drives, the continuing
pursuit of self-fulfillment through meaning.
2
One of the common cornerstones of all the great colonial endeavors of history has been the insertion of the
invading tongue (pun intended) amongst the natives, along with the subsequent suppression of the native language
itself. Yet, consider that, even in the most widespread languages (such as English), there are few signifiers which
are not fundamentally arbitrary; the constant evolution of a language—the evolution of the social structure itself, as
previously noted, including political and religious contexts—means that no single word holds an inviolable favor
amongst its users.

father to possess the sort of relationship with the mother that the child covets. This power must
be a socially-acceptable (or, better, socially-influential) way, but the whole concept of social
acceptability, and indeed the society itself, is made possible only through the exertion of phallic
power in myriad forms, thereby providing foundational evidence as to the primacy of the phallus
in the existence of the Order and its continuation. This is an essential point to keep in mind, as is
its natural consequent; although any language user is bound to the phallus to be able to interact
with the Order, even to act at all, the phallus itself is independent of any object or need other
than to exert in some way. Being the language-using members of an Order of conscious
individuals, we commit ourselves to the phallus by even being able to differentiate ourselves as
‘I’. As the phallus exists to exert itself, so language and all of its users are destined to be the
receptacles and, if so granted, agents of that exertion.
At this point, it becomes necessary, if only for practical purposes, to recognize and
address a potential barrier to understanding, or rather, to be more optimistic, an ideological
obstacle to be understood and, in so doing, overcome: the difference between attitudes toward
sexuality contemporaneous to Marnie and those of today, especially as those attitudes are
reflected in and promulgated by mainstream media. The film being less than half a century old,
it might seem overcautious to assume that there is enough of an ideological difference between
then and now to be taken seriously. Yet, as Źiźek points out, “in the generalized perversion of
late capitalism, transgression itself is solicited, we are daily bombarded by gadgets and social
forms which not only enable us to live with our perversions, but even directly conjure new
perversions (On Belief 20).” Marnie managed to generate what controversy it did at the time of
its release because, in a way that has since become quite modest, it transgressed boundaries
against perversion. But, like Kubrick’s Lolita two years before, it did so not as regards

biological sexuality so much as commonly-accepted notions of romantic love and family
relationships. While certain commonalities in cultural sensitivities can be reasonably assumed
between the two eras, those differences that are endemic to the conversation will likewise be
considered in full during this examination.
The earliest morally-questionable shot of the film is actually its opening, although
Hitchcock does well at making it appear innocuous. The first thing we see after the credits is a
close-up of what looks oddly like a large fortune cookie, clenched under a woman’s arm as she
walks away from the screen. This is a fitting interpretation, as the film concerns this very
woman’s fortunes, but it is also quite an abstract one. If we were to, instead, take a less nuanced
but more precise view, we would see that the woman walking down the long phallic symbol of a
railroad track is carrying the most Freudianly-appropriate object possible; still a ‘cookie’
according to some vernaculars, the shapely crevasse between arm and body is bewedged by a
rather healthy-looking vagina. This vaginal handbag works its wonders in a way not dissimilar
from the real thing, and not just any real thing, either, but that of Marnie’s mother, ex-prostitute
Bernice. Bernice used a vagina3
to illegally and, by definition of the film’s contemporary
standards as well as our own popular ones, immorally make her money. Likewise, Marnie
deposits her cash, recently nabbed from the safe of business-owner Sidney Strutt, in the hole of
the handbag, retrieving it later to construct a mobile variation of the same awkward lifestyle her
mother’s covert and, therefore, unreliable occupation had previously provided.
3
‘A vagina’ as opposed to ‘her vagina’, as the use of the article vs. the pronoun presupposes that there is nothing
owned that is not obtained through phallic power of some kind or in some form, so that the very structure that serves
and is rewarded by the phallus—the Order—could be said to own, to a degree, all that which is possessed by its
members; it is exclusively through the Order, whether manifested monetarily, through granting of affection, as threat
of physical force, or otherwise, that such acquisitions are made.

