Winston Graham’s v Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) all distress and the caring tender Mark (Sean Connery) from Hitchcock’s 1960s Marnie)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve not given up on Winston Graham because his 8th Poldark novel, The Stranger from the Sea, revealed a precipitious falling off. A series of 7 remarkable historical novels set in the 18th century is not to be dismissed. What I’m doing is reading a few more novels by him which are not historical novels, reading good books on historical novels (among them Jerome de Groot’s The Historical Novel) and trying a couple of historical novels set in the 18th century by other people: one I’ve begun which I’m thus far enjoying is Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask. Donoghue’s is the first type in Graham’s typology: most of the characters really did once live and she is in effect doing history imaginatively.

Marnie (Tippie Hedren) stealing thousands from firm’s safe

The burden of the song: Like Graham’s other novels this one delves unusually into sexual unhappiness in marriage (including another rape); Hitchcock turned it silly Freudianism. It might be said that Hitchcock’s movie is an absurd travesty of Graham’s novel, but I’m not sure Graham’s novel is itself really sheds any humane light on sexual and psychological distress — especially in his attitude towards Marnie’s mother. He does calls attention to “the rough deal women have” (his words). That’s a start.

One source for his book was an incident of infanticide that from my reading I know is not uncommon:

while he lived in Cornwall during war a mother with 3 young children came to live there as an evacuee. Graham presents her as simply promiscuous; she’d let men in her bedroom and throw her children out while a man was there. She got pregnant and, fearing ostracism, exile, loss of her own children, she hid the pregnancy and when she gave birth, strangled her newborn in a newspaper.
A neighbor had assisted in the labor, and unfortunately this woman began to hemmorrhage so the dead baby was found. She was acquitted on grounds of insanity. As we shall see, this is a version of what happened to Marnie’s mother.

I’m beginning to think that Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction condemned more than hard-boiled detective stories with women-hating males at the center, more than the deluded use of irony which allows so many books to have evil narrators at the center, more than the hardening of readers such reading encourages: he was pointing out how a whole slew of modern books may be regarded as documents showing the sicknesses of our society. Graham’s book by substituting a woman for the central figure and not asking us to read the book ironically does this in spades.

A second core of Graham’s novel was a real young woman he once came across: It’s based on a young girl who was hired to take care of young children as a nanny. Gradually it emerges she was psychologically disturbed. She would take baths three times a day, and had an inordinate love of horses, loved to ride, and hated men. He says he read a letter she wrote to her mother showing this. He then says she was let go and he heard later on committed suicide.

The moral lesson he draws is the narrowly selfish middle class one of “be careful who you hire to take care of your children, with the implication you should do it yourself – meaning women should.” Nothing about the woman or her suicide. Nothing to ask himself where such a hatred could come from. Nor in the original (as far as he tells us) was the problem the girl was liar or stole things. Nothing of her behavior beyond the above is told. What he did was account for the babysitter’s behavior by making into into one of the children whose mother had gotten pregnant, killed the infant and was imprisoned. What Hitchcock did was substitute the story of the woman who let men into her room and shoved the children out as an explanation for Marnie.

This topic is of interest because the movie at least continues to be famous and no one discusses the book which does have a marital rape (if not at the center at any rate there) nor the portrait of a mother. It is counterproductive and not feminism because there’s no understanding of the causes of a girl’s psychological distress. When you’ve read this one and go back to Graham’s historical novels you see them differently: why he chose to set his novels in the 18th century is perhaps that 18th century novels do examine sexuality at least women’s and men’s centrally

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Marnie centers on a supposedly helplessly sociopath liar and thief who is a woman. In both film and book here is the central character and conceit (so to speak): this the story of a young woman who when we meet her is busy changing her identity, looks, serial numbers (identity cards), clothes & hair color too. She is stashing away a huge amount of cash she has stolen. She then visits her mother with a story about Mr Pemberton who is her husband which the mother doesn’t investigate. She is supporting this mother. In the book we learn little of the mother until the back story emerges. In the movie the mother (called Bernice and played by Louise Latham) is presented as a neurotic bigot who teases Marnie by preferring another small child and clearly dominates her. Marnie though does not depend on her mother or live with her; she leaves (escapes) after the visit and gets another job. Apparently this is what she does: get a job, steal a huge amount of cash, flees, change her identity, gives most of the money to her mother to support her, and and gets another job — all the while lying to her mother by pretending she’s married and her husband just does not want to visit.

