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

However, much of this iconography that appears around the symbols of steps and
staircases specifically stamps female protagonists either as femmes fatales, and therefore
establishing their look and confident manner as such, or, as in the case of The Spiral
Staircase, as victims, accentuating the suffering of the young women, and consequently
heightening her vulnerability in a dangerous world. In any case, as the male protagonist
(and the viewer) looks up at the lady descending the stairs, his eyes ascend towards the
light, and thus, usually in a posed shot or positioning herself in an elaborately composed
posture, the woman on the staircase becomes a representation of a sexualised luminosity or
glamour.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, staircases can be connected with sexuality, 93 and their
use implies physical activation, a rhythmical movement of the body. As Freud wrote in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1899):
Steps, ladders, or staircases, or as the case may be, walking up or down them, are
representations of the sexual act. (...) It is not hard to discover the basis of the
comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with
increasing breathlessness, and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the
bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going
upstairs. Nor must we omit to bring in the evidence the linguistic usage. It shows
us that “mounting” is used as a direct equivalent for sexual act. (in Runyon
1992:94)
The feminine presence on the staircase further clinches this implied identification: the way
the woman sophisticatedly runs her fingers down the handrail, almost like a caress, and
finally the balusters that end the handrail are nearly always relevantly phallic (as is the case
in Double Indemnity, for example).
Back to The Spiral Staircase, the “spirality” element of the film augments the terror
and the surprise factor in the spectator. It functions fundamentally as a visual element
proper to this Gothic context: a man in a black trench coat and wearing gloves is depicted
many times as if to impel the viewer to the conviction that he is the culprit responsible for
all the violent crimes. Therefore, the kind of sexualised “glamour” that is diffused through
the characters walking down staircases in the films above, such as Double Indemnity or
Sunset Boulevard, is transformed into sexual threat in the dark and ill-defined “space” of
The Spiral Staircase. The stairs lead Helen into the cellar with the sinister feeling that she
93 It is worth noting that the word klimax was ancient Greek for “ladder”.
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