If one comRares the definition of the adverb given by Priscian and other Roman grammarians (viz.: the adverb is an invariable word, the meaning of which is added to that of the verb just as the meaning of the adjective is added to that of the noun) with the usual definition in modern Latin grammars - as well as with grammars of modern languages - the main difference turns out to be that nowadays adverbs are said to modify adjectives and other adverbs as well.

Most words which are now called adverbs were considered adverbs by Roman grammarians. The overall impression is still one of heterogeneity (L6fstedt 1967: 79; Marouzeau 1949: 11; Booth 1923: IX). The adapted definition is not sufficient to cover the characteristics of these words.

I will examine what modern grammarians have to say about the adverb as far as morphology and phonology, semantics and syntax are concerned. On morphology, I will remark that the classification needs no revision. What is problematic is only the meaning of the term ‘invariable'. This term will be discussed in ch. 5. The semantic subclassification, which is in fact the only subclassification given, will appear to be rather unsatisfactory, especially with respect to so-called manner adverbs. The syntactic remarks, finally, if understood as a system of generative rules will be shown to produce various types of incorrect utterances and not to produce certain correct ones. In the discussion about syntax the notion of modification will be accepted as such. A further analysis of this will follow in ch. 6.

Morphology and phonology

The adverb is an invariable word (Szantyr: 170; Kiihner-Holzweissig 1912: 255 (using the term ‘unflektierbar’); Ernout-Thomas 1959: 1; Blatt 1952: 33, etc.). This characteristic is one it shares with words belonging to other categories, such as prepositions, conjunctions, interjections. For example, Szantyr (: 170) mentions prepositions and particles (see ch. 8, n.2.) as other classes of invariable words. As in ancient Roman grammar it seems feasible to speak of ‘comparison of adverbs’ (expressions like: ‘altissime is the superlative of alte; diutius the comparative of diu’), which suggests that by ‘invariable’ is still understood ‘uninflected for Case, Gender and Number'. Degree of comparison is apparently not considered an inflectional category. This question will be discussed in some detail in the next chapter. I only mention one exception, viz. Bos (1967: 107), in whose opinion degrees of comparison form ‘a system of inflectional categories'.

In this chapter I will discuss a number of problems that are inherent in the study of a dead language. Next, I will expound what consequences these general problems have for the choice of the material. Finally, I will justify the use of linguistic universals in studying Latin adverbs after a brief exposition of the nature of this concept.

Problems o/the use o/a closed corpus

Some of the most important problems one has to face when undertaking a syntactic study of some aspect of the Latin language result from the fact that Latin is a dead language. The lack of native speakers as well as the fact that the corpus that has come down to us is almost definitely closed gives rise to certain difficulties, mainly of three types: (i) concerning productivity; (il) concerning grammaticality; (ill) concerning the adequateness of the corpus as to variety of constructions. These factors are complicated further by the uncertainty of the manuscript tradition.

Productivity

It is impossible to decide which of the utterances we find exemplify productive formation types and which do not. Some of them may agree with rules that were productive in former stages of the language, others with rules that possibly had not yet come fully into use. A decision could be reached by comparing stages of the language - assuming that the construction underlying the problematic utterance is attested in other stages - and’ by distinguishing different social strata. There is, of course, a large number of comparative studies, but most of them take the total system insufficiently into account and concentrate on details. The investigation of different social strata is difficult on account of the lack of material and has been carried out mainly from an aprioristic psycholinguistic point of view. Cf. Happ (1967: 64-78) on Hofmann (1963).

Since a division into productive and unproductive constructions is difficult, it is hard to decide which constructions should be descrIbed in the grammar and which should be referred to the lexicon as being idioms (De Groot 1956b: 22-4).

The problem of productivity is furthermore connected with the problem of grammaticality, which will be discussed shortly.

There are two frequently used terms I would like to clarify.

