The issue of “robbery” deserves further scrutiny.  If, as Hitchcock establishes, Marnie’s fundamental sin is her departure from femininity1, then the robberies – themselves a symptom of her affliction – must arise as an extension of this flaw.  It is in this vein of thought that an interesting comparison arises between the images of purse, safe, and vagina.  Modleski discusses Hitchcock’s tendency to interpret purses in flagrantly vulgar ways throughout his work – in the purse, after all, lie the jewels.  Price, by contrast, expounds upon the rather obvious concept of Marnie as a simple prostitute – a notion well-defended by Abraham’s tract on the Freudian female castration complex2.  Notable is his comparison between robbery and castration.  Hitchcock alludes directly to this connection during Strut’s initial robbery report: “Always pulling that skirt down over her knees like she was guarding a national treasure.”

Given all of these premises, a larger truth begins to emerge: Hitchcock, in Marnie, associates the men’s safes with the same castration anxiety that drives Marnie to rob them.  Indeed, the safes are veritably vaginal in nature: though they are vulnerable to castration, they also possess both a physical similarity and a symbolic analogy to vaginas insofar as they form cavities (with jaw-like opening) which envelope and guard valuables.  By the end of the film, the power of one man’s safe will have effectively castrated wayward Marnie.

Marnie cannot overcome her inability to steal from Mark (as she must submit to her love for him, evidenced by the love theme's reappearance). He has tamed her and, through his dominance, removed her ability to "castrate" his safe's valuables.

The ultimate relevance of such potential parallels between Marnie and the safe lies in their significant contribution to the gender ambiguity both of Marnie and of the men at large in the film.  Additionally, it refines the link between Marnie’s effort to overcome the fears of her past and Mark’s idealized state – that is, one that has allowed him to overcome the (castration) fear of watching his safe robbed.

Though the safe concept per se appears only sporadically in Hitchcock’s other work, gender ambiguity on the part of men appears quite often.  Vertigo’s Scottie, for example, is forced into a corset whilst carrying a surrogate phallus in the form of his cane.  Though men like these are generally “cured” in films like Vertigo, only in Marnie does Hitchcock provide (in the person of Mark) an example of a man of certain gender identity.  Though Mark does store his valuables in a safe, he relies not upon his surrogate purse but upon his own dominance over his would-be thief in order to deter her.