I've struggled to write this piece on Shadows of Doubt for several days. I hope you don't mind if I get a little frank with you here. This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Ashton E. Charlie isn’t a widow, but she does have a streak of independence that her uncle finds threatening at one point, young Charlie states that she doesn’t want to be “an average girl in an average family.” Charlie’s situation serves to represent a dramaticized version of women’s role under the patriarchy: either become a domestic figure (a dutiful wife) or risk death. But why does Uncle Charlie wish to kill his niece? Uncle Charlie kills widows who use their husbands money after they’ve died, citing their being “fat, horrible, greedy animals” as reason for their death. This idea is evidenced by a moment of classic Hitchcockian dark-comedy in which one of Charlie’s friends compliments her new jewelry by saying, “I’d just die for a ring like that”. Charles took the ring from the finger of one of his victims and placed it on Charlie’s, marking her as his next victim, an idea which we see play out at the end of the film when he attempts to kill her. In addition to its symbolization of marriage and domesticity, the ring represents death in a literal sense. Thus, the offering of a ring as a symbol of marriage, and of Charlie’s becoming a woman and subsequently a mother, is a sentencing to death of her freedom. However, Charlie does not desire a life of housekeeping and domesticity, she wants to escape the fate of her mother (dinner, then dishes, then bed). No longer able to enjoy the freedom of childhood but not yet a woman who is busy with domestic duties: she feels lost. Before her uncle arrives, Charlie suffers from an overwhelming sense of ennui. The gifting of a ring has one obvious connotation: marriage, but in this instance the “gift” is not actually a welcome surprise, but rather it represents a sort of death sentence. Young Charlie utters these words as her uncle takes out an emerald ring and places it on her finger. If you gave me something, it would spoil things”. “We’re not just an uncle and niece, it’s something else.
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