The Dream

This feminization of Scotty reaches its pinnacle in the surrealist dream sequence: “Scotty actually lives out Madeline’s hallucination, that very hallucination…and he dies Madeleine's death. His attempt at cure having failed, he is plunged into the ‘feminine’ world of psychic disintegration, madness and death,” the world representing everything an insane Madeleine shared with him (Poague 42). In another perspective Linderman points out, “Scotty conceivably could dream Madeleine, but instead he dreams Madeleine’s dream, reprojecting as his own object language that has supposedly registered her fantasies” (64). The two become one, which leaves the audience, to this point identified with Scotty, in an awkward and uncomfortable position. “The male spectator is as much deconstructed as constructed by Hitchcock’s films, which reveal a ‘fascination with femininity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis’” (Brill 41). Scotty’s loss of self confuses us but also leaves us open for another character or perspective.