Diegesis

The narrative world of the film, conceived as a unity. The two main areas in this study where a distinction has been made between the diegetic and the non-diegetic are with the soundtrack and the audience. Music or sounds which are diegetic can be heard by the characters within the film. A soundtrack added to the film afterwards will normally be non-diegetic: Marion does not hear the pounding violins in PSYCHO. But sound effects may also be non-diegetic: the characters in JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK do not hear the machine gun shots which punctuate the breaks between the film's acts. By contrast, sound emanating from any source within the diegesis – whether or not we can see the source, which may be off-screen – is diegetic. Similarly, a diegetic audience refers to an audience within the film, and is referred to in that manner to distinguish it from an audience watching the film.

In fact, Hitchcock also includes visuals which are non-diegetic, albeit rarely. The shots of dancers swirling to ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ which punctuate the narrative of SHADOW OF a DOUBT from time to time are not, say, flashbacks or what Uncle Charlie is imagining (if that were so, they would be diegetic). They are outside the narrative world, and so are non-diegetic.

Point-of-view editing

Following David Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film (Bordwell 1985: 60), when describing shots in a film, I have restricted point of view to mean optical point of view. In other words, what we see on the screen corresponds to the subjective view of someone within the diegesis: the camera is placed where the person is situated and angled to show what he/she sees. Occasionally Hitchcock will cut in closer along the axis of the look to emphasise something (REAR WINDOW includes shots like this), but this is relatively rare: he usually respects the necessary distance. Point-of-view editing is an elaboration of point-of-view shots into a specific sort of sequence. A point-of-view shot of what a character sees (alternatively called a subjective shot) is followed by a reaction shot – usually in medium shot or close-up – of the person looking, which is followed by another point-of-view shot and then another reaction shot and so on.

Critical positions

There are widely differing opinions about the prevalence of homosexuality in Hitchcock, and it would be useful, first, to look at what are probably the two extremes: the essentially conservative assessment of Robin Wood in Hitchcock's Films Revisited (1989), and the far more radical one put forward by Theodore Price in Hitchcock and Homosexuality (1992). In his chapter ‘The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock's Homophobia’, Robin Wood begins by looking at the claim that many of Hitchcock's psychopaths are coded as gay (Wood 1989: 336-57). In certain cases – Fane in MURDER!, Mrs Danvers in REBECCA, Brandon and Phillip in ROPE and Bruno in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN – Wood is prepared to go along with this; in others – Uncle Charlie in SHADOW OF A DOUBT, Norman Bates in PSYCHO and Rusk in FRENZY – he questions it. However, he agrees that there are strong links between all these characters. In particular, he suggests that most of them are ‘fascinating, insidiously attractive Hitchcock villains who constantly threaten to “take over” the films… not only as the center of interest but even, for all their monstrous actions, as the center of sympathy’ (347-48). This emphasises Hitchcock's ambivalence about such figures and, by extension, about homosexuality, and Wood explores the complex resonances this sets up in the films. He also discusses in detail the Brandon and Phillip relationship, and analyses Rope in terms of both the attitude towards homosexuality at the time and the problems of representing gayness under the Production Code (349-57).

Leonard in NORTH BY NORTHWEST is another murderous gay, and although Wood does not mention him here, he refers to the character's homosexuality in his original chapter on this film (Wood 1989: 133). In fact, Hitchcock cues us to connect the Vandamm-Leonard relationship with the Guy-Bruno one when he repeats the direct punch at the camera delivered by the seemingly straight character at the gay one. In each case – Guy hitting Bruno after the public disturbance at Senator Morton's party; Vandamm hitting Leonard when the latter exposes Eve's treachery – it's as if the (officially) straight character is angrily warding off the sexual threat of the gay one.

Children's cameos

At first glance, children may not seem to be a major feature of Hitchcock's work. They have substantial roles in relatively few of his films, and even in these they are seen primarily in relation to the adults: Hitchcock does not enter into the child's world in the manner of, say, Robert Mulligan. The TV episode ‘Bang! You’re Dead’ is the furthest he has gone in that direction (➢ APPENDIX I). On the other hand, children do in fact make some sort of an appearance in a surprisingly large number of his films and, even though their parts may be small, they are usually vivid. At the most basic level are little scenes in which children turn up as mischief makers, usually at the expense of the adults. Examples include the upper-middle class boys who fight each other and later disrupt the school dinner in DOWNHILL and their lower-class equivalents who, later in the first act, prompt Roddy into behaving foolishly in the Bunne Shoppe; the landlady's children who surround Sir John's bed and create chaos in MURDER!; the cousins who make off with Johnny's bowler hat during the family farewell in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT and the street urchins who, when Mr and Mrs Smith decide to dine alfresco at Momma Lucy’s, appear looking hungry at their table and drive them indoors.

