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Journal of Gender Studies

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How to be a Hero: Space, Place and Masculinity in The

39 Steps (Hitchcock, UK, 1935)
Angela Devas
Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Angela Devas (2005) How to be a Hero: Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, UK,
1935), Journal of Gender Studies, 14:1, 45-54, DOI: 10.1080/0958923042000331489

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0958923042000331489

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 How to be a Hero: Space, Place and
Masculinity in The 39 Steps (Hitchcock,
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UK, 1935)
ANGELA DEVAS

ABSTRACT This paper explores the representation of the hero in the 1935 Hitchcock classic The 39
Steps. The film, while drawing on the original adventure story of The Thirty Nine Steps, adopts a
modernist sensibility in its cinematic depiction of technology and its representation of a bantering
heterosexual couple. However, this does not displace the gendered, classed and racialised role of the
hero. I examine the construction of the hero via discourses of masculinity, linked to the notion of the
flâneur, that is, the right of the male hero to wander, gaze and appropriate different space and place
for his own use. Hannay, as the hero, also has the correct credentials of class and ‘race’. This
permits him a particular imperialist position which allows him the right of disguise and
dissimulation. This freedom assures him a final bourgeois romantic union, consolidating his position
as the hero. The role of the hero is one that is not available to women, who are either punished or
only permitted to take up the role of heroine, the complementary and lesser partner to the hero.

KEYWORDS: Class, femininity, flâneur, hero, Hitchcock, imperialism, masculinity, race

Introduction
The object of this paper is to articulate the characteristics necessary to become a filmic
hero by following the progress of one in particular, Richard Hannay, throughout The 39
Steps. By a filmic hero, I mean one who is able to occupy the role of the leading male
protagonist, one who is at the centre of the action, and around whom the narrative is
organised. This paper argues that it is the masculine hero who carries the necessary
discursive weight to be able to do this. Richard Hannay is an accidental hero, who has a
series of adventures in London and Scotland, from where he returns to the capital to
vindicate himself, dispose of the villain and be rewarded with the heroine. Hannay is
caught in the classic Hitchcockian trap of being pursued both by the villains and the police
(Glancy, 2003). Throughout the narrative Hannay, as played by Robert Donat,
demonstrates a stylish wit and urbanity, giving an air of light-hearted fun to the whole
enterprise. The film came to my attention because The 39 Steps offers us a modern hero,
shorn of the outmoded trappings of empire that are more conspicuously present in the
original book. Hitchcock takes a classic imperial text and re-invents it as a modernist one,

Correspondence Address: Angela Devas, London College of Music and Media, Thames Valley University, St Mary’s
Road, London W5 5RF, UK; Email: angela.devas@tvu.ac.uk
Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 March 2005, pp. 45–54
ISSN 0958-9236 Print/ISSN 1465-3869 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journal DOI: 10.1080/0958923042000331489
 46 Journal of Gender Studies

combining tropes of the adventure story with aestheticised technology, comedy, and a
narrative which includes the feminine sexuality which is so determinedly absent from the
original novel.
The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, was written in 1915, in the middle of the First
World War. It follows the traditional outlines of the boy’s own story, or the yarn.1
Hitchcock’s adaptation makes a number of changes, the most significant of which is the
remaking of the hero to include a heterosexual romantic liaison, and also the introduction
of a number of other women. For reasons of space, my focus in this paper is on the
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Hitchcock version of the film.2 The 39 Steps forms part of Hitchcock’s British cycle of
films (Yacowar, 1977). It is an action comedy and exemplifies some of the characteristics
that Hitchcock pursued in his later, American films.3 In this paper, I look at the
construction of masculinity in the film, and examine how particular attributes of
masculinity coalesce around the figure of the hero; I link these to theories of the flâneur,
that is, the right of the male hero to wander, to gaze and to claim a temporary occupancy of
space and place wherever this may be. This is a gendered privilege, usually denied to
women; in the film, I argue that punishment is meted out to women who transgress the
spaces and places they are expected to occupy. This droit de flâneur is also a classed and
racialised position, that is, one that only certain males are eligible to occupy by reason of
their whiteness and their class. In The 39 Steps the tropes of the spy story draw upon
narratives of imperial adventure that require the hero to renounce the domestic arena, at
least temporarily, and submit himself to tests of intelligence, strength and endurance
(Dawson, 1994).