This is what is presented in both movie and book.

It could thus be a misogynistic book, but I really think it’s another of Graham’s curious works of instinctive quasi-feminism — he means it as feminist. I didn’t read it that carefully because I grow very impatient with hard-boiled detective fiction — I’ve hardly tried any or gotten through any — but I know from those I’ve opened and Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction (justly famous) these often have these cruel misogynistic males at the center, Mickey Spillane and irony is a cover (as in Lolita) for offering up delectable exercises in raping, torturing, murdering, bad-mouthing women. Most of the time they are mindless: the protagonist’s name is put in agreement with verbs.

The real impulse behind Booth’s famous book is his detestation of this popular form. Booth shows that the ironies supposedly used here are a cover-up to allow male readership (and female perhaps) to read cruel trash and tell themselves what they are reading is really reprehended by the author and themselves. The Rhetoric of Fiction was written during the 1950s when this kind of fiction had had a supreme embodiment in the hypocritical Lolita where Nabokov has it both ways: he gets to masturbate in front of the reader and flatters himself and the reader they really detest what they are doing in the person of Humbert Humbert and anyone Lolita is a total tramp and deserves to be used, exploited, her mother killed &c&c.

In Graham’s book at first Marnie seems as hard and mindless as the usual detective story, but as we progress we find that although she never does give us subtle psychological meditations (only Le Carre and tremendously successful writers in this vogue dare that and not too often), by the end we have a fascinating portrait of a woman twisted by her society.

It includes a motif I’ve come to expect of Graham: the marital rape. As in the Poldark novels, the rape itself is not described in any details, only enough suggested to feel a terrible violation of Marnie.

Marnie is told in the first person and as an incessant stream of consciousness that gradually widens out. I found it a kind of page-turner at times, and then again was bored by being asked to keep track of minutiae of facts (endemic to this type). I also find the conventions of hard-boiled not-telling inner truths directly or keeping the mind of the central figure semi-blank or not understanding herself irritating.

In the original book Mark is a businessman, not (as in the movie) upper class. Graham’s Mark is high in the last firm in the book Marnie tries to fleece. He falls in love with Marnie because she is beautiful and strange and he does sleuth successfully to discover her previous position and catches her at a new theft and attempt at a new appearance. He demands she marry him and then he’ll protect her. He discovers she seems terrified of sex, won’t let him near her, and he rapes her that first ight. After that unlike Sean Connery he is does not attack her again. There is another male in the company, one Terry, who is also attracted to her and she to him, a much less moral man. Mark brings Marnie back to the firm after himself replacing the money. Then he says he has married her so naturally she will not work anymore but stay home. He says they have an invitation to Mark’s house to gamble and he does not want to go. Marnie does so she concocts a story about a girlfriend which Mark appears to believe and then Marnie goes to gamble each Saturday night — lying to Mark about it.

Alas, it’s somewhat justified for the man, Mark, is not just married to her and wants to help her and by the end she returns to him and begins what might be a decent life — we can’t tell. He has (I rush to say) not done that again, not forced himself on her again.

One of the fallacies of the book is how she gets away with lying. It’s just improbable. Now in the book gradually Marnie comes to like, trust Mark and when she is found out further (an old employer comes to a party) and Mark finds out a great deal and wants to go to the police, she decides to flee again. This time though guilt assails her, she puts the money back, and visits her mother, stalling for time. She arrive to find her mother dead, and her uncle and an aunt who brought her up there. She goes into the mothers papers and discovers the book’s back story. Graham’s novel is a gothic.

