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3 Expressionism at Its Height:
Secret Agent

Of all Hitchcock's films of the thirties. Secret Agent (1936) is the one in which he experiments with sound most obviously and most continually. In fact, in this film the celebrated Hitchcockian wit more often finds expression in aural than in visual ideas. Some of the aural tours de force that various writers have noted, if only in passing, include a sustained organ chord produced by a murdered organist, the use of a fire alarm to create a diversionary panic in a chocolate factory, and the whining and howling of a telepathic dog who senses that his master, far off on a mountain, is being murdered. To be sure, such effects do share the tendency of expressionistic devices to draw attention to themselves. What the writers have not noticed, however, is that these set pieces are more than isolated bravura effects; they are an organic part of a profound exploration of the possibilities of subjective sound. As in Blackmail, the hero and heroine passively allow the murder of an innocent man, and Hitchcock once more uses aural expressionism to convey their sense of guilt. Hitchcock's experiments in Secret Agent with nonliteral and even subliminal sound effects push far beyond the usual limits of narrative film. Yet none of these experiments have received any critical attention to date.

There is a unifying concept that links style and theme in Secret Agent: the way chaos can overwhelm apparent order. In metaphorical terms, this concept might be expressed as "discord over-whelming apparent harmony," and, indeed, in Secret Agent the musical metaphor comes to life. Music is by definition the ordering (spatially for harmony and temporally for rhythm) of what would otherwise be random sounds. For Hitchcock the breakdown of social order is best expressed subjectively through an individual's perception; he exposes a character to chaos in order to penetrate

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his psyche—and, by extension, ours.[1] The key to Secret Agent lies in the connections Hitchcock establishes between these two kinds of order—musical and psychological. He establishes these connections through a series of "shifts": music becomes noise, and noise becomes a subjective extension of a person's feelings.

From the very beginning of the film, music helps Hitchcock express the undermining of social order. The opening shot, framed in perfect symmetry, shows visitors assembled around a bier. The scoring is an exaggeratedly, stately march. When the guests leave, the framing becomes asymmetrical. The one-armed soldier in charge upends the empty coffin and, to leering music that underscores his disrespect, lights a cigarette from one of the holy candles. In the next scene we learn that the man who is supposed to have died has been officially "buried" by the British secret service so that he may actually assume the identity of a writer named Ashenden. Under his new identity the writer is to travel to Switzerland in order to locate and kill an enemy spy—one who is playing a crucial role for England's enemies in the Middle East (the year is 1916). Assigned to Ashenden (John Gielgud) are two assistants, a fake wife, Elsa (Madeleine Carroll), and a professional assassin with a fake title, the General (Peter Lorre).

The three spies are first united in the couple's hotel bathroom, and it is here that Hitchcock plants the initial conjunction of music and chaos. The General, a compulsive womanizer, annoyed because he has not been assigned a beautiful "wife" as well, throws a temper tantrum, tearing apart everything in the bathroom, including his own clothing, except for one thing: a record player, which is inexplicably sitting on the toilet. The next day Ashenden and the General visit a rural church to hear from an organist the name of the agent whom they are pursuing. The sounds of distant cowbells and church bells accompany Hitchcock's establishing shots of the mountain village. As the two men enter the church, however, they are greeted by a loud, sustained, discordant sound, which adds immeasurably to the suspense as they wait for the signal, which, as things turn out, they never receive from the organist. It is the eerie sound of organ notes. (Technically, the word chord would be a misnomer because the intervals are too close to form any sort of harmony.) The two men creep up behind the organist, whose hand.

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is creating the noise, and he falls over as soon as they touch him. As he does so, his hand strikes a second register and produces a second nonchord before finally slipping off the keyboard altogether. Oddly enough, it is the resulting sudden silence that provides the aural emphasis for the fact of his death. The eerie dissonance of the sustained organ sound, although actually caused by his death, adds more to our feeling of suspense than of death, since we at first do not know its source. It is also a characteristically Hitchcockian way that an organist might "register" his death. In the director's world, people often live and die by using objects as extensions of their professional identities: a photographer blinds an attacker with a flashbulb, and a carousel attendant falls, when shot, onto a lever that sends the carousel out of control. As for the organist, if a triad represents order, the non-chord

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played here stands for chaos. It is the organist's way of signaling posthumously that murder has entered the cathedral, or, in this case, a humble village church.