Masculinity and the Hero

The noun ‘hero’ signifies a particular clustering of attributes: masculinity, an ability to
lead the narrative forward, and omnipotence of action. The beginning of the film
establishes Hannay’s suitability for the project of hero-dom; he is (re)presented as a
wanderer as he enters a theatre alone among other scurrying footsteps. The initial shots of
him do not reveal his face (Rothman, 1982) and when the camera finally pans round to
reveal his face in midshot he is centred among the audience, luminously lit. But, as
Rothman suggests,

Hannay is no ordinary spectator. Within the music hall audience, he stands out by his
height, the ease and grace of his bearing, his well-tailored coat.
(Rothman, 1985, p. 115)

The audience is working-class, as evinced by their acquaintance with working-class sports

such as football and boxing, their hands-on approach to working with poultry, the flat caps
and the general roughness. The music hall itself was a place of working-class
entertainment, particularly prominent in London and with close links to the breweries
(Stedman Jones, 1998). The lively, bantering music-hall crowd in the stalls are occupying
and using a masculine space, a place of leisure and entertainment. Middle-class men might
frequent these places alone but not middle-class women. The presence of Annabella, the
spy, is thus already illicit.
 Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 steps 47

In the literature of D.H. Lawrence, among others, Knights argues (1999), the domestic
environment is frequently one from which the hero has, at all costs, to escape. Many
narratives of masculinity involve a flight from the feminine sphere, an entrapment in the
world of women, where a man cannot display the correct type of masculinity. The process
of running away re-affirms his distance and his opposition to that which threatens to engulf
him. The woman, the source of this anxiety and discontent, is often herself removed from
the narrative in order for the man to escape any taint of the feminine or its influence. This
allows the hero to signify his freedom from familial constraints and his superiority to other
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classes of people. Dawson (1994) argues that this masculine quest can require encounters
with a dangerous woman, and a triumphant return to the safety of the home at the end of
the narrative, but by the end of the nineteenth century the masculine adventure was
exclusively concerned with male camaraderie and bravery. This is the generic convention
adopted by the novel but abandoned in the film with its emphasis on masculinity and
romance. The danger from Annabella does not represent domesticity but illicit sexuality
and a potential promiscuity that represents the antithesis of bourgeois domesticity.4
Hannay is not in flight from domesticity but in search of a correct coupling, one that he
later finds in the romantic closure with Pamela.
In The 39 Steps Hannay is only loosely connected to his domestic environment. He is
living in a borrowed flat; his name, unlike the names of the other tenants, is not engraved in
the front entrance, but stuck on with a piece of paper. The furniture inside the flat is
covered in dust sheets, indicating Hannay’s transitory state and highlighting his unstable
and impermanent lifestyle. Annabella invites herself to his flat but even away from the
streets, Hannay remains at ease and in control. He is not perturbed by Annabella’s
advances, merely mildly intrigued by her apparently lurid tales of espionage. He swiftly
adapts to Annabella’s cloak and dagger behaviour, albeit rather light-heartedly. When she
lurches into his room in the middle of the night clutching a fragment of a map and with a
knife stuck in her back saying, ‘Here you are, Hannay, they’ll get you next’, Hannay is
well-placed to take up the demands of being a secret agent.
Hannay escapes from the flat disguised as a milkman and catches the train to Aberdeen.
On the way, he makes a daring escape on the railway over the Forth Bridge. Here, although
the train has already passed Edinburgh, it is crossing a border, a border between the town
and the country, the metropolis and the moors. In the scene at the Forth Bridge, the hero
bestrides modern technology, literally embraces it, looking down at the river with its
parade of steamers and shipping, and is able to make his escape. Hannay then finds himself
in a mountain glen, crossing an ancient stone bridge in front of a painted mountain
backdrop.5 What links these disparate location and studio shots is a radio broadcast of
Hannay’s description, melding technology and nature, the future and the past together
under the pervasive reach of the modern wireless. Hannay is literally able to straddle both
areas as he hangs suspended from the girders gazing down at the depths below. The shots
of the bridge show up as strong dark lines, emphasising its aesthetic value as a piece of
modern engineering and the domination of ‘man’ over nature, reinforced by Hannay’s
domination of the narrative. Bold iron columns lead down to the river, where a ship is
moving, passing under the bridge. Above, the train starts to leave and the powerful
locomotive continues with its journey. At this moment Hannay’s point-of-view shots
allow us to inhabit the position of the hero, to feel for ourselves the precariousness of his
position. Although from the beginning Hannay has been the hero of the film, this moment
allows the audience to identify with his exhilarating mastery of the environment and to
 48 Journal of Gender Studies

