DescriptionIn this thesis, I explore the urban courtyard in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window as a feminized space of personal transformation and potential social change. Using Tania Modleski's ideas about the possibilities of female spectatorship and the cinema, I examine the film from the perspective of Lisa, the beautiful and privileged socialite who is drawn not only to the diffident L.B. Jeffries, but to the neighbors in his modest Greenwich Village courtyard.