These authors-Wilde most overtly-were in revolt against the stark ethical dichotomies of an earlier Victorian moralism: and their insistence that good and evil are more implicated in one another than Britain’s quasi-official moral guardians were inclined to allow struck a responsive chord with the reading public of the United Kingdom. Hyde (1886), to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In addition to numerous other works now mostly forgotten, this motif is central, for instance, to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. On the contrary, the film is built on a theme that was a prominent component of the British culture into which Hitchcock was born in 1899: namely, the theme of the half-good and half-evil double, presented here through the juxtaposition and interaction of the benevolent, virginal teenage girl Charlie Newton (played by Teresa Wright, and hereafter referred to as Young Charlie) and her murderously sinister uncle, Charlie Oakley (played by Joseph Cotten, and hereafter referred to as Uncle Charlie), after whom Young Charlie is named. Yet, before examining the American character of the film, it is important to make clear that Hitchcock’s roots in the culture of late-Victorian Britain are by no means effaced in Shadow of a Doubt. Like many of his great American precursors, Hitchcock takes as his central concern the persistence of evil in American civilization. 3 It is, I maintain, the first film in which he emerges as predominantly an American filmmaker and creates a major work deeply rooted in the American cultural tradition. In the following pages, I will examine Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as registering a crucial moment in the process of Hitchcock’s Americanization. From 1939 onwards, the relation between the culture of his original homeland and that of his adopted one is a frequent presence in Hitchcock’s cinema. Also like them-and unlike such more extreme instances of cultural “extraterritoriality” (George Steiner’s term) 2 as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, or Samuel Beckett-Hitchcock crossed no linguistic barriers and instead went on to engage, in his work, the Shavian (or pseudo-Shavian) paradox that Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language. Like them, he was neither or, more accurately, both. Auden, who cannot be described as unambiguously either British or American. He thus became one of those modern artists, like Henry James, T. Allowing for numerous international trips, he remained in the United States for the rest of his life, residing in California, making movies in Hollywood, and eventually taking American citizenship 1. Britain would never again be home for the London-born Hitchcock. On March 1, 1939, Alfred Hitchcock-accompanied by his wife and daughter, a personal assistant, a cook, and a maid-boarded the Queen Mary in Southampton in order to set sail for New York. THE PERSISTENCE OF EVIL IN HITCHCOCK'S SHADOW OF A DOUBT AMERICAN CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
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