In all these scenes, the children disrupt the adults’ world with their insistent presence. The disruption is particularly in evidence when there is a class difference between adults and children. In DOWNHILL, Roddy gives the boy in the shop an expensive box of sweets for a half-penny, but then rings up £1 on the till, which obliges him to pay Mabel, the shopgirl, £1 in compensation. Mabel later exploits this payment in her story that he is the young man who got her pregnant. IN MR AND MRS SMITH, David and Ann try and outstare the children, but are themselves outstared; here the children are like guilt images, drawing attention to the couple's wealth and their own deprivation.

In The Alfred Hitchcock Quote Book, Laurent Bouzereau includes a chapter on Hitchcock and food, beginning with a bold statement:

Although Bouzereau merely cites quotations from the films – there is no discussion – he at least provides a start. Because of the number and range of examples, food is a tricky motif to analyse in Hitchcock: there is probably not one of his films in which food (and/or meals) is not an issue at some point. I would like to begin by considering Bouzereau's three main categories – food and marriage, food and sex, food and murder – taking into account both the examples he cites and others. I shall also refer to the very useful ideas in Susan Smith's PhD thesis, Cinematic Point of View in the Films of Hitchcock (1997). Smith includes a section on the food motif in Hitchcock, and although she concentrates mainly on Sabotage, she also discusses Hitchcock's use of the motif elsewhere. I have also included meals, because on occasions the food is less important than the eating occasion itself. In the headings which follow, then, and in references to ‘the food motif’, food is an inclusive term: it also implies meals.

Food and marriage

With the striking and symptomatic exception of Miss Lonelyhearts in REAR WINDOW, characters in Hitchcock do not eat alone – they always have company. Hitchcock thereby uses meals to probe relationships – and this is especially true of his married couples. Sometimes the meal is simply a suitable setting to register general marital tensions: the patronising contempt Lord Horsfield directs at his wife in THE PARADINE CASE; the reconciliation breakfast which turns tense when Ann asks charged questions in MR AND MRS SMITH.

A crucial feature of Hitchcock's motifs is that, collectively, they serve to say a great deal about the ‘world’ Hitchcock creates through his films; in some cases illuminating areas which one feels would have surprised him. They may appear fragmentary, but they are, rather, part of a complex, a network of associations which only really emerges when the motifs are considered across the whole of Hitchcock's work. Although it would not be possible to illustrate diagrammatically all of the ways in which the motifs interrelate with one another, the two figures are intended to indicate the dominant patterning of the individual motifs across two basic grids: one dealing with locations; the other with characters.

The locations grid merely groups the motifs according to the sites where they are concentrated. Lowercase letters indicate that the motif also occurs at these places, but less frequently.

The characters grid attempts something more complicated: to indicate the ways in which (most of) the motifs serve to connect the key figures of hero, heroine, villain and the police in a variety of ways. Thus the police typically bring the hero and heroine together under ENDINGS AND THE POLICE. Under CONFINED SPACES there is a quite different dynamic around these three figures, but all three are nevertheless frequently involved in the workings of the motif. By contrast, the BED SCENE usually connects the characters of hero, heroine and villain in separate pairings, so the diagram should be read slightly differently: hero and heroine, hero and villain and heroine and villain are brought together under the motif. FOOD AND MEALS likewise involves all three of these key characters in a variety of combinations.

With other motifs, two of the key figures are privileged. Thus in ENTRY THROUGH A WINDOW, the hero is usually going into the heroine's bedroom. The HANDS motif is used to connect the hero and heroine much more than any other characters. VOYEURISM AND EXHIBITIONISM connect hero and heroine in a frequently complementary manner; Hitchcock's BLONDES in particular are a powerful source of attraction for the hero. KEYS serve to connect the heroine and the villain (villainess in UNDER CAPRICORN) more often than not.