In Secret Agent, therefore, almost from the start, music is potentially noise, and the same transformation is repeated in the very next scene. While Ashenden and the General are searching the dead organist, they hear footsteps and climb the belfry to hide. They are trapped in the church tower for hours as its huge bells toll out the news of the organist's death (or is it tolling out a signal to the enemy?). Hitchcock emphasizes the intensity of the noise by tracking in to an extreme close-up of a mouth speaking into an ear as the two men try to communicate. When the men get back to town, the General's first words are: "Me still blind on this ear." The words suggest that their subjection to painfully loud noise has been a punishment—either from the gods (the church bells) or from the enemy—for their sins (the major issue of the film is the morality of killing even when one is under orders from one's country).

Whereas in the church scene the heroes are victimized by loud noise, when they later gain the upper hand they put loud noise to work for them. Ashenden and the General visit a chocolate factory, one that they have learned also serves as the spy headquarters. The scene is accompanied throughout by the deafening roar of machines, which Spoto suggests may symbolize "the inevitable grinding of 'the wheels of fate."[2] When they see police come to arrest them, the two take advantage of the noise by using it as an excuse to whisper to one another a plan whereby the General fakes a diversionary seizure while Ashenden pulls a fire-alarm signal. The crowd of assembly-line workers is suddenly turned into a panicking stampede, and this temporarily prevents the would-be arresters of Ashenden and the General from entering the building. Thus the transformation of order to chaos has been used to their advantage. By showing them using the method (chaos) of the enemy, Hitchcock implicates the ostensible good side by suggesting that it is not much better than its enemy, an issue that has been raised earlier in the film when the heroes mistakenly kill the wrong man. Hitchcock's use of loud noise in the factory scene has a contrapuntal value as well. Its stridency provides an ominous warning that the order and friendliness of the chocolate factory are only apparent.

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Paradoxically, the use of a loud but steady sound also allows Hitchcock to shoot in silent-film style and thus revert to the visual method of story telling that he favors.

It is important to distinguish in this film between what is done in pantomime and what is openly spoken. When the heroes formulate their plan under the cover of factory noise, their attempt to communicate appears to us as pantomime. Once again Hitchcock associates silence—not speaking—with moral paralysis. The film explores the alternating willingness and reluctance of the two main characters (Elsa and Ashenden) to kill in the line of duty. A major indication of a character's acknowledgment of moral responsibility for his actions is his ability to actually refer to his work as "killing" as opposed to evading his responsibility by circumlocution. For instance, when Ashenden is first given his orders he asks what to do with the spy once he is located. His superior—who significantly has no name; he is just called "R"—avoids saying "kill him" outright; instead, he looks up at the sound of a bomb dropping and comments, "That sounded just like a pistol shot, didn't it?" (However, the equation of the two sounds implies that the gunshot will be a retaliation for this bombing of London and somewhat mitigates the evil of the killing by suggesting that it is justified selfdefense for a country under attack.)

In Elsa's case, moral paralysis is also expressed through oral ellipsis. Her initial callousness about killing is indicated by the indirectness with which she refers to the task. Ashenden asks her why she has become a spy; she answers, "Excitement, big risks, danger, perhaps even a little . . ."—but instead of saying the word "killing" she pantomimes the rest of the sentence by mimicking the action of pulling a trigger. Similarly, when Ashenden tells her at a casino the next day that Caypor, the charming Englishman who has just joined their party, is the spy they have been seeking, her reaction is the elliptical: "Do you mean we shall have to . .'. how thrilling!" Hitchcock's staging of this scene—the faces of Ashenden and Elsa are out of focus in the foreground as she speaks, and we can hear and see the alleged spy in the middle ground—also emphasizes her insensitivity because the intended victim is within the frame. Later in the evening, Ashenden, appalled by Elsa's callousness, tries to impress on her the seriousness of what they are.

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doing by finally giving the proper name to their task. When she complains about her less active role in the plans, he says, "Can I tell you something? We aren't hunting a fox but a man. An oldish man with a wife. Oh, I know it's war and it's our job to do it. But that doesn't prevent it from being murder, does it? Simple murder." They look at their intended victim, who gives a friendly wave as the scene ends with an iris-out on him—an important visual effect that links this scene with the way his death is witnessed in the next scene, through a telescope.

