ABSTRACT
Stage Fright, like so many of Hitchcock's films, appears on one level to be centrally concerned with overcoming this duality in woman and subduing her resistance to being placed entirely within the boundaries of patriarchal law. In respect, the film provides a version of the myth of patriarchy's overthrow of 'matriarchy'. This chapter attempts to show with each film it analyzed, however, the overthrow is never complete or final, for reasons which have to do, in part, with the nature of male desire itself. Given the fact that male desire and the texts which express that desire are, so to speak, divided against themselves, it is not surprising to find that occasionally the 'individuality' of the other decisively triumphs over the efforts to assimilate and destroy it. On more than one occasion the chapter quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work seems to capture more than that of any other thinker the impossible dialectics of desire.
