In Search of the Female Gaze
It’s no coincidence that Midge wears glasses. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Barbara Bel Geddes’ character is a woman who knows too much—and, therefore, a woman who can never capture the romantic interest of the hero, Scottie (James Stewart). That falls to Kim Novak’s Madeleine, the sphinx in a grey suit. If, men in classical Hollywood, to paraphrase Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), “aren’t attentive to girls who wear glasses,” this has less to do with any deleterious effect corrective lenses have on a woman’s physical appearance than more with the character attributes they are made to signify. The bespectacled woman is curious and desexualized; she takes a step towards being an active subject of vision and knowledge, away from her typical place as the object of the male gaze. Glasses are the sign that she trespasses on his terrain, however tentatively. Midge’s diligent efforts to care for Scottie and heal his past trauma echo the way he relates to Madeleine, casting him in the feminine role. He wears a therapeutic corset; she is there to catch him when he faints. But poor motherly Midge is determined to win his attention nonetheless. To this end, she paints a self-portrait in which she is dressed as Carlotta Valdes, an ancestor of Madeleine’s who died by her own hand. No matter how many times I watch Vertigo, the sight of this painting never ceases to shock me. It is a copy of the artwork before which Madeleine sat mesmerized while Scottie watched from a distance, gripped by her glacial beauty and resemblance to the dead woman—a copy gone wrong. The head does not seem to belong to the body and the lips are curled in a strange smirk. Worst of all are the glasses Midge wears within it, an utter mismatch with her 19th-century gown.
The trope of a woman removing her glasses to suddenly reveal her great beauty is as familiar as it different, but her status as an erotic object changes immediately and immensely. A classic example is Dorothy Malone as a bookstore clerk in (1946), but more recently there is Rachel Leigh Cook descending the stairs to the saccharine sounds of “Kiss Me” in (1999). Give up your active gaze, this convention seems to say, and you will be alluring. In her self-portrait, Midge’s glasses defiantly and anachronistically stay on, framing eyes that stare out to meet the viewer. Is the painting a gag? Perhaps, but it is most certainly a stab at getting Scottie to see her as he sees Madeleine—that is, through the prism of desire. The unsettling canvas is evidence of Midge’s doomed effort to occupy a second position in the field of vision without giving up the first. Upon seeing it, Scottie abruptly leaves the apartment. Midge defaces her creation, pulling at her hair, exclaiming, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” as the scene fades to black. A woman’s attempt to be both subject and object of the gaze has backfired. According to the logic of classical Hollywood, it must.