This woman, the titular Marnie, takes the train out of town to visit her mother, eventually
returning to Philadelphia, her apparent base of operations, with a newly-dyed head of chestnut
hair and clothes to match. This is, presumably, to elicit an air of responsibility and
trustworthiness. Regardless of what the muted tones of such a look might indicate, however, the
depth of symbolism in Marnie’s transformation concerns more fundamental perceptions than are
to be found in basic color theory. Although, for reasons that will be addressed later, it is unlikely
that Marnie has engaged in anything more than flirting with Strutt, her last mark (or, perhaps, her
previous ‘Mark’; even more accurately, her ‘not-quite-Mark’) she is good enough at her con that
she noticed his incessant stare. Though more concerned with ‘Mrs. Holland’s’ measurements
than her movements and whereabouts, Strutt’s gaze must have been constant, given the
impassioned, if thoroughly objectifying description he gives the police: “Five feet five. A
hundred and ten pounds. Size eight dress. Blue eyes. Black, wavy hair. Even features. Good
teeth. … Always pulling her skirt down over her knees as though they were a national treasure.”
That she was still able to pull off her plan under that libidinous stare makes the man seem all the
more impotent for having been fooled, and Marnie herself all the more daring. While such a
sexualized position may have been surmountable at the time, however, it would seem that her
new job—she passes down the classifieds page, her finger skimming past the ironic ‘operator’ ad
to light on a call for a payroll clerk at Rutland’s Publishing—might require a greater degree of
professionalism (for appearance) and focus (to do the real ‘job’). The first purse Marnie held
under her arm was round and full with the money she had stolen, calling to mind the image of a
vagina that is young, ripe, perhaps even pre-pubescent as the color is not too far from skin-tone;
could this have been Marnie’s first theft, so that we see her fresh from having her ‘cherry
popped’? Unlikely, especially considering that, according to the metaphor, she would have been

popping he own cherry, rather than Strutt doing it for her. Or, perhaps the vagina is Strutt’s own,
having been popped during the theft and then stolen away, like a young –deflowered maiden by a
highwayman.4
But, having now dispensed with her loot—the vaginal receptacle of the handbag
having been voided of the money in Marnie’s hotel room—she reappears with a different purse,
one that, though brown and older-looking, approximating the mature, unshaved vagina of a
woman of sexual experience (and, perhaps due to general lack of satisfaction, indifference), is
also decidedly larger, capable of accommodating quite a bit more than before.
This is good planning, both practically and symbolically, as it turns out that Marnie
stumbles on to quite a bit more at the Rutland offices than she had at Strutt’s. Just before her
interview with Sam Ward, one of the officers of Rutland’s, the head of the company himself
shows up and silently observes. As Marnie enters Ward’s office, a shot from Mark Rutland’s
(or, perhaps, ‘new Mark’, or ‘the right Mark’) perspective shows her standing directly in front of
a large safe, much larger than Strutt’s (for which the former, smaller handbag had been well-
suited) and at least as tall as she herself. She stares back at Rutland for a moment, her figure
partially obscuring the Rutland name emblazoned on the double doors, until Ward prompts her to
take a seat and the name is again made plainly visible. Though only taking a moment, this
sequence subtly reflects the direction in which Mark and Marnie’s relationship will develop
throughout a significant portion of the film, as well as the dynamic nature of this seemingly-
simple backdrop, which will later be the site of Marnie’s next heist. Rutland’s mere presence in
the office establishes that he is more cunning and aware than Strutt had been, though, for he later
admits that, despite the change in hair color, he recognized Marnie immediately, remembering
4
Either way, though, we are also having our own symbolic cherries popped, as we experience our first theft with
Marnie, making us complicit to a degree if only because we will continually have knowledge of the doings of this
hunted criminal.

her from a visit to Strutt’s offices. Rather than simply seeking justice for his business colleague,
Rutland’s silent observation of Marnie’s interview is but the first move in a pursuit fueled by a
number of complexly-interrelated motives that have more to do with private indulgences than the
common good.
Marnie’s immediate, physical interposition between Rutland and his money, meanwhile,
is only momentary, pointing to the dubious success of the scheme even as it begins its opening
phase. Eventually, Marnie will find her way into the safe, but her victory will last little more
than a day before she is caught and the underlying psychological drama begins in earnest. This
is not to say that this initial meeting only tracks the story so far, however; the most intriguing
development is also the easiest to miss. As previously mentioned, Mr. Ward asks Marnie to sit
down, but he does so by her last name—here, ‘Taylor’—intoning the word just as Marnie moves
out of the camera’s view and the ‘Rutland’ name occupies the center of the frame. Given what
will become of Mark and Marnie’s relationship as the film continues, it is tempting to merge
verbal and visual cues to imagine that, instead of complying with Ward, Marnie’s movement
serves to correct him: “Thank you, but the name is Rutland.”
That the future course of their relationship—and the power-struggle that continues to
advance once they are married—is so intimately tied to money is not an indication of the
shallowness of their union, however, but of its depth and complexity. Marnie is at a distinct
disadvantage in Ward’s office, having been implicitly shown where the money is, but also
having twice as many male eyes on her all the time she is within the safe’s vicinity. And should
she not be concerned that, while Strutt’s vision was poor enough that he needed glasses, these
two, Rutland and Ward, are all the more clear-eyed? Yet, Ward is only an employee, no matter
how senior; though he might be of immediate concern, he is not so potent as to overshadow the

