Hitchcock cleverly extends this line to muddy Marnie’s gender identity.  Critics1 have described Marnie as overly masculine on the basis of her self-sufficiency and her various bits of anti-male dialog; this much is true relative to the gender norms of her time.  Notably, though, in Mark’s dialog after Marnie’s regression, he explains that “if a child is denied affection, it will take it wherever it can find it.”  Such a deliberately gender-neutral pronoun as “it” was even less prone to replace the standard “he” in the 1960’s than it is today. Hitchcock seems to imply that Marnie's gender identity balances not simply between explicitly masculine and explicitly feminine traits, but rather between a feminine state - its natural state in the Hitchcockian world - and an ambiguous, androgynous middle ground.

Herrmann supports the concept of Marnie’s peculiar dialectic between the masculine and the childish-androgynous through both his meter and his orchestration.  In those instances where Marnie’s criminal-cum-masculine behavior takes the fore, for example, his compound meter takes the form of a crisp, march-like duple overlaid atop a subtly stated triple meter. Classically, the triple meter is associated with waltzes and, by extension, the love themes of Hollywood melodramas - thus it falls more neatly in the category of the feminine than the masculine.  

By contrast, Herrmann supports those moments when Marnie is in her naïve state of perceived freedom with instrumentation closely coded to childlike fantasy: overstated high strings flinging impulsively skyward on the scale, punctuated by harp.*  Similarly, he shifts her theme from its lush, effeminate expression in the string voices to the non-gender-coded oboe at moments when she is in a directly manipulative state.*  Often coded as “other,” the oboe, taken in combination with the fact that it appears at moments at which Marnie “hates” and “doesn’t need” men, strongly supports the notion of Marnie as a sexual “other.”