47 pages • 1 hour read
Robert BlochPsycho
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mirrors
Content Warning: This guide describes and analyzes the source text’s treatment of trauma, abuse, and mental health conditions. The novel contains stigmatizing depictions of cross-dressing and an individual with a mental health condition, which relies on outdated and offensive tropes that connect mental health conditions with violence.
Mirrors are a symbol closely associated with Norman Bates, and, to a lesser extent, Mary Crane. Norman has a fractured sense of self, torn between the overbearing persona of Norma and the infantilized persona of his child self, which he reverts to when dealing with “Mother.” When Norman spies on Mary through the office’s secret peephole, he can only catch a glimpse of her nude body reflected in the mirror. However, the moment he sees her, he becomes dizzy, and the mirror becomes distorted and wavy, reflecting the distortions in his mind. Later, the novel reveals that Norma once punished him for looking at his nude body in the mirror:
From then on it seemed he got a headache almost every time he looked in a mirror. Mother finally took him to the doctor and the doctor said he needed glasses. The glasses helped, but he still had trouble seeing properly when he gazed into a mirror. So after a while, he just didn’t, except when he couldn’t help it (91).
It is not the mirror that is the problem; it is Norman’s psyche. He is unable to look at himself without feeling the shame his mother instilled in him. This recalls the trauma that caused his identity to fracture.
While Norman cannot look at himself in the mirror, Mary’s reflection symbolizes her lost youth, spent taking care of her mother and working instead of living her life. In the 1950s, it was unusual for a woman not to be married at 27. Mary feels she has wasted her life, and she has little sense of her own identity. She first realized this looking in the mirror after her mother died, seeing her “drawn, contorted face peering back at her” (20). When Mary threw something at the mirror, it shattered, “and she knew that wasn’t all; she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too” (20). This shattering glass represents Mary’s shattered hopes and broken identity. In this way, Mary’s arc parallels Norman’s, as both of their lives are eclipsed by their devotion to their mothers. However, in contrast to Norman, Mary uses her moment of self-realization to change, while Norman remains stuck in the mold of his life.
Taxidermy
Taxidermy is a motif in Psycho that highlights Norman’s oddness, and its introduction foreshadows the novel’s biggest twist—that he stole and preserved his mother’s corpse, living with it as if she was still alive. Early on, Mary is put off by Norman’s invitation to see his taxidermy studio in the basement. Though taxidermy alone is not enough to serve as a red flag, coupled with Norman’s short temper and off-putting demeanor, his otherwise innocent hobby heightens the suspense during his interaction with Mary. His invitation to his workshop basement, which Mary declines, resonates with a sinister dramatic irony. Norman’s hobby feeds directly into his delusion. After murdering his mother, he preserved her body using taxidermy techniques. Sam speculates, “He wanted to preserve her, too; preserve her physically, so that the illusion of her living presence would suppress the guilt feelings” (171). The motif of taxidermy also supports the exploration of Psychoanalyzing Norman Bates, providing Norman with a main means of cathexis, the transference of emotional energy to an object, in the form of Norma’s preserved body. By keeping his mother “alive” through taxidermy, he can deflect his guilt over murdering her.
The Bates’s House
Norman Bates’s house is a symbol of many of the themes present in the novel. Arriving at the Bates Motel, Mary notes “the house on the hillside behind the motel; Its front windows were lighted, and probably the proprietor was up there” (28). The only other description Bloch gives of the house’s exterior is that it is a “big frame house” (31). It is not the exterior of the house, but its interior that is important, reflecting The Duality of Human Nature. Just as Norman presents an acceptable face to the strangers he interacts with in his day-to-day duties as a motel manager, his house presents an ordinary façade, hardly warranting any description. The house presents a façade of normalcy, which belies the darkness within. In Arbogast’s case, that darkness is just visible through the house’s high windows in the form of Norma Bates’s preserved corpse, which he mistakes for a living woman.
The house’s interior symbolizes Norman’s Shame and Repression. Looking in the window, Mary is surprised at how old-fashioned the interior appears. Lila’s impression is largely the same: “downstairs were remnants of the past ravaged by decay, and upstairs all was shabbiness and neglect.” The house does not appear to reflect Norman at all. In fact, the one room of the house that Lila senses to be inhabited is Norma’s. Norman’s neglecting to change the house since murdering his mother is emblematic of the guilt he feels, which essentially freezes his life in place, just as the interior of his house is frozen in time. The fact that his mother's room is the only room in the house that gives any sense of inhabitation is due to Norman’s devotion to the delusion that her corpse is still alive. He converses with it, cares for it, and helps it go through the motions of a living person; this is the “living energy” that Lila feels in Norma’s room. The Bates house is thus an expression of Norman’s repressed personality.
