Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is one of his representative works dealing with voyeurism as its subject matter. Critical views on this film have mainly been diverged in two directions: one focusing on the film’s meta-cinematic structure and the other emphasizing the gender-based power relations. Especially the latter view has been propelled by Laura Mulvey’s important essay on the ‘gaze theory’ in cinema in which she mentioned this film as an exemplary work showing the imbalanced sexual power aligned with vision and gaze.
This essay adopts the interpretations on this film developed so far, and at the same time tries to analyze the film from another analytic angle, reading it as a social allegory reflecting the reality of postwar America. Unlike the perfect families and stable lives reprised on 1950s TV, American society at that time underwent crises and changes regarding gender roles and social norms. Returning veterans had difficulty in being relocated into the society, and more and more women wanted to have their positions outside their homes. In viewing this film as a critical comment on postwar America, this study focuses especially on the function of spaces in the film. The wheelchair-bound protagonist, Jeffries, who cannot leave his private space and his girlfriend Lisa who actively crosses the private and public space seem to reflect the changing American society in which the boundary between traditional gender roles was being destabilized.