The Green Dress:

Femininity in a Masculine World

After the first scene, Melanie abandons her black suit and dons a decidedly more feminine outfit (part of her gradual feminization). She wears a sea foam green dress with matching jacket, mink coat, silk scarf, suede gloves, and sports blindingly red polished nails. Her purse is also more feminine, resembling a uterus in its broad, slightly circular shape and top-loading clasp more than the phallic shaped clutch from before. Yet despite her concerted effort to blend in by becoming more effeminate, Melanie still stands out among the crowd.

If San Francisco's Union Square was a feminine space because of its association with fashion, Bodega Bay is a decidedly masculine space because of its reliance on the fishing industry and chicken farming. Melanie, looking like she is straight off a runway in Milan or Paris, is terribly overdressed for Bodega Bay, a place where women wear simple frocks not haute couture. Melanie stands out the most in the scene in which she retrieves the boat from the fisherman and sails across the bay. When she first approaches the fishermen on the wharf, they stare at her with, what seems to be, half masculine gaze and half disbelief. Most striking, however, is her appearance in the boat. Paglia compares the visuals in this scene to art: "In the eerie artificially subdued light, Melanie glides on her mission with preternatural ease. A woman in a fur coat with a birdcage in a rowboat: it could be a Surrealist painting by Dali or Magritte." [7] The visual presented to the viewer is utterly absurd and if were taken out of context, much like Melanie is out of her proper context, would make no sense at all.