occupy his place in the narrative as he deploys his skills of hero-dom to flee from potential
captors. The sequence dissolves to a final, redundant shot of the Forth Bridge.
The bridge is mentioned in Hannay’s speech at the political rally, to great approval from
the Scottish audience:

When I travelled up to Scotland a few days ago on the Highland Express, over that
magnificent structure the Forth Bridge, that monument to Scottish engineering and
Scottish muscle, I had no idea I should be addressing an important political meeting.
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The bridge functions as an example of imperial achievement, spanning nations – it

marks a symbolic frontier between England and Scotland. Hannay’s fantastical escape
from the train and then his dazzling suspension in mid-air remind us of the breathtaking
power of modern technology, furthered by the hero’s ability to make use of this iconic
moment of engineering triumph to facilitate his escape to the wild and open
countryside.

The Flâneur and the Impossibility of being a Flâneuse

Hannay occupies the role of the flâneur, able to wander at will and sample the
delights of the city. A flâneur is a product of modernism, a person of the city,
experiencing its delights, gazing at its phantasmagoric and dazzling array of people.
The flâneur partakes of the delights of the city, a traveller on the sidewalks and pavements,
able to merge and yet maintain a distance. The eyes of the flâneur collect objects of beauty
from the city, ‘botanising on the asphalt’6 (Benjamin in Buck-Morss, 1986, p. 104).
The flâneur needs the spectacular city in order to undertake his strolling and
wandering. The flâneur, as specific historical subject, may have disappeared from
the world, but the modern subjectivity which he represents, the ‘consumerist
mode of being-in-the-world’ is still with us, fragmented into a myriad of different
manifestations (Buck-Morss, 1986, p. 105). The city by night creates an even stronger
show-case for the senses, becomes yet more alluring, more open to pleasure. This is
the situation Hannay finds himself in at the beginning of the film; at a loose end,
but able to profit by the absence of friends to enjoy the strangeness of the town, enter the
music hall, ‘at the centre of the world and at the same time hidden from the world’
(Wolff, 1990, p. 38). His initial anonymity is foregrounded by allowing the spectator only
a rear view, a panning shot that follows Hannay in to the music hall, shown in large lights
at the beginning of the film, simultaneously situating the hero in the city at night and
establishing his right to be there.
The role of the flâneur, as both Wolff (1990) and Buck-Morss argue (1986) is a
male one. To walk the streets as a woman is to be defined as a street-walker,
who sells sex to men. Clearly women are positioned in a different relation to
the streets; they become part of the embodied femininity of the city as seductress, as
whore, while experiencing the very real difficulties of harassment. The public space
of the streets is denied to women as a space to observe and gaze or even at times to be.
A woman alone at night risks being mistaken for a prostitute, which is what
Richard Hannay assumes Annabella to be. Even to be an actress in the music hall
has connotations of prostitution, as Annabella herself admits to Hannay after they have
returned to his flat:
 Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 steps 49

She: What do you think I do for a living?

