Hitchcock’s Mothers

In watching a collection of Hitchcock’s works, we can begin to see that the mother role is an important factor in most of Hitchcock’s work. In retrospect, we can see that the mother is a convention used by Hitchcock to enhance embedded meanings in his work. The mother figure becomes salient in his works Notorious, Psycho, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Shadow of a Doubt. Many critics argue that the image of the mother that Hitchcock creates in Psycho and Notorious are representations of his own upbringing. However, Hitchcock remained a somewhat private person and it is impossible to depict these statements as true. The mother figures may actually be a projection of Hitchcock’s world and the times that he lived in. In this paper I investigate the meanings behind the maternal characters in some of his most successful films as they are hardly the same, but they do function as a way to advance the plot and add depth to the complexities of the characters’ minds Alfred Hitchcock never said anything negative about his mother. In fact, most quotes of Hitchcock regarding his mother have been nothing but positive. There is a story that claims Hitchcock having to report to the foot of his mother’s bed, confessing his daily activities to his mother. This would seem a little twisted in the eyes of today’s society - being forced to list off his sins to his mother’s ears. Nonetheless, the period in which his mother brought up Hitch retained a very common Catholic tradition for the children to give bedside confessions every night (McGilligan 9). Although strict, his mother was hardly different from most. With this being said, it is hard to claim that Hitchcock’s mother had smothered her son, or was at all a horrible mother. In the collection of Hitchcock’s renowned works, there are two types of mother’s being defined. Both types of the mother, typically