fact that, in this moment, Marnie is, quite literally, surrounded by mark Rutland’s power; the
office and everything in it, as well as the building she has passed through to get there and, of
course, the target of the safe, are manifestations of his masterful wielding of the phallus. On a
few occasions it is noted, even by Mark himself, that the company was headed for disaster until
he took it over: “By the time I came along, the company was hanging on the ropes. We had
about a thousand employees who were about to go down for the count.” And if a single man can
reverse the fortunes of an entire company, pre-feminist though contemporary to the time would
hold that he should have no problem taking a woman, especially one so pre-occupied with
money as Marnie, firmly in hand. For her own part, although Marnie disclaims sexual attraction,
she has contextually-established experience in manipulating the physical desires of successful
businessmen. Rutland’s property and possessions are valuable not just as signifiers of the power
imbued in them through his business triumphs, but as a promise of Marnie’s chance to grasp
some part of that power, provided she plays it as cool as her attire suggests. This is impossible,
though; just as the two of them end up almost immediately in close proximity in Mr. Ward’s
office, so the power that Rutland wields will soon be singularly focused on dismantling Marnie’s
chestnut-colored façade.
A major factor in Marnie’s plan is the acquisition of the key to Ward’s office safe, a copy
of which is kept in his secretary’s purse. Similar to the opening at the railroad station, Hitchcock
draws attention to the relationship of symbolic elements; the vaginal purse (though not
necessarily the virginal purse, and of whatever color) has been established as a fitting receptacle
for phallic cash, but a purse filled to the brim before the movie even begins does little to expose
the nature of power relationships, or more precisely, the relationship various characters have
with the phallic power the money represents. Marnie’s initial theft, though financially

significant, is comparatively simplistic; Strutt served as the wielder of what proved to be a very
sexualized, or at least desire-centered phallus; it would be easy to imagine Strutt, or any other
similarly-stereotypical, fictionalized businessman—Howard Roarke and Cosmo G. Spacely,
come to mind—treating his work with the same passion as he might a lover. But such passion
for any possession, be it monetary or in the person of beauty, can easily fog the senses, so that
the acumen Strutt showed in making his fortune is trumped by his overactive libido, as is noted
rather painfully by ‘Mrs. Holland’s’ lack of references. Though Marnie might have wished no
personal ill will on Strutt—another unlikelihood, considering her modus operandi focuses on
victimizing men of a particular profile and privileged social standing—from Strutt’s perspective
the ‘cleaning out’ is tantamount to castration; he can no longer even ogle the object of his
fantasies, the fantasies themselves being shattered with Marnie’s exposure as a fraud. Even the
money that might have offered comfort in light of her disappearance, that was his best proof of
his own accomplishment and viability, has been denied. Strutt’s situation is ultimately his own
fault, of course—not necessarily for being taken in, but rather for his limited understanding of
phallic power. For what Strutt has not considered is that, even though sexual desire is an
expression of phallic power (or attraction to phallic power) the phallus is not constrained by
sexual desire; its sole function is to exert, regardless of the specific means. In other words,
Strutt’s spite is based, in part, on his belief that his attraction to Marnie was not reciprocated, but
this belief stems from a shortcoming in his view of his own attractiveness as being based in those
traits endemic to romance (looks, personality, etc.), with money valued (at least, by good girls)
only insofar as it brings with it stability. Although Marnie quite wisely decides to part company
as soon as she has cleared out Strutt’s small safe, we can imagine the pains with which she
ingratiated herself to that point, developing a relationship with Strutt by which, at the very least,

she could observe him wielding his power in the workplace, for this is as close as Marnie can
come to anything approximating sexual desire. Such a proximity to power that does not simply
transcend the bedroom, but begins well outside it, is supremely attractive to a woman who has
explicitly rejected sexuality and, in turn, those same tropes of romance; what turns Marnie on (in
a purely intellectual way) is the (nominally) de-gendered potency of cash. Thus, with traditional
married life not even a considered option, Marnie simply takes a more direct, more numerically-
rewarding route to the same objective as all the other secretaries working away for their share of
the dividends of Strutt’s economic power until they can nab husbands.
Returning to the icon that serves so thoroughly phallic a function at various points in the
film, it is ironic that Marnie chooses to dispense with the spare station locker key in the manner
she does. Rather than putting it back into her purse or depositing it in some other symbolically
sexual fashion—sex here still symbolizing the same power exchange it often serves in real life, at
least for everyone but Marnie—she intentionally drops the key in a grate, a thoroughly non-
sexual repository, prominently defined as such by the bars that restrict access to whatever the
grate is covering. Marnie might be momentarily satisfied in having seized what monetary power
she has, but she knows the dangers of her position, especially if she is caught by the police and
made subject to even more severe exertions of phallic power than Strutt has access to on his own.
Knowing that she’ll have no further use for the key5
, Marnie opts to both relinquish and
neutralize its power in a fashion that, as we will see, reflects the power differential of some of the
most important relationships of the film.
But all of this, while being awash in greed and lust, is not necessarily indicative of
psychosis, per se, and Marnie is very much a story of psychosis, its trailer notwithstanding.
5
She only needs one for herself, as she has no plans to share with anyone but her mother, a distorted model for
Marnie’s own misguided behavior and, at least initially, the only authority that she is truly invested in.