The first bed scene in Hitchcock is when Jill shares Patsy's bed in THE PLEASURE Garden. As Truffaut has suggested, with Patsy wearing pyjamas and Jill a night-dress, there are perhaps suppressed sexual undercurrents to the scene (Truffaut 1968: 33). But the rather playful tone of the scene is less typical of Hitchcock than the film's subsequent, more troubled, bed scenes. When Patsy marries Levet, the ensuing extended honeymoon sequence includes a scene of her waking after her wedding night and being tended by him. Levet seems considerate, but the honeymoon sequence overall serves, rather, to emphasise his moral corruption: in fact, he has little time for Patsy's feelings – all he is interested in is sex. Even at this point in his career, Hitchcock was not only critical of male sexuality but quite prepared to show a honeymoon, that most privileged of romantic experiences, in a negative light.

Later bed scenes are darker. Levet leaves Patsy to return to his work in a West African colonial outpost; Patsy follows him and finds him in a drunken, dissolute state living with a ‘native woman’. She recoils from him; Levet murders the native woman (➢ WATER). As this occurs, Patsy is nursing the bed-ridden Hugh, Jill's ex-fiancé, and Hitchcock effects a brilliant juxtaposition between Levet's murderous hands and Patsy's caring ones (➢ HANDS). This also leads to juxtaposed bed scenes. As Patsy nurses Hugh, the latter in his fever thinks that she is Jill. This is cross-cut with Levet hallucinating that the native woman is coming back to haunt him, and she first appears, ghost-like, over his bed. Levet then comes to reclaim Patsy from Hugh, arriving just as Patsy – acting ‘as’ Jill – responds to Hugh's request and kisses him. The kiss makes Hugh realise who Patsy is, but provokes Levet into threats of violence: Patsy is obliged to return home with him. We next see Levet back in his own bed; Patsy lights a lamp. This wakes him, and he now hallucinates the native woman emerging from the bed to point at some swords on the wall, which he takes as a sign that he should murder Patsy.

In an article on LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (MAx Ophuls, 1948), I wrote of objects in melodrama that:

In other words, as certain sorts of object circulate within a melodrama narrative, they generate associations deriving from the different contexts in which they are found. My project here is an extension of this notion. First, motifs are not confined to objects, but include other features in the films as well. Second, I am looking at the circulation and function of these motifs not just in individual films, but across Hitchcock's work overall, i.e. intertextually. Third, this intertextual context includes films (and other narratives) in general and, in some cases, I compare Hitchcock's inflections of a given motif with those typically found elsewhere. Fourth, although I would now extend my observation about circulating objects to include not just melodramas but all types of popular narrative, theories of melodrama are particularly useful in the analysis of both Hitchcock's films and the individual motifs. Motifs tend to function like ‘melodramatic elements’ within the films, and they may be analysed accordingly. A final point is that the density of meanings generated by the use of motifs varies: a given motif may possess quite striking resonances in some narratives, and seem of little interest in others. In Hitchcock, I would maintain, the associations generated are almost always remarkably rich. A few examples where he has used a motif which is relatively common in other works will help illustrate these points.

The first shot of THE PLEASURE GARDEN shows chorus girls descending a spiral staircase as they come on stage. The penultimate shot of FAMILY PLOT shows Blanche sitting on the staircase in Adamson's house and winking at the camera. Staircases thus frame Hitchcock's entire directorial oeuvre. They are also one of his more famous motifs, mentioned quite often in the Hitchcock literature. Equally, however, they are familiar features not just of the cinema generally, but of cultural forms which preceded the cinema – myths, folk tales, art, drama – so that one needs to look at Hitchcock's use of the staircase in relation to its typical symbolic associations in other contexts.

The traditional associations of the staircase are summarised in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant:

In addition, the staircase has long been a feature of set design in the theatre. Apart from its potential for entrances, exits and visual staging generally, a staircase on stage also provides a ready-made setting for confrontations in which the positioning of the characters has symbolic significance. Hitchcock undoubtedly recognised the dramatic potential of creative set design; in his early years in the cinema, one of his jobs was as art director, and at least two of his sets – in THE PRUDE's FALL (Graham Cutts, 1924) and THE BLACKGUARD (Cutts, 1925) – have significant staircases. The expressionist influence is also relevant here: both The Blackguard and THE PLEASURE GARDEN were made in Weimar Germany. The prevalence of staircases in Weimar films has been well documented by Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen (Eisner 1973: 119-27).

