Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

governess, Margaret (Fay Baker), but eventually he is the one to be killed by the poison
and Margaret is sent to jail.
With its sophisticated construction and creepy setting, along with the technique of
flashback (Victoria’s story is told retrospectively), the film displays the Gothic features
mentioned above: the hints of sexual abnormality, the interference of an inscrutable past
(when Victoria sifts through Alan’s past to discover the apparent charmer is a murderous
monster), and the seclusion and ultimate entrapment of the heroine in the old mansion
(contrasting with the bright San Francisco daylight and the busy streets of the city). The
climactic scene is then transformed into something threatening and real: when Alan and
Victoria are face-to-face in the child’s playhouse, we learn that he had pushed her and
made her fall from the hill. All these elements touch upon conventions found in the noirrelated
period film.
In conclusion, the themes in the Gothic romance, namely those related to psychic
illnesses, fear of the supernatural and paranoia were extensively used by Hollywood in the
forties as a sub-branch of the “woman’s films”, aimed at the vastly more numerous female
audiences. But again, this classification of “woman’s films” reinforces my argument that
film genres are not so easily definable. Trying to fit films tidily into genres may be
misleading, and some films that may be classified as “Female Gothic” 24 in this case can
simply be left out. Therefore I argue that, within certain historical and cultural contexts,
film production inscribes a certain instability in a cycle of films, normally starting with the
success of a film or films and leading to a categorisation of genres. Film noir is, in this
regard, no exception. While some critics were pointing up some of the films that belonged
to the invented genre “film noir”, one might speculate what elements are necessary for a
film to be fitted in this category, and what are those that foreclose the possibility of a film
being considered a noir production. Some of these rejected films usually had women as the
main protagonists, but then conflicts arose regarding the possible classification as film noir,
as indeed the films chosen insist upon the role of men as the main protagonists to the
screen.
24 The term was actually coined by Ellen Moers in 1977 as an attempt to come up with a different reasoning
about the Gothic novel as a literary genre. She questions the link between the Gothic settings and the female
sexuality, but for this purpose, the term she has created shows that even within the Gothic novel, the generic
categorization comes into conflict.
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