It is structured like a gothic for at long last we get to a back story, and what is it, but of Marnie’s mother — whom Marnie has been lying about and protecting and stealing for for years. Turns out Marnie’s mother murdered a baby son she gave birth to. A while back I reviewed two books which made a strong impression on me: the first, McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, demonstrated that infanticide is 1) omnipresent in many books; and 2) central to social stability throughout history (killing unwanted infants) and 3) most of the time suspected in such books and in the real world of societies too the woman is suspected and is blamed for killing the baby when most of the time she didn’t do it (shades of false accusations of rape) but either the child died in a miscarriage, was still born, from the horrors of childbirth before the 20th century; or she is often driven to it because she has gotten pregnant out of wedlock and will be shamed, ostracized, her life ruined in the community.

The third is the case here: Marnie’s mother in Graham’s book murdered the neonate after denying she was pregnant in the last trimester in order to hide it from all those who would despise and throw her off. Her husband had fought in WW2 and the way she supported herself was to be a prostitute. Not uncommon. If she were pregnant when he came home or had a baby, he’d know. Some time after he returned, he died, but she was suspected and accused of killing the baby. She went to prison and then was later released (exonerated). She then spent the rest of her life hiding this after she was exonerated by a court: — that is improbable, but then this is a novel. This woman in the book brought Marnie up to hate and fear sex for (among other things) the way the woman supported herself and Marnie was through quiet prostitution along with a menial job — not uncommon for women in history.

Marnie’s mother (Louise Latham) in Hitchcock’s movie: she often has just that irritated smirk on her face

This story as I’ve told it speaks for itself I should say. I ordered the movie from Netlfix and it arrived two days ago and I watched the movie for the first time last night. I also have a book called The Making of Marnie— by Tone Lee Moral, a very early film study — of the type so familiar today but not when it was done. I chose to read the book because of my interest in Graham’s Poldark novels, desire maybe to write a paper on historical fiction set in the 18th century and growing love of things Cornish, books and films (yesterday I watched one made out of Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove” about abysmally impoverish people who make their living gather seaweed to sell it for manure on the dangerous cliffs).

In the movie much of this is changed, and in the movie Hitchcock said the central issue is Marnie doesn’t want to have sex with Mark. (Graham never said Marnie’s dread of sex was the real crux of the book.)

Why in Hitchcock’s movie did the mother teach Marnie to hate sex. It seems that either the father died or disappeared and to support herself the mother went in for prostitution. The child was forced out of the bed where she slept with the mother and had to allow the man in. She had to sleep outside in the outside room. One night she cried too much, the young man came out and tried to soothe her, grew irritated, started to shake her, the mother defended her and before you know it a brutal incident emerges and the child grabs an iron stick for stirring a fire and hits and kills him. The mother “takes” the “rap;” says she did it and ever after lied about it.

A very different story from the one in GRaham’s novel where a woman gets pregnant and is driven to kill the neonate (rather than be exposed as a prostitute and ostracized) and then is accused, goes to jail for it, and hides that.

At the heart of Hitchcock’s movie is Marnie’s refusal to have sex with Mark. This is what seems to be the great problem to Hitchcock. Mark looks upon this as her tremendous illness and what she has got to get over: poor thing. And of course long-suffering noble Mark — except that one instance of rape which is presented so discreetly if you blink you’ll miss it and seems to have not much effect on Marnie afterward in the movie (nor to be fair in the book). She just carries on.

This rape scene was very controversial in the movie it’s said. Oh the film was the one which clinched Sean Connery’s career (as OxBow Incident began Anthony Quinn’s) and he was Mark. I mention The Oxbow Incident because it was a genuine success d’estime (and deserved it) and was a financial flop. Not only was Hitchcock’s movie a financial flop, it was ridiculed. Only years later did it come to be seen to be worth studying, fascinating, to some a “great” movie.

In Graham’s book the marriage is coerced strongly (as it is in the movie), but it’s not done with violence. Mark discovers Marnie is a thief of a high order: stealing vast amounts of cash and threatens to turn her in except they marry. She thinks to herself (in the book) that this will prevent him testifying against her. So there is a sort of bargain.

