From this scene we may begin to extrapolate the peculiar but internally consistent moral system which Hitchcock exposes in this film.  After Marnie relives the accident, she speaks a line that sheds some light on the moral ambiguity of the world of Marnie: “I’m a liar, a cheat, and a thief – but I am decent.”  Decency, in the Hitchcockian schema, is the stick by which a character is measured – and it has no necessary correlation to her actions in the world of traditional morality.

Indeed, Mark himself falls afoul of the classical system of morals – he is, after all, a blackmailer, possessive, arrogant, and solely interested in the well-being of himself and his “property.”  He is possibly a rapist.  By contrast, Mama, in her current manifestation, is a veritable saint: she takes in a needy family, goes above and beyond in her babysitting, and preaches nothing but the most traditional values.  Nonetheless, Mark is painted as a hero and Mama as a villainous harlot.1 Mark's breakthrough act of heroism, indeed, takes the form of his act of enveloping Marnie in his yellow bathrobe of freedom. The irony of granting her true freedom by enveloping her into the confines of his garment is all but lost in the shuffle. Similarly, Marnie’s robberies are dismissed offhand as irrelevant – after all, her true flaw is her savage failure to resign herself to a life in the classical feminine role.  Once that “moral” shortcoming is sorted, she is once again “decent.”

 

Throughout Hitchcock’s work, issues of moral ambiguity have arisen.2  Consistently, his characters have exhibited behavior both good and evil – but, in previous films, this has been the sum of the moral impetus.  In Marnie, by contrast, Hitchcock stares his system of morality in the face and produces a considerably more clear tract on which values he holds most dear, at least in his narrative capacity.