He: Actress?
She: Not in the way you mean.

Annabella’s role as sexual temptress is re-enforced by her clothes, particularly her little hat
and veil, her long black gloves. Clothes mark the woman out as respectable or not, whether
to be accosted or not (Buck-Morss, 1985). Cinema has long used this short cut for
identifying character types (Bruzzi, 1997). Annabella’s role as a secret agent, as a woman,
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has to be linked inextricably to her sexual allure, and she confesses that she only works for
England because they pay better, prostituting her talents for the nation which pays her the
most. There is a little sequence of them both framed together in a two shot:

He: You don’t make it very easy for me – beautiful and mysterious woman pursued
by gunmen. It sounds like a spy story.
She: That’s exactly what it is – only I prefer the word agent.
He: Agent? For what country?
She: Any country that pays me.

The implication is that Annabella’s sexual promiscuity is linked to a wanton disregard of

her country – as a whore she cannot be a patriot.7
Annabella Smith is a temptress, a deceiver. Her forename gives an exotic, continental
upturn to the more prosaic, English ‘Anabel’ while ‘Smith’ betokens an ironic disregard
for the commonest of pseudonyms. Her accent belies any trace of Englishness. She is a
woman of the night, a woman flaunting her own sexuality to gain her own ends. Her initial
entry into the narrative allows her to fire off the gunshots to empty the theatre; but a gun in
the hands of a woman signifies a sexualised danger, a transgression of the phallic order.
She is a foreigner, masquerading under an assumed name, taking on the role more properly
appointed for the hero. In order for Hannay to become the hero, Annabella must be killed.
She must also die in order to free up Hannay for an alternative romance, a love affair that
will bind him to an Englishwoman, Pamela.
Annabella’s presumption in taking on the male role of the spy, and passing as
someone else, leads to her death. Her behaviour transgresses a number of gendered
boundaries; not only does she dare to use disguise in her pursuit of a man’s occupation, but she
flaunts herself in public spaces. Disguise for a woman signifies a re-enactment of her inherent
duplicity and deceit, centred on the problematic of her sexuality. Disguise does not let her
transcend her gender, it reinforces it, and highlights her provocative and futile attempts at
hero-dom.
For a woman, desire for the bright lights of the city leads to punishment, as the example
of Margaret, the crofter’s wife, demonstrates. She talks longingly of ladies who paint their
nails, the nightlife of Glasgow and London, and her desire to go to the cinema. She is
subsequently beaten by her husband (off screen) for conversing with the stranger (Hannay)
with whom she has struck up an amorous rapport. Her Proppian (1968) role as a helper has
to be seen in the sense of a female helper, for the punishment that is meted out to her is for
her gendered transgression.8 She may help the hero, but in doing so she risks her position
as wife, for her actions are motivated by illicit desire. The audience is invited to collude
with her behaviour, because it allows the hero to continue on his journey. Hannay is saved
 50 Journal of Gender Studies

from a bullet by the husband’s bible, which has been providentially left in the overcoat
given to him by the crofter’s wife; thus the narrative revenges the husband’s betrayal of
Hannay, but the wife is still left to suffer. This is emphasised by the way in which the
audience is invited to share the voyeuristic pleasure of the narrow-minded and cruel
husband as he peers in at the window to spy on his wife and Hannay. Unlike Annabella,
there is no need for the crofter’s wife to be killed off; she is not alone on the city streets but
living a suitably married life in the wilds of Scotland; she can return to her patriarchally
prescribed role. The role of the hero is reserved for the male, and feminine attempts to
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take over such a role will see them punished (Annabella, the crofter’s wife) or relegated
to a complementary and lesser role as partner to the man.