Rather than using the established signifiers of money and sex to reveal how Marnie’s perspective
has become distorted, Hitchcock further complicates matters by providing an indication of
psychosis that is rather oblique; an extremely adverse reaction to the color red. This fear is given
a pat answer late in the film, via a flashback to childhood trauma, but Marnie’s natural, gender-
based relationship with blood and the associations it has engendered while she lived under her
mother’s roof lend a great measure of additional complexity to the initial phobia. While it
should be noted, if only for the sake of the complete sign, that Marnie is specifically prone to red
on white, it would seem that red is the primary color through which her psychic injuries are
echoed; when something reminds her of the repressed memory, such as an errant ink spot on a
shirtsleeve or a polka dot dress, Hitchcock indicates the intrusion of the memories of the
damaging real by imposing a red filter over the frame. But while the narrative origins of the
situation will be explained as a function of the plot, red also represents a much different kind of
potential intrusion, a common question Marnie faces every time she finds herself in Mark’s
presence; to reproduce or not.
After an adolescence and womanhood of hardline straight sexual repression, first at the
hands of her mother, then by her own hand (in either case, perhaps the same hand that more
directly helped to curb sexual urges), Marnie meets a man who might actually be a viable mate,
as he shows in how he handles her. Though having been entrapped by Mark, Marnie does not
entirely wish for escape; though she could physically bail at any time, out a window or using a
piece of topiary to cross the lawn, she is bound to Mark through his intimate and increasing
knowledge of her history as a thief, and it is only via this intellectual inlet, a sustained power
obtained in knowledge and expressed in skillful management of the situation, that further
intimacy (and of further kinds, perhaps, but perhaps not) can be achieved. Marnie’s neuroses are

deep-seated, though, and she steadfastly is ambivalent, as she would also be expected to engage
in a sexual relationship, a violation of the first order under the law of Bernice, Marnie’s mother.
In the aftermath of the old trauma, Bernice has shunned all men and taught her daughter to do the
same. Thus, if we assume Marnie has adopted her mother’s misandry and had “no lovers, no
steadies, no beaux, no gentleman callers, nothing”, Mark becomes a direct threat to Marnie’s
maidenhood and, more importantly, to her mother’s already-elusive approval. Early in the film,
in fact, as Marnie presents her mother with the gift of a fur stole (oddly echoing the hair her first
vaginal purse, the bag which contained the rest of what Marnie ‘stole’, notably lacked), Bernice
becomes suspicious as her daughter explains that she has a very “generous” boss. This is a
mistake that is, by some standards, the simple substitution of the spoken sin for the unspoken
one. Yet, the situation of sexual indiscretion, the less socially palatable transgression, being
assumed over grand theft, a crime of less moral severity but entailing a longer jail term, is but a
small-scale example of much larger inversions that Hitchcock uses the film to enact and
manipulate.
A much more powerful example occurs late in the film, as Mark grills Marnie and her
mother about the old trauma; the killing of a sailor, a client of Bernice’s during her days as a
prostitute. He is satisfied with his progress on Marnie’s behalf, though one gets the impression
he hears nothing surprising or even particularly interesting, but this could be another display of
his skillful and subtle hand. Yet the true importance of the color red, in all its implications for
Mark and Marnie’s future, has not yet been fully understood. Though the origins of the trauma
are exposed, that single childhood event caused a massive and permanent shift in Marnie’s
already tenuous home life, an effect which continues to shape Marnie’s present and might have a
profound and devastating impact on her future. In the aftermath of the sailor’s violent death, as

Bernice renounced everything about prostitution, she profoundly stifled her daughter’s sexuality
even as she denied her own. Assuming this process commenced right away, when Marnie was
still a young child, she had yet to reach puberty, at which time she would begin to menstruate.
Considering Marnie would see similar-looking blood as she witnessed running down the dead
sailor’s shirt coming out of her own vagina on a very regular basis, it is not at all hard to see how
basic color associations could deeply problematize an already complex psychic injury. Given
that we are only privy to manifestations of Marnie’s phobia while she is in Mark’s vicinity, there
becomes little symbolic difference for Marnie between these flashes of the real, sexual
jouissance, and her own vaginal liquids, whatever their nature. While this is not necessarily
enough to overcome ambivalence, the complications of a newly-developing sexual situation
affect Marnie so severely not because of the sailor’s molestation—which both Marnie and her
mother have claimed as the motive in his death—but because her sexuality was systemically
repressed before she had a chance to develop it. But this, of course, begs the question of
expressions of female sexuality sans the male gender, an issue that will be examined in greater
detail with a study of the power structure of the Edgar household. Meanwhile, for all her
fabrications, Marnie is unerringly steadfast in her assertions that she has never had an intimate
relationship of any kind with any man; despite her occupation and mental issues, she is not yet a
fallen woman in the strict, irrevocable sense. But such assertions again cast her relationship with
Mark as a radical new element which, whether exerting itself sexually or intellectually, is again
bound to become problematic. While, once discovered for a thief, Marnie displays no physical
attraction to Mark, we can confidently infer that such attraction does exist, for two reasons.
First, Mark shows his willingness to display his considerable phallic muscle at several points,
such as when he buys Marnie her beloved horse or when he pays off Strutt and all the other

business-owners Marnie has stolen from; while such acts are not directly sexual, it is well-
established by this point that Marnie perceives value largely in terms of money, such as the funds
she attempts to gift to Bernice in exchange for maternal favor. Thus, Mark understands Marnie
just as well as Marnie understands her marks. Second, and much more obviously, Marnie’s
attraction to Mark is displayed in the fact that, despite having several opportunities to flee, she
only seems to seriously consider the notion once, at the restaurant the pair stops at just after
Mark catches his prey at the stables. Indeed, rather than cloistering Marnie, Mark gives her free
reign over the family home and, later on, takes his new bride on a honeymoon cruise. The latter
occasion is doubly-rewarded, as he is able to exert his considerable fortune to impressive effect
while, in giving Marnie fair opportunity to jump ship at any port she chooses, confirming Mark’s
unerring confidence in his own judgment. Later, during the Rutledges’ honeymoon, Marnie
attempts suicide by drowning, but she does so in the ship’s pool rather than the enveloping,
Źiźekian massiveness of the ocean. From a Źiźekian perspective, we can immediately see this
attempt for the token that it is. Rather than desiring an absolute merging with the real, Marnie
only wishes to skirt the border, to engage in a controllable, terminable jouissance (“Of the
Subject” 234). She knows she risks something more with Mark, something closer and more
dangerous than her customary, comfortable distance, whether it ends up being a co-dependent
relationship based on a shared secret (still a distinct possibility as an end scenario) or a genuine
and desire for proximity. In choosing such a method of drowning over its clearly more definitive
alternative, Marnie overtly chooses to maintain her proximity to Mark while also communicating
the painfulness of her own ambivalence; the specific distance of the pool from the cabin is
constant and easily traversed, so that, alive or dead, she would only be so far away as Mark
desired in his own mobility. And it is the consideration of Mark’s desires, mobility, and power,

and the implicit acknowledgement that Marnie has herself allowed him to take control of her
movements, that constitutes the other side of her earnest (though still not necessarily sexual)
desire.
All this time, Mark most directly displays his phallic power through the narratively-
contextualized gaze he casts on Marnie. As a thief, she employs her own pedestrian version of
the gaze, but it is diluted, and not just because of her position as a woman. The male gaze is one
in which the woman is reduced to object of desire and possession but, until Mark, Marnie has
had little basis from which to relate. Even with Mark, she goes catatonic rather than even
attempting to view her husband in a sexual way, perhaps in part because she has never learned
how. Instead, she has had to make due with a lesser gaze, set upon lesser objects, unable to
themselves know of the gaze or respond to: cash fits the bill. Despite the relative impotence of
her gaze in itself—she would get nowhere if she just demanded the money, nor does she have
any established business channel by which to acquire it—it is helped significantly by both her
cunning and her understanding of a lack of scope and insensitivity to subtlety and nuance that is
a common weakness of the male gaze. After all, she does not need to satisfy Strutt’s sexual
desire for her, nor even overtly entertain it, to be able to manipulate him out of his $10,000. But
now, in forced retirement via marriage, she becomes the object of Mark’s gaze, and it is far more
potent and dangerous that Strutt’s, if only for the fact that Mark pays attention to more than
Marnie’s hair and knees. After being caught for the Rutland safe theft, as Mark lays out his
plans for Marnie, she makes a token attempt to overtly exert herself, an act which, considering its
ineffectiveness, might have been intended as nothing more than Hitchcock’s wish to make the
extreme inequality of the power differential plain to his less observant viewers. While there is
much more to be explored in Mark and Marnie’s relationship, the power dynamic is, at the least,

established and consistent; while Marnie might be an operator, Mark is the one in control. It is
through the exertion of that influence, in fact, that he helps the viewer get at a better
understanding of the story’s true mystery, that of Marnie and Bernice’s strange relationship and
how it was so marked by the sailor’s death. Before we embark on this journey to the story’s
heart, however, we must again be mindful of the variability of phallic influence in its
manifestations, made all the more complex by the setting of Marnie’s revealing flashback.
Accordingly, Lacan would draw our attention to “a relation between the subject and the phallus
that forms without regard to the anatomical distinction between the sexes and that is thus
especially difficult to interpret in the case of women with respect to women… (“Signification”
576).”
During Marnie’s early childhood, as Bernice’s business is presumably flourishing (for all
the knocks on the door and “men in white coats” coming through), their apartment is a place of
constant but understandable and reliable shifting of power positions. When Bernice and Marnie
are there alone, we can assume they accept the predictable power differential of any mother-
daughter household. Meanwhile, Bernice is also the controller of the space itself, paying for and
maintaining her daughter’s shelter, food, and clothing. Even when various men enter the
apartment, their role as customer in the act of exchange of their own money (symbol of their
phallic power) for use of Bernice’s orifices (receivers of phallic power), satisfies the need for the
phallus to exert itself, what might be explained as the Lacanian drive as it manifests itself in the
unconscious (“Seminar” 34). Thus Bernice continues on in relative safety, so long as each
customer continues to understand and abide by not just his relationship with her, but with his
own authority figures (usually the Navy), and the implicit rule of law for business of this kind.
Yet, that this complex counter-balancing of phallic power must exist in the first place proves that

Bernice is incapable of maintaining her indirect hold on that power should if any of the men
choose to subvert the phallic law and exert themselves in an unacceptable way. Curiously, a
close viewing of the flashback reveals that, contrary to the spoken narrative, the sailor does not
strike either Bernice or Marnie at any time, and the obscene kisses that he is accused of are
rendered, at best, ambiguous by the frame. This is of little consequence, though, as the sailor’s
fatal sin, the error by which he continues to be judged worthy of killing by both Marnie and
Bernice, is in having touched the child at all, or perhaps even in having approached the child to
begin with. Living within this ever-shifting power structure could have contributed in untold
ways to Marnie’s current psychoses, but is it possible that even Bernice’s own, mature mind
might have been affected by the unique conditions? Survival of the self and the family requires
constant vigilance, especially under such circumstances, so we can assume that Bernice had very
narrow limitations on how her customers could interact with her daughter; in maintaining her
phallically-endorsed yet tenuous social positioning, she would have to be able to catch and
somehow deal with problems almost before they occurred and without hesitation. That said, it
matters very little if their seeming lie is intentional fabrication or a mutual attempt at
subconscious reimagining, another line of psychic defense once repression has reached its limit
(“Seminar” 25).
Unfortunately, when called upon to wield whatever she can of phallic power, Bernice
fails. Despite picking up the fireplace poker, a fair attempt at evening out the different levels of
phallic power on display betwixt she and the sailor, Bernice only manages to bring her foe down
so far. And not far enough to be able to gain the advantage on him, as he manages to fall on top
of her and break her leg in doing so, all the while looking as though he were on the verge of
passing out. Even in such a state, he is still able to make his most overtly-antagonistic and

violating move of the entire sequence, however: the sailor’s foot is lodged in Bernice’s crotch as
he tries to untangle their legs, attempting to move away from Bernice rather than toward her, the
same direction he assumes for most of the scene. It is important to note the sailor’s power-
positioning here, or rather, Bernice and Marnie’s perceptions of such; he is still tangled up with
Bernice, still being fought against as the transgressive superior (transgressive in the eyes of the
higher power, yet still the superior force within the immediate setting), when Marnie takes up the
dropped poker and finishes the job her mother started. At the moment Marnie kills the sailor,
she situates herself at the top of the power structure within the apartment. The sailor, being the
felled holder of the phallus, deemed unworthy in his defeat, now assumes the supplicant position
of death, total immobilization, a full ceasing of the means by which to continue meaning. Even
in defeat and death, however, the sailor manages to maintain his dominant position over Bernice,
who is now situated physically and symbolically at the bottom of the heap.
Thus, what we are presented with in the flashback is the ruination inherent in the
realization of the desire to fulfill the mother’s phallic need. The child Marnie takes up the
fireplace poker, a blunt symbol of phallic force, in defense of her mother, technically fulfilling
the call to mean, but in a way that is, ultimately, quite limiting and alienating. Whatever phallic
power that had previously dwelt in the house had, it could be assumed, been manifest in Bernice
herself. Yet, in taking matters in hand, Marnie also quite firmly takes them out of the hands of
her mother; regardless of Bernice’s momentary cries for her daughter to mean in a very specific,
very phallic way, the child’s execution of her charge manages to invert the power dynamic such
that neither will be able to come to grips with. Lacan points out, however, that the mother is
normally “endowed with a phallus (“Signification” 576)” of some kind, at least in the eyes of the
child; this is usually in the person of the father. Even though the sailor himself is not the

ultimate phallic father figure, he is expected to temporarily fulfill that position in certain ways,
such as providing Bernice with cash, a flexible (read: fluid), potent sign of phallic power, able to
produce the fulfillment of material needs. His death at Marnie’s hands, then, is both a murder of
the monetarily-producing father and a castration of the phallic mother, in that she no longer has
empowering access to a line of income.
No matter the nature or duration of its acquisition, however, a little girl is simply not a
viable vessel for the power of the phallus, or so it goes for Hitchcock. He even gives us an early
hint of the depth of Marnie’s sustained injuries as, just after the Strutt theft, she tosses the spare
locker key into the floor grate at the train station, unable to take full ownership of even that token
of phallic power. Nor, technically being the weakest of the participants during the flashback,
does Bernice have the option to resume the business relationship she had previously enjoyed
with the phallus; the rules that had governed it previously are revealed as unreliable in their
ability to provide security. The phallus tears into Bernice’s space in a new and unmanageable
way and, even though one of its minor agents dies as a result, the power that he brought into the
environment remains, turning ghostlike and haunting Marnie and her mother as the traumatic
memory that, even in its repression, continues to shape their lives through Bernice’s spiteful
misandry. Such a mindset does have its advantages, though: Bernice-as-prostitute is unable to
sufficiently wield phallic power to keep her family safe, but Bernice-as-matriarch, de-sexualized
to the point of manliness, can find some degree of control and satisfaction in approximating the
phallic power that (still) lies ever beyond her reach.
What has been created, then, is an Edgar household the structure of which is defined by
such a marked lack of the phallus that the phallus must still count as an effect-bearing presence.
To mark the effect of the removal of that which can never not be desired (Four Fundamental

Concepts 235), even as it is vocally renounced, we need only observe where Bernice and her
daughter moved for their ‘fresh start’. Our first view of Bernice’s current home comes after an
establishing shot of the neighborhood, and it establishes a quite large, black-hulled ship facing
the new residence, with the waterfront just a half-dozen or so houses away. Bernice has thus
chosen as her refuge a bizarre liminal space; instead of being free of the specter of the sailor
who, in his dying act of dominance over Bernice, has transcended his status as an anonymous
john to become the Freudian dead father, the classical manifestation and of wielder of the
phallus, Bernice keeps him at an oppressively-visible distance. Rather than symbolizing the
relatively insubstantial power of the sailor, the ship truly represents that phallic power, in all its
mass and gravity, which Bernice cannot fully escape from, if only for the effect of its lack.
Instead of growing a healthy home life, Bernice and her daughter live quite literally in the
shadow of a power that they make every conscious effort to deny, thereby creating an
environment of what Źiźek describes as ‘the notion of anxiety in its strict Lacanian sense as the
effect that registers the subject's panic reaction to the overproximity of the object-cause of desire
(“Grimaces” 52).’ Although the sailor turned her off to the male gender, Bernice still longs to
become permanently as powerful within her own family unit as the sailor was for his brief stay.
She even expresses as much near the end of Marnie’s first visit of the film:
BERNICE
Uh, Marnie, I've been thinking seriously about asking Miss Cotton
and Jessie to move in here with me. Miss Cotton is a real nice
woman. She’s decent. A hard-working woman with a little girl to
raise.
MARNIE
Come on, Mama, why don't you just say what you mean? What
you want is for Jessie to come live with you.

BERNICE
Marnie, you oughtn't let yourself act jealous of a little ol' kid like
that.
Despite what Marnie treats as a basic (if age-inappropriate) competition for maternal affection,
Bernice is quite earnest in her proposition. For a woman who was bested by both a dead man
and her own young daughter in the same night, who had spent the last few decades trying to
reclaim the phallic power that she had so thoroughly been divested of, what better way to take
hold of that power anew? All that would be required is an inversion of normalized household
gender structures, a feat Bernice is quite used to from her prostitution days and her failed
attempts at eliminating vestiges of the phallus. In desiring to bring the Cottons into her home—
as opposed to entering their home, which would established a decidedly different power
structure—Bernice finally shows her understanding that alienating herself from the phallus has
been both futile and self-destructive. In a psychoanalytically-sophisticated move, she has
accepted that the phallus and the male are not one in the same and that she can gain legitimate
phallic power by taking on the symbolic (and perhaps sexual) position of the father. Whether
she would actually engage in a lesbian relationship with Miss Cotton (who in being named so
sounds more like a young, vulnerable, unwed mother than a widow) is immaterial, as Bernice
can see herself possessing and exerting phallic power just by financially supporting a ‘complete’
family. Moreover, so doing would allow her to distance herself from her previous, powerless
identity more completely than ever.
We should not mistake this impetus as Bernice’s desire to blot her relationship with
Marnie from her memory, however. Instead, Bernice’s hesitancy to even touch her daughter,
“the only thing in this world I ever did love,” is indicative of her wish to maintain the necessary
distance from which to gaze upon Marnie in that empowered, masculinized way Laura Mulvey