Confined spaces is a loose term. I wanted a designation which covered two sorts of setting in Hitchcock: on the one hand, small private rooms such as bathrooms and toilets; on the other, a variety of public spaces, from jails to telephone booths, which enclose the characters in more or less claustrophobic ways. There are also more elaborate examples: the action of LIFEBOAT is entirely confined to the lifeboat itself; that of ROPE to the increasingly claustrophobic apartment of the two killers. But my concern here is with small rooms and with ‘boxed-in’ spaces such as booths, bunks and trunks, where the sense of confinement functions in two broadly contrasting ways: either as a retreat/hiding place from the world or as an imprisoning cage. Although there may seem to be little connection between a bathroom and a telephone booth, my argument will be that, if we look at how they are used across the films, a pattern emerges.

Bathrooms and washrooms

Only occasionally are bathrooms and washrooms in Hitchcock's films used purely for conventional purposes, such as taking a bath (as in THE LODGER). More often, something else is going on. In particular, they occur repeatedly in the spy movies. In THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), there is a minor example: Bob finds the MacGuffin hidden in a shaving-brush in Louis Bernard's hotel bathroom. In SECRET AGENT, the bathroom scene is much more significant. Shortly after Ashenden and Elsa have first met, Hitchcock stages a long scene between them in their hotel bathroom, in which Ashenden reads Elsa a decoded message and they discuss both the terms of their fake marriage and their forthcoming mission. The General enters during this, and he becomes so upset that Ashenden has been ‘issued with’ a wife and he has not that he assaults a toilet roll, an act which Hitchcock must have been delighted to have got past the censors. Throughout the scene Elsa has been putting on her makeup, but when she presents her beautified face for Ashenden's approval, he is so rude that she slaps him, prompting him to slap her. ‘Married life has begun,’ she comments, tartly.

In THE LODGER, this motif has several inflections. (1) The detective Joe is proud of his handcuffs, telling Mr Bunting that they are ‘a brand new pair of bracelets for the Avenger’. When Daisy joins the two of them, he declares cockily that when he has put a rope round the Avenger's neck – he uses the handcuffs to mime the hanging – he’ll put a ring round Daisy's finger. (2) Joe then threatens to handcuff Daisy and, when she resists and flees, pursues her up the back stairs. In the front hall he catches her and carries out his threat. Daisy's scream brings the Lodger to the top of the stairs and he gazes down intently at the little drama being enacted below. Despite Daisy's distress, he does not interfere. (3) When Joe later concludes that the Lodger is the Avenger, he arrests him, putting him in handcuffs. The Lodger escapes, but his inability to use his hands gives him away, and he is pursued by a vengeful mob. As he climbs over some railings, the handcuffs get caught, and he hangs, helpless, whilst the mob attack him. Learning that he is innocent, Joe does his best to stop them, but it is in fact the prompt appearance of The Evening Standard, with its account of the capture of the Avenger, that serves to draw the mob away.

Here the handcuffs are used, first, to symbolise Joe's notion of marriage – as soon as he has proved himself by capturing and executing the Avenger, Daisy will become his prisoner. But the Lodger's fascination with this scene suggests something else: that he is turned on by the idea of Daisy in handcuffs? That he is seeing himself in Daisy's place? If we take it that, as with most of Ivor Novello's films, there is a gay subtext (➢ HOMOSEXUALITY) – as in Joe's earlier comment: ‘I’m glad he's not keen on the girls’ – we could even read this moment as suggesting that the Lodger might rather like the idea of being handcuffed by Joe.