Promotional shot of Marnie on horseback (Forio)

Then what happens in the book is Mark insists that Marnie see a psychiatrist. (The first script for the movie by Joseph Stefano included the psychiatrist of the book.) We read of weekly long sessions in Graham’s book where Marnie lies, makes up stories, but, after she learns her mother’s back story, is broken down to tell the psychiatrist what we have known all along: her father died when she was young, mother remained alive and supported them on a menial job. Marnie was was brought up by a kindly aunt who lived with and on the mother, Lucy Nye. Marnie as soon as she grew up herself supported her mother by stealing, thus sparing her mother the awful office jobs she had had to endure.

In Graham’s novel, Marnie has been followed by Terry who urges her to return, instead she returns to her house and goes on a hunt. Mark shows up; in the book she lures Mark into a bad accident and her feelings afterward and thoughts (at long last) about her mother and all she has said to the psychiatrist and past bring her to a realization Mark is her great friend and she is last seen returning to him.

I’ve discovered a theme of intense loneliness is important for Graham — Graham’s Marnie is intensely lonely and Graham’s central hero for his Poldark novels, Ross remains a renegade, a man apart, ever traveling and keeping to himself, bitter within, seeing how unjust and awful are society’s arrangements, sickened by them The ending of several of the Poldark novels were Ross comes home to Demelza, stands outside watching her and feels comforted he has this place of order, stability, peace to return to is just the way Marnie ends, only it’s the woman who has been a radical criminal type and now finds her way back to a dependable kind partner.

The movie changes much of this. In the movie absurdly Mark is not only upper class but Philadelphian (with a Scottish accent as Connery’s is still there). We have this upper class milieu which is fake utterly, which includes a tender loving father-in-law dressed absurdly (not in the book where there is prosaic sort of mother who lives off her son’s business.) There is a promotional still where we see Marnie talking to her father-in-law. Shades of La Traviata.

In the movie all is done that counts by the powerful Sean Connery. It’s he who finds out about her mother, he who takes her there, he who is kindly overlooking the mother’s story (but deeply disapproving), he who focuses on Marnie’s dislike of sex. Not that the book Mark likes this but he does not see it as so central, and anyway he is in rivalry with Terry.

In the movie, Marnie does not nearly kill Mark but herself gets into an accident which appears not to hurt her at all except emotionally. She does bang her horse, Fornio into a wall. Fornio is so badly hurt he must die. She runs for a gun and hysterical shoots this horse. In both novel and movie , we are asked to believe that during Marnie’s childhood the one creature she really loved who loved her was this horse, that she had the money to keep and ride it. (Maybe this is why Hitchcock made Mark upper class so when they visited the horse it would not seem improbable to a British audience). It’s after this that in in the movie Mark takes Marnie to visit her mother.

Hitchcock regarded Graham’s book as fodder with which to make a very different story, one with a strong hero (not in original); a previous screenplay by a Evans Hunter kept the transposition and did not include the rape but this was rejected. Jay Presson Allen wrote the play we now have; in the feature she comes across as not caring about the improbabilities and saying the rape was not really a rape. (The usual way of justifying rapes.)

In Graham’s book Marnie does ride and she does damage Mark, come near killing him in a hunt towards the end of the book as I said. So we could say it’s partly a woman’s film, one third of the triumvirate was a woman. But the truth is the first play was writen by Evan Hunter who was fired because he balked at writing the rape scene in the way Hitchcock wanted it changed. The Heart of Me– a misogynistic take on Lehman’s book had a woman playright, but the director was a male.

The great climax of the movie is how Mark breaks down Marnie’s carapace, she relives the incident where she was put out of her mother’s room, the man came into the room when she cried, violence ensued and she killed the man. Marnie breaks up into whimpering and a kind of crazed monologue. We are to believe this releases her, and when she returns home with Mark they will now begin to have a “normal” life together: she will have sex with Mark. Mark of course will continue to support the mother who is left there after herself confessing how she has ruined Marnie’s life by bringing her up to hate men and sex. But she did not mean this. So we are allowed to feel for her.

