ABSTRACT
AT T H E E N D O F V E R T I G O , Scottie, like Stefan at the end of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), awakens – too late – to his failure to recognize the woman he loved. Vertigo is not a “melodrama of the unknown woman,” as Stanley Cavell (1996) calls the genre that also includes such films as Stella Dallas (1937), Now Voyager (1942), and Gaslight (1944). And yet, as I observed in “Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock” (2004) (an essay published several years after Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze (2012, first published 1982)), an “unknown woman” plays an essential role in Vertigo and in a number of other Hitchcock thrillers.