The Vanishing Class of the Hero

Hannay is a hero, but a reluctant one, drawn into a conflict against his will, in this case
because Annabella, whom he initially refuses to believe, dies in his flat and he is
accused of her murder. He is part of the tradition of the amateur (Hark, 1990) for it is
only to save himself from his inadvertent plight that he must become a hero and
save his adopted country. Robert Donat does not have the looks or the physique of an
action hero and many of his close-ups show him reacting to, rather than initiating, any
action.9 This passivity reinforces his position as the gentleman hero: his role as a secret
agent is one that is thrust upon him as a result of an accidental encounter, he is not forced
into it by economic necessity. He is a gentleman adventurer, attempting to save his honour
and his country.
Hannay, despite being Canadian, occupies the classed role of the English gentleman, a
man of honour and integrity, unschooled in the deceptive ways of the enemy. Much of his
heroism arises from his eloquence and wit, particularly well demonstrated in the scene
where he becomes an orator at a political meeting, convincing the crowd of his sincerity by
describing his own plight. His skill with words and his quick thinking reinforce his status
as a gentleman, not a man of brute force or vulgarity, such as the music hall audience.
The fear of classes unfixing, of not staying in their defined places, is a recurrent theme in
the book of The Thirty Nine Steps; the middle classes are an object of terror, their soft and
hegemonic embrace representing the antithesis of the rugged masculinity sought by the
hero. In the film, however, class is banished from the forefront of consideration; no overt
class sensibility is displayed. This is not to say that a class regime does not operate within
the narrative, but rather that the film opens out away from the stridently class bound and
imperialist hero of the book to suggest a more modern one. Despite Robert Donat’s
English accent, the fact of Hannay’s Canadian background provides him with a presence
in the film that allows him to operate in a number of different situations without over-
emphasising his own class.
Hannay is white, an English-speaking middle-class Canadian man marked by an
exiguous difference of nationality, enough to set him apart, to give him the cachet of the
adventurer, but at the same time preserving enough of his racialised and class inscribed
masculinity to render him able to take up his role as the hero. Hannay must be an outsider
to mingle successfully with disparate groups of people. Only with Pamela is he initially
unsuccessful; it takes from the beginning to almost the end of the film for Pamela to be
convinced, not only to maintain the romantic tension, but also to position her as the correct
complementary partner to the hero. Her resistance to his charms underlines her lack of
 Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 steps 51

attainability and her initial sexual rebuff of Hannay distances her from the wanton
Annabella. Pamela is both virtuous and middle class, and unlike the working class
crofter’s wife, she is not taken in by cheap glamour and bright lights.
Hannay as the hero cannot escape from the heterosexual union which he is literally bound
into by a pair of handcuffs. Even though she succumbs to his charms, Pamela retains her spirit
of self-possession and self-preservation. Pamela, by reason of her accent, her clothes,
(glamorous, with a hat, that icon of middle class female outdoor respectability) and
her travelling in a first class compartment in the train, is singled out as an appropriately
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classed, suitable and ultimately sympathetic heroine.10 The union with Pamela assures
Hannay’s final confirmation as a middle-class hero, and restores the normative ideal of
the bourgeois couple. However, as Glancy (2003) argues, the relationship between Pamela
and Hannay is a lively, bantering one, with Pamela well able to hold her own, and very much in
the tradition of American screwball comedies.11 In these exchanges, a version of a freer, less
class-bound romance emerges, representing the middle-class couple as an egalitarian
enterprise based on wit and companionship, rather than, as with the crofter couple, patriarchal
subjugation. This allows the narrative to present us with a potentially more democratic vision
of class than that contained in the original novel. The hero succeeds precisely because he is
able to mobilise his apparent classlessness so effectively in so many different backgrounds. He
seems to open up a different vision of modern life, untethered from a rigid system of class
boundaries, while still retaining his status as a gentleman.

