"Truth beauty" as "Waking dream" : Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and the "Mystic oxymoron" of Keats's poetry

Abstract

Wandering among Vertigo's misty trees, bathed in what Robin Wood describes as "an atmosphere of romantic dream" (115), Hitchcock's Judy/Madeleine accrues the mysticism of a Keatsianfemmefatale in this enchanted critic's eyes. After paraphrasing the penultimate question of "To a Nightingale," "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?" Wood oraws in fact a comparison between her and Lamia, Keats's serpent woman, in terms of their alluring "mysteriousness [as] representative[s] of another world" (114) that mere mortals can never comprehend. Wood refrains, however, from pursuing his intriguing VertigoKeats connection, and so have subsequent Vertigo critics3 despite Richard Allen's suggestion that "[o]ne can discover fertile correspondences between Hitchcock's films and works of English romanticism in the romantic-ironic vein" (256). This paper attempts to redress this omission by considering the deeper implications of Wood's and Allen's observations in terms of affinities ratfier than influences, for despite Vertigo's Keatsian-like vision of existence, Hitchcock never cites Keats as a source of inspiration. Indeed, it can be argued that the Vertigo-Keats association recalls Harold Bloom's uncanny theory of apophrades or intertextual haunting whereby Hitchcock appropriates Judy/ Maaeleine's state as he likewise contends with an absent/present shade. When viewed from this Bloomian perspective wherein Keats, like Carlotta Valdes, looms as a pivotal phantom, Vertigo becomes what Gerard Genette would label a "metatextual" film narrative (4) haunted by evocations of Keatsian thematic and stylistic preoccupations. The focus of this essay is this overlooked Vertigo-Keats kinship.