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Lisa In Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window

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Hitchcock has treated Lisa as a remarkable portrait of American personality and Pomerance describes her thus: “There she is now, scampering up a fire escape, sliding onto a window ledge in her high heel, invading a presumed murderer’s cave, finding irrefutable evidence that something dark and unthinkable has undeniably been happening there, and transmitting that evidence back home” (Pomerance 161). Lisa by becoming a sleuth on behalf of Jeff wants to prove that she can be the sort of girl he needs and their marriage is possible. She now shows that women can also have power, agency, activity, and adventurous triumph within their grasp. No other character in Rear Window exhibits such derring-do, the prowess or the skill (Pomerance 161). Lisa proves that nothing is impossible …show more content…

In Vertigo (1958), the European beauty Carlotta Valdes, the subject of a portrait is withdrawn and refined, a cultivated look , an object for the dominating prerogative of the male gaze as Berger John notes. The woman in the portrait suffers reduction, subjected to appraisal in general, she is primped, tailored, adjusted, clipped, coloured and smoothed and bedecked all to make for beauty and is regarded central value of Old Europe. American culture does not regard beauty as principal value, for them beauty is related to function, practicality and to mobility. If an American can admire European beauty it is only with respect to the foreign. For an American beauty is superseded by “effort and accomplishment, the ability to make and do and the success that comes when objects and situations are put together, produced, effected, and charged with the power of function” (Pomerance 162). Hitchcock emphasises that a man is not required for such a triumph. Lisa can be equated to Lady Palmer the wife of Potter Palmer who brought richness to Chicago. Lisa Fremont, for her part is an all American girl not because she is good to look at, but in the tradition of Mrs. Palmer who is a d0-gooder and

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