The death of Caypor is filmed partly as pantomime. Ashenden and the General climb a mountain with Caypor; their intention is to push him off at a treacherous point. Ashenden changes his mind en route, but the professional assassin insists on carrying out orders. The murder itself is seen from Ashenden's point of view, through a telescope in an observatory half a mile down the trail. Yet the couple acknowledge later that, even though they were "long-range assassins," they were guilty along with the General. Thus, killing by indirection is condemned along with speaking by indirection.

Hitchcock stresses the enormity of the murder through a brilliant combination of crosscutting and sound. It is in the murder sequence that he initiates a series of shifts that transform a dog's howl into a subjective expression of guilt. The scene on the mountain is crosscut with one taking place in Caypor's hotel room, where Caypor's German wife is giving Elsa a language lesson. By the door sits a wirehaired dachshund, which Hitchcock, with characteristic clarity, has carefully identified with Caypor. Both times that Ashenden and the audience meet Caypor he is introduced via his dog (the first time, Ashenden trips over his leash; the second time, the dog escapes into the casino to find his master). Hitchcock equates the innocence of man and pet by having Elsa say of Caypor, when she learns he is the spy, "But he looks so harmless," just before Caypor tells a casino official, "But anyone can see this dog is harmless." As the murder takes place, the dog sits by the hotelroom door, whining in anguish and pawing at it as if to get out. Editing his sound track with a freedom he would never again allow himself, Hitchcock continues the sound of the dog's whining even after he cuts to the mountain. The effect suggests that the dog has a telepathic sense of its master's danger; we begin to feel as if we,

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too, should be sympathetic to Caypor; although we do not yet know that he is innocent, movie (and melodrama) convention has taught us to trust animal instincts. The first two times Hitchcock cross-cuts, the dog sound is overlapped with shots of Caypor alone in the frame. Having earlier identified the dog with the man, Hitchcock now identifies the sound of the dog with its owner. (Overlapping sound for a few frames is common in films, but Hitchcock overlaps here for whole shots. Furthermore, he will later introduce the whine without "justifying" it with the presence—even in a previous shot—of the dog. Thus Hitchcock is editing sound here with a freedom that had only been used in musicals and the quasi musicals of Lubitsch and Clair, where nonrealistic sound editing did not jar with the fantasy of the genre.)

Just about the time that Ashenden is deciding not to carry out the murder Hitchcock allows the whining to continue under shots in which Ashenden and the General appear, so that the whine now becomes associated with Ashenden's guilty conscience. This association is made on a conscious level back in the hotel room, where Elsa, knowing full well why the dog is upset, is tormented by the dog's anguish. We do not actually see Caypor going over the cliff; but we hear a sound that suggests his descent. After showing (through the iris of a telescope) the General putting his arm up to Caypor's shoulder, Hitchcock cuts to Ashenden at the observatory saying, "Look out, Caypor, for God's sake!" As he calls out we hear a heartrending howl from the dog, a slow, descending howl that continues under the next shot: the mountain with only one figure on it and a cloud shadow passing over it. The howl continues under a series of shots in the hotel room, the last of which is a close-up of Elsa. The baying is richly evocative. Its length and descent provide an aural objective correlative for Caypor's unseen fall. Its tone is suitably mournful to represent our own emotions at the time. It becomes associated with the guilt felt by Ashenden and Elsa. And it seems like nature's protest against the wrong perpetrated. Although I would not go so far as Durgnat, who said that "the interconnection of the animal, the musical and the telepathic at the point of death, must represent climactic transcendence within the Orphic rites,"[3] the resonance of classical myth surely envelops the sequence. This strong aural image will reach a haunting climax in

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the following scene where a howl and a whine are heard just after Ashenden and Elsa discover that they have killed the wrong man.

