A Violent Progression

Rear Window: presents Grace Kelley as the attractive, vibrant and rousing blonde who is sexually drawn to Jimmy Stewart. Her sexual connection to his L.B. Jeffries gets her caught in his metafictional murder-mystery stage play. Her devotion to Jeff eventually interjects her into harms way as Thorwald finds her snooping in his apartment. He tosses her around a little, but nothing too serious.

Vertigo: Here Madeline/Judy, the braless, mystical, and strong-headed blonde exhibits a resilience stronger than Kelley's Lisa Freemont, and is also more sexually aggressive ("muss me a little"). Her desires keep her attracted to, and in the grip of, Stewart's Scottie. She is in the end rewarded for her devotion not only through the symbolic rape (forced to climb the bell tower stairwell) but also through her own death-by-falling.

Psycho: If Rear Window tells us that female sexuality can lead to trouble, and Vertigo claims that the one punishment for expressed sexual want is death, then Psycho drives the nail further into the coffin through claiming that not only can the sexual female die, she will and must. The violence reaches its epitome here and continues past Psycho only to end in self ridicule with Marnie, where Hitchcock presents the viewer with the ultimate of evils: the woman who not only was aware of her sexuality, but also sold it. I use self-ridicule because whereas earlier films depicted lead males with rational explanations behind control issues (curiosity, obsession, and now insanity) Marnie's Mark rings of a shell of his conflicted forerunners: a controlling figure with no justified reason to control, a rapist with no reason to assault his bride. While we didn’t see Marnie's mother outwardly punished for being a prostitute, the incapacitation   due to the aging woman is passed down to her daughter.