The Hero as a Product of ‘Race’ and Imperialism

Despite this potential, however, he is a product of the British empire, and as such he is both
‘raced’ and gendered. He possesses a buccaneering spirit which conveniently elides with
Hollywood requirements for male roles. Hannay is carried away from England by train,
over the border into Scotland. This links with Dawson’s argument that in Walter Scott’s
novel Waverley, a series of multiple displacements takes place, relocating contemporary
colonial struggles over India, to Scotland; Dawson suggests that ‘chivalric excitement is
transferred to a colonial periphery, located at an historical rather than a geographical
distance — the Scottish Highlands’ (Dawson, 1994, p. 62). Scotland, then, becomes the
displaced colony, both near and distant, where a hero can play out the imperialist fantasies
of adventure without the additional ideological complications of overseas colonies. From
the start, Scotland is highlighted as a different country. In the narrative, a passenger on the
train, one of the underwear salesmen in Hannay’s compartment, mocks the Scottish accent
of a newspaper seller, asking him if he ‘speaka da English’. The accent of the metropolis,
London, is perceived to take precedence over that of the provinces and the phoney accent
of the salesman links the provincials to other inferior and uncivilised Europeans,
especially Italians. As Dyer (1997) reminds us, there are hierarchies of whiteness, which
may operate fluidly to encompass different regimes of power and representation. Italian-
ness may function as a lesser form of whiteness, as a mark of inferiority. The corset
salesman, low down in the hierarchy of masculinity, may yet use his Englishness,
his accent, as a badge of superiority.
In a critique of Kim (1901)12 by Rudyard Kipling, in a chapter significantly entitled
‘The pleasures of imperialism’, Edward Said (1994) describes the picaresque form of the
novel with the eponymous hero undergoing a series of adventures, often in the company
of a Tibetan monk. Kim is recruited into the service of the empire; owing to his
 52 Journal of Gender Studies

strange upbringing, brought up in the Indian bazaar as if he were a native, he is fluent in

Hindustani, though he is in fact Irish, white and of working-class origin. His cultural and
linguistic fluency allow him to move freely across India and the North West frontier in the
service of imperialism.
Said suggests that Kim’s ‘remarkable gift for disguise’ (1994, p. 191) arises out of his
hybridic background which allows him to take on the multiplicity of identities on offer
around him. As Dyer (1997) reminds us, Irishness itself may be positioned as more or less
white according to the structural necessities of different racial classifications; here, Irish
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may be marginal, but it is still white. Kim retains a core identity of Britishness, a right
of possession of the Other, which is denied to the Indian or non-British characters.
As Said argues, when engaged upon the mission of imperialism, the white man may go
anywhere with impunity in the service of knowledge and surveillance:

T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom expresses this fantasy over and over,
as he reminds us how he – a blond, blue-eyed Englishman – moved among the
desert Arabs as if he were one of them.

(Said, 1994, p. 194)

Richard Hannay, the colonial outsider, is able to indulge in the same behaviour. He too
becomes the master of disguise, though with little in the way of props, merely by thinking
himself into the part. As Phillips (1995) points out, quoting Leitch:

in the course of the film Hannay pretends to be a milkman, a motor mechanic, a

marcher in a parade, a political speaker, and [. . .] a hardened criminal . . .
(Phillips, 1995, p. 6)

Hannay uses the minimum of effort to effect these disguises and carries it off with urbane
insouciance, the hallmark of the classically cool hero. As the hero he can impersonate a
working-class man, a milkman in London, a motor mechanic in Scotland, just as the white
Lawrence can be a black Arab and the white Kim can be a Hindustani. This freedom of
impersonation across class and ‘race’, and the white hero’s ability to take on the guise
of the Other, is reserved for the white, middle or upper class man. Hannay carries
the authority of the hero with him, a hero who is a product of imperial history and imperial
right. He assumes the same right to adventure over the terrains of London and Scotland,
re-colonising the margins on his foray from the metropolis.
When discussing the persona of Kim, in the context of an examination of literary
masculinities, Knights (1999) argues that Kim’s identity is necessarily mobile, able to take
on multiple and impenetrable guises, but never relinquishing his essential, British, self.
His Britishness both protects him from contamination from the Other and allows him,
because of his inherent racial superiority, to adopt such roles with expert conviction. He is
allowed to (sub)merge his self into that of the native Other because he is operating in the
service of his country:
Marginality and metamorphosis are sanctioned in the male actor if they can be seen
not as narcissistic, or self pleasuring, but as ruses on behalf of power.
(Knights, 1999, p. 111)
 Space, Place and Masculinity in The 39 steps 53