refers to as ‘the gaze’—to vicariously enjoy a dubious yet materially-manifest success that she
could never experience personally, and in so doing vindicate the beliefs and attitudes that guided
Marnie’s upbringing. Mulvey elaborates on this “the position of the spectator,” in which overt
exhibitionism is foregone in favor of projecting “the repressed desire on to the performer (9).”
Bernice effectively becomes the cinematic viewer for a period, or at least gains the same
advantageous position as the viewer for as long as she can observe her daughter’s life without
becoming overly-invested as one of its active participants.
Unfortunately, this situation which has allowed Bernice some type of solace has also cast
Marnie as a victim twice-over; her psyche may have been scarred by the event itself, but the
restructuring of both the household and the maternal relationship have resulted in a home life
that that is torturously oppressive. While effectively binding the mother and daughter to each
other, the reformed power differential proves ultimately unsustainable, yet irrevocable in its
effects. Even as she ascends the stairs to wake Marnie from a nightmare, so Bernice is made
anonymous in the shadows of the stairwell; she looks on her distressed daughter from a physical
distance that approximates the emotional removal necessary for spectatorial enjoyment. The
physical distance between the stairwell and the bedroom echoes a distance of mind between the
two women, just as each environment they momentarily inhabit (stairwell, bedroom) is distinct
and self-contained; the bedroom, the bed specifically, is the well-defined scene of the action, and
the spectator need not look anywhere else for the object of interest, Marnie herself, asleep and
unaware that she is being watched. Meanwhile, the stairwell contains little to distract from the
view of the bedroom, which Bernice has full visual access to, as the door is wide open. It must
then be considered whether the use of the bedroom specifically as the site of the most blatant
exertion of the contextualized gaze is meant to invert what that same type of setting meant to

Bernice before the incident. As we are shown Marnie’s memories in 3rd
person—an indication in
itself that what we are seeing might be manufactured even within the context of the narrative—
our first sight of the girl occurs as her mother is removing her from the bedroom, the place of
business not simply with her customers directly, but with the phallic power she both serves and
is kept at a distance from. Seeing the adult Marnie put into a similar position of service to a man
with no authentic promise of security, no matter to what degree, is repugnant to Bernice, so that
her fixations are satisfied not by lurid interest in her daughter’s sexuality, but by Marnie’s
solitude and reassurances of chastity, or at least for as long as Bernice believes such.
Meanwhile Marnie is left torn between the law of her mother and the law of the
dead sailor, now immortalized as the Freudian father. Both sources of authority establish
themselves through denial of and admonition for desire, Bernice to an extreme degree given her
paranoiac super-sensitivity to the vulnerability of her own position. Each is a force of restriction;
though Marnie does not understand the reasoning behind her mother’s structures, while the rule
of the dead father, that which Bernice has tried to stand in for, continues to exist in the very
memory of Bernice’s ultimate incompetence, the occasion of her child-inflicted castration. What
Bernice has thus constructed for her daughter is a very intentional version of a common effect of
the exertion of the gaze, what Mulvey describes as “the matrix of the imaginary, of
recognition/misrecognition (10).” As Bernice has created an atmosphere in which she is seen by
Marnie and others, such as the Cottons, as the phallically-empowered authority when, in fact, she
has never had sufficient stature to legitimately claim that title, so her means of re-valuing men
and casting heterosexual relationships in a negative light has had its logical effect on Marnie’s
sexual and emotional development, though even this may eventually change with the
introduction of Mark’s phallic influence. Notice, though, that in none of these outcomes is

Marnie ever so autonomous as she is while grifting. That this period of her life is so often
referred to as transient—even her mother disapproves of the outcome of her daughter’s activities,
even if she is unclear on their nature—indicates that the socially-acceptable version of the
phallically-approved, nuclear family power structure would see her firmly subject to her
husband’s whims, regardless of the iconoclasm of the film’s approach. While romantic love
might fade into resentment and its commensurate abuses, we can take at least some solace in the
fact that Mark’s attraction to Marnie is, to a considerable degree, an intellectual one. Or, rather,
it is so long as Marnie remains a puzzle.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. On Dreams. Trans. M. D. Eder. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. “Of the Subject Who is Supposed to Know, of the First Dyad, and of the Good.”
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. 230-243.
Print.
---. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton,
2006. 6-58. Print.
---. “The Signification of the Phallus.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton,
2006. 575-584. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. Jahsonic.com, 2 Sept. 2007. PDF.
31 Mar. 2012.
Źiźek, Slavoj. Living in End Times. London: Verso, 2010. Print.
---. On Belief. New York: Routledge, 2001. PDF. 31 Mar. 2012
---. "Grimaces of the Real, of When the Phallus Appears." October Rendering the Real 58
(1991): 44-68. JSTOR. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

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