In his original Cahiers du Cinéma article, Philippe Demonsablon divides ‘The Hand’ into four subheadings: ‘floating hands’ (e.g. the Lodger's going down the banister rail); ‘strangling gestures’ (e.g. Ashenden's hands reaching out as if to strangle Marvin after the train wreck in SECRET AGENT); ‘grasping hands’ (e.g. Bruno reaching down into the drain to retrieve the cigarette lighter) and ‘indicating hands’ (e.g. Kate's father publicly pointing out Philip as ‘her betrayer’ in THE MANXMAN). Apart from these groupings, Demonsablon makes only a few points about the overall significance of the motif: to hold something is to have it in one's power; hands tend to have an autonomous will; ‘is it an accident that most of Hitchcock's killers are stranglers?’ (Demonsablon 1956:26). Altogether, he lists some thirty-five instances of the hands motif in Hitchcock, but even within the films he covers, there are many more; it is unquestionably one of the director's most significant motifs, and all I can do here is refer selectively to its usage. In Part I, I look at certain cases where the hands motif is used ‘expressionistically’ in Hitchcock (➢ A melodramatic motif: hands). Here I touch on an argument begun in Part I – that the director's use of hands is essentially ‘melodramatic’ – but my main concern is to use the hands motif as a means to examine key aspects of the sexual politics in Hitchcock's films.

Male hands / female hands

A moral distinction between male and female hands in Hitchcock goes back to THE PLEASURE GARDEN, his first film. In it, a naïve young woman, Patsy, marries a man, Levet, whom we know to be unworthy of her: immediately after the honeymoon, he sets off alone for a colonial outpost, where he promptly sets up house with an anonymous native woman and turns to drunken dissolution. Responding to his lie that he has had a fever (his excuse for not writing), Patsy travels out to be with him. Her arrival shocks Levet, and when an opportunity presents itself, he drowns the native woman (➢ WATER). At this moment, Patsy is tending Hugh, structurally the film's hero, who genuinely has fever.

The prevalence of the motif of threatened or actual falling from a height in Hitchcock's films is well known, but I am unaware of any attempt to analyse it. At a relatively basic level it refers to a fear of the abyss: another metaphor for the chaos world. Noting that we are never told how Scottie in VERTIGO is rescued from his predicament at the beginning – suspended from a roof gutter over a terrifying drop to the ground – Robin Wood suggests that: ‘The effect is of having him, throughout the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss’ (Wood 1989: 111). Although VERTIGO is perhaps the only Hitchcock film in which the Falling motif (as I’ll abbreviate it) may be seen as operating throughout in such a metaphorical sense, there are plenty of moments when characters find themselves suspended over dangerous falls, and several villains – and, indeed, one heroine – die in falls. I would like to start with the villains.

One feature of the motif is the number of films in which it is Hitchcock's preferred method of ‘dealing with’ the double, or – whether or not he/she is a double – the person who carried out the crime blamed on the hero. Although Hitchcock said to Truffaut that it was a ‘serious error’ having the villain rather than the hero hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in SABOTEUR (Truffaut 1968: 122), the outcome – in which the villain falls to his death – is typical. Fry's fall here is echoed in Valerian's off Mount Rushmore in NORTH BY NORTHWEST: in each case the hero witnesses the death fall of the figure whose crime (the opening act of sabotage; the murder of Townsend) has been blamed on him. This pattern may also be seen in TO CATCH A THIEF. Foussard, who planned the crimes (the cat burglaries), is killed in a similar manner; his daughter Danielle, who executed them, is caught by Robie as she slips from a roof gutter, and is held by him over the drop to the ground until she confesses. Likewise in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN: in the climactic fight on the runaway merry-goround, Bruno tries violently to force Guy off, but is then himself killed in the ensuing crash.

Vampires and blinding

About fifteen minutes into THE LODGER, there is a close-up of a light in the Buntings’ lodging house growing dim: money needs to be inserted in the meter. This theatrical device – as William Rothman points out, like lowering the house lights (Rothman 1982: 14) – is in fact to cue Ivor Novello's star entrance. When he appears on the doorstep, wearing a hat and with a scarf over his mouth, he is intended to look like descriptions of the Avenger. But there is another association, missed by Rothman, though since noted by Richard Allen (1999: 223). With his pale face and darkened eye sockets, Novello also evokes Max Schreck's eponymous vampire in NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1921), an association reinforced when he reacts nervously to the brightening of the lights as a coin is inserted. Nor was this the first time that Novello's star image had been linked to Dracula: in THE MAN WITHOUT DESIRE (Adrian Brunel, 1923), his character spends two hundred years in a state of suspended animation in a tomb. This is an early example of one of Hitchcock's most complex and elusive motifs: the symbolic use of light/lights, which occurs in many of his films, but nearly always allusively.

