" Hitchcock domesticates Lang’s image of the staircase from earth to heaven (or hell) and Murnau’s supernatural expressionism to re-create the staircase as the key expressionist space of modernity that links the everyday public space of the street, the hall, and the downstairs to the private, sexual, deadly secrets contained in the upstairs room, a space that, in the words of Dennis Zirnite, ‘is incarnated by those who unleash the darkest human impulses.’. On staircases, as a site of interaction between worlds, public and private, and as a site of conflict between Uncle Charlie and young Charlie (from Richard Allen, Hitchcock's Romantic Irony): Is the implication that wedlock is really deadlock? Are Charlie’s fears about the killing mediocrity of family life being every so underhandedly confirmed? Those desires of independence and freedom almost do kill her yet she rids herself of them only to land in the tomb of marriage and family life – so she really has not escaped death after all” (152). Yet their ‘marriage’ occurs during a funeral. There they stand, the redoubtable couple, churched and together, the detective and his recently ‘cured’ wife, with all contaminating traces of her uncle’s influence – that is of her own disturbing desires – expunged she is (they hope ) clean. “ Hitchcock is not only convicting civilization of its illusoriness –the priest, stalwart representative of society’s moral values, eulogizes a murderer – but is also, in effect, marrying Graham and Charlie. On family, and young Charlie's movement from dissatisfaction, to incestuous union, to an uneasy (re)affirmation of marriage (from James McLaughlin, “All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt," commenting on the final scene):
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