It is because Kim is a white boy that he is able to play the spying game so adroitly.
His quickness of understanding and his facility with languages enable him skilfully to
manoeuvre himself into and out of difficult situations demonstrating the easy cleverness of
the white boy of imperialist fiction. In turn, the assured place of his masculinity allows him
to adopt these various roles without imputing any loss of integrity or identity; as a man, or
a boy involved in a man’s game, he is at the service of his country, of higher things and his
exploits serve to reinforce a core masculine identity that in its strength can take
on different roles. Hannay too partakes of this ability; he too is ultimately fleeing and
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fighting not only for his life but for the sake of his adopted country and the British empire.
Hannay may borrow an assumed identity, but, unlike Annabella, he is assured of a real one
as well. Not only does the film emphasise Hannay’s role as the imperial white heterosexual
hero but, as he makes his escape across the moors handcuffed to Pamela, it is clear that she
will be offered to him as confirmation of his role as the hero, re-affirming the hierarchies of
class, ‘race’ and gender:

She: What chance have you got tied to me?

He: Keep that question for your husband. Meanwhile I’ll admit you’re the white
man’s burden.

Conclusion
The 39 Steps presents us with a hero who appears to emerge from nowhere, be presented
with a series of unlooked for challenges, and successfully overcome adversity. Beneath the
apparent façade of the ordinary outsider, he is specifically organised around certain
principles of masculine heroism. He is a white, well-mannered amateur gentleman spy,
who speaks with an English accent but who comes from the Dominion of Canada,
allowing him a privileged position to act from inside and from outside classed boundaries.
His hero-dom draws on constructions of white masculinity derived from imperialist
fantasy and domination which give him a particular freedom to move across the spaces of
England and Scotland, and which ensure his effortless domination of the narrative.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous referees for all their help with this article.

Notes
1
See Glancy (2003) for a discussion of the different historical concerns between the book and the film.
2
See Ryall (1993) for a comparison of the three filmic versions of The 39 Steps.
3
The hero on the run and the duplicitous woman is taken up in North by Northwest (1959) and the idea of
the male inextricably yoked to the female, in this case Hannay handcuffed to Pamela, foreshadows the
later male obsessions of, for example, Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964). Modleski (1988) discusses
Hitchcock’s ambivalent attitude to feminine sexuality.
4
In the book, no such feminine threat is ever offered; women are an almost invisible species – even
Hannay’s servant is a man. Women remain the ghostly Other of the narrative, a world where men
operate by homoscocial bonding (Sedgwick, 1985).
5
See review by anonymous author 1935.
6
Benjamin began work on the unfinished Passagen-werk (The Arcades Project) in 1928. See Benjamin 1973.
7
In contrast, Marlene Dietrich as a prostitute in Dishonoured (1931) works as a spy for her country out of
true patriotism; she dies heroically at the end.
 54 Journal of Gender Studies
8
Propp’s (1968) account of the structural foundations of folk tales has 31 functions, of which one is the
action of a helper.
9
As Barr (1996) notes ‘It is part of a rigorous pattern whereby, until the final resolution, whenever
Hannay is absent from the action we are shown either before, or retrospectively, that he is asleep or
otherwise unconscious.’ (Barr, 1996, p. 14).
10
The star persona of Madeleine Carroll also resonated with this image. See Glancy (2003).
11
See for example It Happened One Night (1934) or The Thin Man (1934).
12
Kim was first published in 1901; it was still in print when Buchan published The Thirty Nine Steps in
1915 and had a renewed bout of popularity during the First World War.
References
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Filmography
Dishonoured, Josef von Sternberg, 1931, USA
It Happened One Night, Frank Capra, 1934, USA
Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, USA
North by North West, Alfred Hitchcock, 1959, USA
The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock, 1935, UK
The Thin Man, W.S. Van Dyke, 1934, USA
Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA