Abstract
This essay proposes that the dream-like tone and recurrent plots and motifs in Alfred Hitchcock’s films derive from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. These echoes are most obvious and pervasive in Blackmail and Notorious, but also evident in Hitchcock’s early stories and in Rebecca, Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho, and Marnie. Carroll’s influence appears in Hitchcock’s pervasive use of downward movements, in his frequent resort to metonymic objects, and in the figure I call the “vision of affrighted purity.” Later films use mirrors to represent their protagonists’ sojourns through inverted or insane worlds. The Hitchcockian landscape is both a realm of wonders and an absurd domain governed, like Carroll’s dream worlds, by a preposterous system of justice.
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Osteen, M. (2017). Alfred in Wonderland: Hitchcock Through the Looking-Glass. In: Grossman, J., Palmer, R. (eds) Adaptation in Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_12
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