JAMAICA INN indicates how allusively. First, as Mary approaches the inn in a coach, the driver's refusal to stop at such a cursed place is another oblique reference to NOSFERATU. Second, the wreckers, who operate at night, cause the shipwrecks by removing the cliff-top beacon, thereby consigning the sailors to a darkness which kills them. As in NOSFERATU, the evil spreads out over the terrain, extending to the beaches where any sailors who survive the wrecks are promptly murdered. Eliminating the light thus leads to mass murder; what Mary is required to do in the climactic scene is restore the light and thereby save the sailors’ lives.

JAMAICA INN also preserves one of the most significant features of the Dracula myth: the fear of daylight. Neither Joss, the leader of the wreckers, nor Sir Humphrey, the mastermind behind them, is ever seen outside during the day, and nightfall arrives abruptly at one point in order to sustain this.

Hitchcock's use of the Milk motif is by no means as sophisticated as his use of the cigarette lighter in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, but it illustrates the distinctiveness of his point of view. Within the cinema generally, motifs could be said to operate across two broad continua: from conventional to unconventional and from simple to complex. Hitchcock's motifs consistently gravitate towards the unconventional and/or the complex, with milk illustrating the former and the cigarette lighter both features.

In particular, Hitchcock's motifs continue to accumulate significance throughout the individual films, and throughout his films overall. In order to explore this further, I would like to pursue the notion that the resonances of a given motif may be analysed through theories of melodrama. In its direct appeal to the emotions of the audience, and in the way that it charges acts, gestures, statements with a wider symbolic significance, melodrama is particularly relevant to an understanding of Hitchcock's films. Equally, the condensed, emotionally resonant signification typical of melodrama may be seen operating in many motifs. Viewed as melodramatic elements in a narrative, motifs serve to crystallise issues and preoccupations.

The role of melodrama in articulating the motifs invites a psychoanalytical approach. In his seminal article ‘Hitchcock's Vision’, Peter Wollen runs through a number of Hitchcock's themes and motifs, discussing them from a Freudian point of view. I would like to quote one passage in some detail:

This book examines Alfred Hitchcock's work through his recurring motifs. Motifs in general are a neglected area of Film Studies. Although the decade by decade multi-volume American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (see Munden 1997; Krafsur 1997; Hanson 1988, 1993 & 1999) includes a ‘Subject Index’ for each decade, and several film guides have either a ‘Category Index’ or a ‘General Subject Index’ – all of which include motifs – these are no more than listings of the films in which a specific feature occurs. Actual discussions of motifs in the cinema are rare, and there is only one publication in this area which I have found useful to this project and would like to acknowledge at the outset: Michel Cieutat's two-volume Les grands thèmes du cinéma américain (1988 & 1991). Despite the title, Cieutat includes motifs as well as themes, and he looks at the ways in which recurring elements in Hollywood films reveal (sometimes hidden) aspects of the culture which produced them. Nevertheless – to anticipate one of my arguments – whenever Cieutat's categories overlap with those in Hitchcock's films, there is a clash: Hitchcock's motifs do not fit the general pattern: see, for example, Milk in Part I and STAIR-CASES in Part II.

I have had a substantive interest in motifs in the cinema for many years. This book arose out of my research. Although it is confined to Hitchcock's films, it is also informed by an awareness of the functioning of motifs in films generally. In cases where one of the Hitchcock motifs has resonances with examples elsewhere, I discuss the similarities and differences. My response to the not unreasonable question: ‘why another book on Hitchcock?’ would be that (a) this aspect of his films has been surprisingly ignored and (b) approaching Hitchcock's films from the point of view of his recurring motifs offers a different slant on his work, one which I hope will reveal new insights.