The scene following Caypor's death—one in which Ashenden, Elsa, and the General meet at a dockside cafe where folksingers and folkdancers entertain—climaxes the first half of the film by uniting the major separate images and sounds of the previous scenes. In the murder sequence both couples, Caypor and wife and Ashenden and Elsa, are physically separated. The cafe scene opens with a close-up of an amorous-looking couple staring into each other's eyes, in contrast to Elsa and Ashenden who sit adjacently but uncommunicatively. (They remain emotionally apart until they argue, reunite, and kiss after a steamer ride. This kiss is filmed under an arched bridge, which architecturally reunites them, just as the sound of distant bells—music that remains music—consecrates their avowals.) The murder sequence ended with a second, shorter howl of the dog, and the cafe scene starts with the singing of peasants, two sounds that merge later in the scene. The scene also pulls together all the circular images that have been gradually associated with the couple's guilt until now. Furthermore, the scene establishes and resolves the connection between the complex of aural images (those which shift from music to noise) with the complex of circular images as it shifts from an objective to a subjective mode, in order to convey Elsa's feelings of guilt.

The scene opens with the entertainers singing a pleasant folk tune. As the General arrives (from the Caypor inquest) the number ends, so that the audience's clapping at his entrance can be taken as an ironic form of approval for the General's performance as a killer. The General gives Ashenden a telegram to decode, and while Ashenden is away from his seat the entertainers perform what is evidently a local custom, in which the singers spin coins in bowls for accompaniment while they perform a peculiar kind of yodeling in slow chords. Through a combination of dollies-in, cutting between the coins and Elsa, and framing, Hitchcock identifies the moment with Elsa's feelings. Elsa is becoming mesmerized by the spinning (although she cannot literally see it) and the ringing of the coins. Hitchcock often uses spirals or circles (in The Lady Vanishes, for example)

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to indicate states of delirium. From the beginning of the film the English spies have asked themselves whether they are acting out of patriotic or materialistic motives. Coins stress the mercenary possibility at this point; Elsa not only hears the ringing coins but watches the General flip a coin into the bodice of a girl he has just met (he later bribes her for espionage secrets). Ashenden returns to the table with the decoded message that they have killed an innocent man. By this time the chorus's yodeling has come to sound as much like a dog's howling as it does like singing. Music has been transformed into the specific noise that has already been associated with the heroes' feelings of guilt (through a series of transfers from dog to master to murderers). The shifts from music to noise and from noise to subjective expression form a single continuum.

After Ashenden is seated, Elsa reads the decoded message that they have killed the wrong man. She puts her hands to her head and says, "But the button!" (Caypor was mistakenly identified as the spy because his jacket had buttons identical to one found in the hand of the murdered organist.) To express Elsa's shock Hitchcock augments both the audio and the visual tracks. He raises the loudness of the sound track to an almost painful level (noise is once again a form of punishment), and he creates a montage of spinning images. Over the now-familiar shot of a coin spinning in a bowl he superimposes the image of a spinning button, a shot of multiple rows of buttons, and a few frames of clapping hands. The circular images, besides creating a geometrical suggestion of Elsa's delirium, also evoke earlier shots of a roulette table (at which Caypor was identified by his button) and the two iris shots of Caypor. In the tradition of German expressionist films, Hitchcock uses iris shots in Secret Agent to connect the victim's entrapment with the perpetrator's voyeurism. Ashenden has watched the death they perpetrated if not executed, and, as in Psycho and Rear Window, Hitchcock implies that his voyeurism is only one step removed from murder. Thus, all the major aural and visual motifs in Secret Agent coalesce in the delirium sequence. At the same time, the characters have been brought to their lowest psychological state. It is characteristic of Hitchcock that the moment when all the film's

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stylistic elements come together is also the moment when his characters fall apart. Paradoxically, the greatest stylistic order is required to convey a sense of moral breakdown.

There is one component of the sound track during the cafe scene that requires separate discussion from the others because its usage is unique in the film and, to my knowledge, in Hitchcock's career. It is the sound of a dog whining, which Hitchcock adds to the track under the sounds of the ringing coins and the yodeling-howling while Ashenden sits down at the table. The whining is a more radical use of sound than the howling in two ways. First, the howling has a realistic basis in the scene where it occurs; deliberately ambiguous, the sound can be attributed to the yodelers even though it resembles howling. By contrast, the whining allows only one interpretation; it is the distinctive sound made by Caypor's dog during the murder sequence, and it clearly has no literal source in the cafe scene. Second, whereas the howling is a noticeable component of the sound track, the whining is apparently not meant to be registered consciously but more or less subliminally.[4] Even though the whining is not consciously discerned by the viewer, its inclusion furthers Hitchcock's expressionistic aims. In a film that has already established the subjective nature of the sound track, Hitchcock here introduces a sound completely divorced from any literal source and solely for the emotional value of its associations.

