I would like to extend the discussion of melodrama in the motifs by looking at the ways in which one motif – the BED SCENE – is elaborated to the point where it opens up an investigative path through two films, REBECCA and MARNIE. Here both condensation and displacement are in evidence in the workings of the motif.

In Part II, I discuss the BED SCENE in Hitchcock. Most of his films have at least one such scene, and their associations are nearly always negative, to do with pain and suffering. The bed scenes in REBECCA and MARNIE are typical in this respect, but they also function in a more developed way. First, Hitchcock here uses the scenes in a subjective sense, to explore the inner world of each film's heroine. Both REBECCA and MARNIE belong to Hitchcock's ‘stories about a marriage’, one of Robin Wood's five plot formations. By telling this story in a crucial sense through the bed scenes, and from the heroine's point of view, Hitchcock achieves a distinctive insight into the workings of each film's marriage. Second, the bed scenes enable Hitchcock to focus on female sexuality in the complex and suggestive manner of the finest Hollywood melodramas. This has to be done through intimation rather than directly – hence the use, in Rebecca in particular, of displacement – but it is nevertheless implicit, woven into the details of the scenes.

In each film, there is an early bed scene in which the heroine has a disturbing dream, prompted in each case by her mother (figure). Each film then has later bed scenes which elaborate on the fears in the dream. In REBECCA, the dream – which is rendered purely aurally – is about Maxim and Rebecca or, rather, what Mrs Van Hopper, the heroine's employer (and her first mother figure), has said about them: Rebecca's beauty; Maxim being a ‘broken man’ since her death. In The Women Who Knew Too Much, Tania Modleski discusses the Oedipal material of REBECCA (Modleski 1988: 46-52) and elements of it are already implicit in these early scenes: the heroine feels that she can never compete with Rebecca (structurally another mother figure) in terms of beauty and the winning of Maxim's love.