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Some thoughts on the book as part of Graham’s oeuvre. Graham’s novel is not one of your respected high status books so you may have to buy a cheap copy on the Net. I found one which is part of an omnibus book of Graham’s “best” mysteries. It seems that highly unusually Graham really repeatedly delves the problem of unhappiness in sex in married life. He again and again presents marital rape in his Poldark books; he repeatedly shows married couples unhappy because of an unhappy sex life. He shows men raping women, men murdering women out of jealousy (or their lover) or from too much alcohol (that’s what happened to Verity’s husband years ago we are told, and naturally she forgives him for it’s years later.)

The first instance is the rape of Elizabeth Poldark by Ross Poldark in Graham’s novel of the same name, life just goes on. For Marnie she goes about her business the next day, breakfast &c. And he rapes her no more, only a couple of times trying to seduce or soften or be suggestive but she does not let him near her. At the end of the book when she returns to him (after she has had a sort of revenge by luring him into hunting and then into doing something beyond his capacity so he broke bones and was almost killed) we may guess eventually gradually now she’ll learn maybe to accept and even like sex.

This is what presumably happens to the second woman in Graham’s Poldark novels. Morwena experiences marital rape nightly and it’s sufficiently suggestively describe a few times that we know the man is sadistic, a foot fetishist. She begins to lose her firmness of stance, become shattered psychologically and she is impregnated. Finally she has a hard birth and he is made to understand by a doctor he must leave her alone; after a while he does start up again. Our author (Graham) is kind and this husband-rapist is murdered. She flees her wretched family who coerced her into the marriage and to a young man she loved. He see she cannot bear sex and is tender and loving and leaves her be. We see them marry and it’s implied no sex yet. Book ends. The next book opens and we hear she had a child. Presumably like Marnie she began to trust, then bear and then like it. But alas, we are not shown what happened at all.

This kind of thing though one sees was of interest to Graham. This trajectory of the woman coming to trust or learn or change was not to Hitchcock. Instead she breaks out of her shell by him making her hear and tell the tale in front of him and her mother. But there is this peculiar man’s point of view that in both cases (book and movie) we begin with a rape. The author wants to have the woman broken down some more first.

I’m interested in the subject of rape, how it’s presented (which is usually rare in mainstream novels and almost never of marital rape)

Of interest is that Mark in the book is really an ordinary law-abiding person, perfectly conventional, not at all pathological and not a rapist type at all. (Graham’s favorite heroes are not violent men: Dwight Enys, a sensitive doctor; Ross normally is not violent to women at all, but loving and kind even if a strong man. Strength does not issue in physical violence against others in Graham except when someone is attacked.) People watching the movie say there is something awry in the Mark character: perhaps they can’t believe he would live with a woman without sex — or are embarrassed to think so so something must be wrong. In the feature that goes with movie, some people opined Mark is enjoying his role, titillated by it.

The most common promotional still shows Marnie on her horse: see above and this too;

In the movie she goes off and kills her horse; she does not do this in the book

This is an archetypal image of the femme fatale: the woman on a horse (the horse is phallic power, something outright denied Victorian women during the worst repressive phase of the era, when it was not done even to ice-skate). The woman with the gun. The woman on a horse is seen in cover illustrations of Mary Braddon’s Wilkie Collins’s books – and DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Remember Hitchcock made a version of Rebecca. All evil, when DuMaurier said she was partly on Rebecca’s side, and Max de Winter was a murderer.

Well Marnie (book and film) made me think more about the way rape is and is not treated in the Poldark books — sexual experience is open and central to 18th century novels the way it is not in the 19th century. In Graham’s Marnie the transgressive heroine (twisted by her society and childhood) is coerced into marriage, but it’s not done with violence. Mark (as I’ve said) discovers Marnie is a thief of a high order: stealing vast amounts of cash and threatens to turn her in except they marry. She thinks to herself (in the book) that this will prevent him testifying against her. So there is a sort of bargain.