The deliriously loud sound of ringing is abruptly replaced by that of the General laughing at the discovery that they have killed the wrong man. As in Blackmail, Hitchcock uses laughter to emphasize the disparity of awareness between the heroine and the man who is laughing. The callousness of the General's response evidently brings Elsa to her senses, and so, in direct contrast to Blackmail, the sound track shifts from subjective to objective with the introduction of the laughter.

The General's laughter is also entirely in keeping with his characterization throughout the rest of the film. Durgnat helpfully points out that the villain's part here, as in North by Northwest, is divided among various characters.[5] If Marvin (the real enemy spy, played by Robert Young) seems charming, or at least innocuous, Peter Lorre's General represents the sleazy and mercenary aspect of espionage. He likes killing to excess just as he likes women to excess.

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Indeed, he confuses sex and death (just as he confuses hearing and seeing when he complains "Me still blind on this ear"). He is introduced in the film through the sound of a woman's scream at secret-service headquarters in London during the bombing. When "R" and Ashenden first hear the scream, they assume that it is a maid's response to the bombs, but she is more afraid of sexual attack from the General. She runs out of the basement shelter crying, "I'd rather be upstairs with a bomb than downstairs with the General." The General also elicits screams from his German girlfriend each time he throws a coin down her bodice. Sex and death are also interchanged on a verbal level when Ashenden asks "R" if the General is a "ladykiller." "Not only ladies," answers "R."

The General's laughter at death, his combination of sexual and murderous behavior, is finally an obviously immoral extreme of the more ambiguous moral universe of Elsa and Ashenden. Hitchcock first indicates that they have entered that socially dangerous world by creating literal transformations of sound—the transformation of organ chord to discord, of church bells to noise. When he wishes to indicate that his characters are now caught up morally and emotionally in an ambiguous universe, he does so by using sounds for which there are no literal or objective sources. Thus, through the expressionistic use of sound, Hitchcock begins Secret Agent with the same penetration of psychic complacency that frequently marks his best work.

It might be expected that the scenes following the cafe episode would reverse the direction of the earlier scenes, that the moral regeneration of the heroes would be matched by the reassertion of order on the sound track. Hitchcock suggests this possibility in the shift from the subjectivity of Elsa's aural delirium to the reality of the General's laughter. After the cafe scene, the only remaining subjective use of sound occurs when train wheels "tell" Elsa: "Save Ashenden, Save Ashenden!"

This shift from noise to speech neatly reverses the earlier mental shift from human expression (yodeling) to noise (howling). Yet these reversals only hint at an aesthetic resolution, which in fact never comes. Hitchcock never resolves the film except on the most superficial level: the actions of the characters become dictated more by narrative requirements

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than by moral imperatives. The moral dilemma is not worked out in terms of the characters' choices but is simply evaded by the expedient of ending the film with a train crash that conveniently kills the real spy and absolves the heroes of that responsibility.[6] There is nothing the matter per se with an unresolved ending. In many of Hitchcock's films an ending that leaves the audience feeling disturbed or unsettled reflects Hitchcock's vision of a world of moral ambiguity and complexity.[7] In the best of these films, however, Hitchcock has found a formal solution to convey that ambiguity (e.g., the sound of laughter in Blackmail, the image of birds on a porch in The Birds). In Secret Agent Hitchcock never consummates the implications of his aural expressionism.

Hitchcock's other films of the thirties are characteristically more realistic than Secret Agent, with only occasional forays into aural or visual expressionism. The expressionistic techniques are generally quite noticeable. As a result what is conveyed is less the feelings themselves than the idea of the feelings. A typical example occurs in The Thirty-nine Steps, just after a woman spy dies in Robert Donat's room, revealing her secret mission to him with her last breath. The woman has transferred to Donat both her knowledge and her paranoia. A triple repetition of her words and a superimposition of her face accompanies Donat's realization that he cannot escape the burden of his new knowledge. Yet the technique is less expressive of his feelings than is the cutting of the sequence.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) includes two aural ideas used earlier in Secret Agent, but the differences are significant. The first apparent parallel is a delirium sequence. Suffered by the heroine after a blow on the head, the delirium is comprised of a combination of spinning images and loud noises. At this point, however, neither the images nor the noises that make up the montage have any resonance as developed motifs. From here on in train noises continue to express the heroine's confusion when she is forced to doubt her senses (the enemy conspires to convince her that she never saw the lady she thinks has vanished). However, the subjective distortions have physical explanations rather than emotional causes attributable to an initial weakness of character. A brief expository scene that suggests her to be somewhat superficial does not justify or determine the nature of her punishment. The second apparent

