0
0
The mother who towers irrefutably over the Hitchcock canon, Norma Bates of Psycho, is the original monstrous feminine. But how far is she, as Professor Tania Modleski points out, “That much maligned woman?” Absent but pervasive, her presence is consumptive, from the muddy swamp where Norman tries to conceal evidence of murder to the shrine-like bedroom preserved in the gothic family home.
The female force in Psycho revolts against its male counterpart and we hear how Norman was: “Never all Norman but was often only mother.” However, the power displayed in women equals male annihilation. Norma represents fear because she is a powerful female. She symbolizes a threatening prospect in a world governed by male authority.
Ultimately, the female figure carries the responsibility for all human sin, like the Biblical Eve-Norma wears the blame. However, while Hitchcock’s most famous mother might be dead, she is (like the eponymous character of Hitchcock’s 1940’s Rebecca) far from gone. Everywhere we look, she is fighting to be seen. The sheets of her bed still bear her outline, and her preserved, skeletal body ensures it is found with a rip-roaring scream.
Like Marion’s car lifted out of the swamp at the film’s end, Norma refuses to be intimidated or silenced. Instead, she invokes Robin Wood’s groundbreaking theory, “What is repressed must always struggle to return.”