Two, he insists on sex the first night. So he rapes her — not presented in the book after the initial suggestive sentence just the way it’s one in Warleggan between Elizabeth and Ross — and then afterward nothing happens. There are no fatal consequences — except to Ross and Demelza’s marriage and later to Elizabeth’s with George because she conceives a child he can’t endure. As in the rape of Elizabeth Poldark by Ross Poldark in Graham’s novel of the second name, life otherwise just goes on. For Marnie she goes about her business the next day, breakfast &c. And he rapes her no more, only a couple of times trying to seduce or soften or be suggestive but she does not let him near her. At the end of the book when she returns to him (after she has had a sort of revenge by luring him into hunting and then into doing something beyond his capacity so he broke bones and was almost killed) we may guess eventually gradually now she’ll learn maybe to accept and even like sex.

This is what presumably happens to the second woman in Graham’s Poldark novels. Morwena experiences marital rape nightly in Graham’s Black Moon and Four Swans and it’s sufficiently suggestively describe a few times that we know the man is sadistic, a foot fetishist. She begins to lose her firmness of stance, become shattered psychologically and she is impregnanted. Finally she has a hard birth and he is made to understand by a doctor he must leave her alone; after a while he does start up again. Our author (Graham) is kind and this husband-rapist is murdered. She flees her wretched family who coerced her into the marriage and to a young man she loved. He see she cannot bear sex and is tender and loving and leaves her be. We see them marry and it’s implied no sex yet. Book ends. The next book opens and we hear she had a child. Presumably like Marnie she began to trust, then bear and then like it. But alas, we are not shown what happened at all.

The first episode of Poldark movies brings home to me how Graham is unusually frank and interested in marital sex — the dissatisfaction between Enys and Caroline is not just a matter of diet and exercise. How it fails and creates terrible miseries for people. Another couple is presented as having fraught difficulties because of sexual life does not cohere to supposed norms.

This bothers me. There is this peculiar man’s point of view that in both cases we begin with a rape. The author wants to have the woman broken down and does not always punish the males who do this but at times justifies them (Ross in his behavior to Elizabeth, Blamey to his wife, Mark Daniels to his — the latter two murdered their wives).

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Now comments on the movie as movie: Several issues are at the heart of a comparison of the film with its source — which is what interest me. The first is easiest to deal with — swiftly. The mise-en-scene and cinematography of the movie was dated when it was filmed. Lee (and the people in the feature to the movie, some famous, which is part of the modern DVD) justify the refusal to film on location at all and the various symbolic techniques which break naturalism (the screen goes red when Marnie is deeply distressed about her past) are instances of German expressionism. Perhaps the film would be better in black-and-white — as it seems to have been originally filmed. In color it’s all conventional pastels. The use of painted backdrops, of people not on real horses but wooden something-or-others with countryside behind, does detract. The studio rooms with the action as a drama on stage is fine once you accept this is an older style movie.

As for the inner life of the novel (first person personating a woman in an incessant stream of consciousness with story going forward interpersed with memories), what Hitchcock puts in its place seemed to me didn’t work. He is fascinated as were so many by Freudianism and when the “back story” of the mother — driven of course by Mark who is the big he-man presence of the film, acting, knowing, doing everything (but except once apparently fucking his wife, Marnie) — is finally presented we get this sudden dissolving of Hedren as an actress to a whimpering kind of neuroticism. It’s hard acting. We are to pity her. Why? Because you see she had this mother who hated sex and taught her to hate sex.

To me it’s remarkable all the respect Hitchcock gets. Yes he brings up intense important issues of great violence and terror and misery between men and women, but then he most of the time just shows them at their most sensational and improbable and then walks away.

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I am bothered by the way the character, Marnie in the movie is discussed. The discourse endlessly begins with how she’s a “liar.” This word has a powerful dishonoring connotation, so powerful that even today one must not call someone else a liar even when you and they know the person has been lying. In fact lying is so common and when people protest against a lie, it’s usually not the lying but the content they can’t stand and don’t want to admit to disliking.

In the book we gradually see Marnie’s is a defensive lying; she has to lie a lot because she’s getting away with a lot — so to speak.

Ellen