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parallel, a shift from music to noise, occurs when the dancing and singing of some peasants is perceived by the heroine in the room below as stomping and cacophony. Hitchcock even makes the shift explicit: the hero complains, "You dare call it noise—the ancient music with which your peasant ancestors celebrated every wedding for countless generations. . . ."[8] The explicit treatment hints at the difference between the handling of the same idea in the two films. It is no longer an expressionistic element but an acknowledged part of the story line. Such handling places it firmly in the classical style discussed in chapters 4 and 5.

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Notes:

1. The descent of Hitchcock's protagonists into chaos and their subsequent struggles to escape as an archetypal pattern in Hitchcock's American films is analyzed by Robin Wood throughout his Hitchcock's Films (London: A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1965, rev. 1969). References below are to the 1969 edition. It will be obvious to readers familiar with Wood's seminal work that my study is greatly indebted to Wood's thematic analysis.

2. Donald M. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), p. 53. A more obvious function of the noise is that it blocks out from the viewer the unnecessary dialogue between the heroes and the people giving them a tour of the factory. In North by Northwest Hitchcock similarly uses motor noise to drown out unnecessary exposition. By blocking out with airplane noise a federal agent's explanation to the hero of all that has occurred—information already provided to the viewer—Hitchcock has impossibly reduced the explanation to a matter of a few seconds. It is one of the rare instances when sound rather than editing can be used to condense screen time.

3. Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock: or The Plain Man's Hitchcock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 134. Italics mine.

4. I am using the term subliminal in the sense that the stimulus functions outside the viewer's area of conscious awareness, not in the sense that the stimulus is inadequate to produce perception. The term must be denned loosely because it has not been scientifically ascertained what is subconsciously registered from a sound track. I can only report that my repeated experiments have shown that even film scholars told to pay close attention to the scene will not notice the dog sounds amid the other sounds on the busy track, whereas even subjects who have not seen the rest of the film, if told to listen specifically to the one shot in which the sounds occur, will invariably report the presence of the whining, even though they have no reason to expect it in such a context. By contrast, a film student or scholar is easily capable of identifying the four superimposed images that appear a minute later in the scene.

The implication of this comparison between a viewer's ability to perceive clearly a relatively dense visual field but not discriminate among equally dense aural images is that filmmakers must be—and in many cases are—aware of this imbalance in our perceptual sensitivity, of our discriminating of visual information over the sound track. When writers refer to subliminal visual images, they are referring to the insertion of images fur less than the four frames or so that most viewers need to consciously register their perception of an image. By contrast, I believe that with sound the idea of subliminal perception should be identified with simultaneously rather than sequentially dense stimuli. In a sense, the use of subliminal sounds is frequent and normal, considering that the average commercial film has dozens of passages in which the composite sound track at a given point comprises twenty or more separate layers of sound, most of which are not meant to be identified as discrete elements by the listener. These sounds are usually built up from noises natural to the location. Hitchcock's introduction of the dog sounds, which have earlier been associated with the couple's guilt, is qualitatively, though not quantitatively, different from the layering of sounds we are not supposed to notice in other films.

5. Durgnat, The Strange Case, p. 133.

6. After the train crash there is a short coda accompanied by typical newsreel march music. It is a montage of newsreel footage, newspaper headlines claiming victory in the Middle East, and a postcard to "R" from Elsa and Ashenden. Over the message—"Home safely, but never again, Mr. and Mrs. Ashenden"—appears a superimposition of their smiling faces.

7. Wood, in Hitchcock's Films, pp. 22—26, defends this "nasty taste' phenomenon" in depth.

8. It is relevant that the music annoying the heroine is wedding music, for at this point the heroine is headed for a marriage with a man she does not love.

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