Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

I would argue that Rosemary's Baby offers a critical rather than heroic view of the self-sacrifice demanded of Rosemary, who is a woman pregnant in problematic circumstances, and who accepts the nurturing behavior appropriate to female identity.

Rosemary's internal dialogue, which is provided by the novel but absent in the film, contributes to this reading of her acceptance of the infant. Rosemary briefly considers killing both herself and the infant by jumping out of the window (Levin 1967, 302). Like Terry, she faces an intolerable situation, and the insufficiency of her options, suicide and infanticide or raising the devil's son, demonstrates how terrible this predicament is. Nonetheless, Rosemary reasons that she may use her position as mother to subvert the coven's evil intentions from within by nurturing the good in the infant (306). This is a heroic gesture, in Ginsburg's terms, which entails self-sacrifice and "acceptance of the responsibilities of nurturance despite problematic circumstances." Rosemary' s logic for choosing maternity can be understood as a rejection of victimhood and even potentially a radical act, but this is a limited agency fraught with ambivalence.7 An argument for the subversive implications of the ending offered from a rather different perspective makes this clear. Robert Lima understands Rosemary's acceptance of the infant to signal her return to Catholicism: "She accepts her grotesque motherhood as a divinely instituted mission. Like Mary, mother of Jesus, she will crush the head of the serpent. The Satanic rape of Catholicism has had a salutary end" (1974, 220). Salutary for whom? Certainly not for Rosemary.

Even if the ending does indicate a return to Catholicism on Rosemary's part or initiate a subsequent, feminist story of subversive parenting, the narrative has not prepared the audience to accept Rosemary s self-sacrifice for a satanic infant. Rather, to this point it has fostered a desire for Rosemary to prevail. For an audience invested in Rosemary's transformation from naïve victim to critical, investigative agent, Rosemary's seduction by or consent to motherhood compromises a subjectivity she has achieved at great cost, as Marcus's argument points out. However, this is not necessarily a rejection of feminism by the narrative but can be read as feminist provocation: by gothicizing bourgeois, white pregnancy, it renders maternal self-sacrifice as a horrific resolution to a pregnancy engendered by violence and misappropriation. The drama of fetal perniciousness performed by Rosemary's Baby makes abortion a compelling alternative to the exploitation that defines Rosemary's predicament.

Fetal Subjects

Thirty-two years after Roe v. Wade, abortion remains a contested issue. In response to its legalization, an anti-abortion movement has emerged and reframed the debate, asserting the legal and political rights of the unborn in opposition to the rights of women. These claims gain substance and credibility from visual images of an autonomous fetus circulating through the public sphere. As Rosalind Petchesky observes, "The 'public' presentation of the fetus has become ubiquitous; its disembodied form, propped up by medical authority and technological rationality, now permeates mass culture. We are all, on some level, susceptible to its coded meanings" (1987, 281). This two-dimensional icon, which feminists have named "the public fetus" to distinguish it from fetuses carried by flesh-and-blood pregnant women, is the historically recent product of Lennart Nilsson's famous photos, medical visualization technologies, the visual and rhetorical strategies of anti-abortion activism, legal discourse, and advertising (Ginsburg 1989,105; Hartouni 1997, 6, 67; Newman 1996,15-17; Petchesky 1987, 268;Taylor 71-72). It is not a simple, mimetic representation of a real-life fetus, although it works most effectively for pro-life ends when read in this way. Rather, fetal images and pro-life claims for the rights of fetuses are performative discursive practices in that they produce what they claim merely to represent, a fetal subject.8 This discourse suppresses pregnant women's bodies as the condition of possibility for fetuses, making an independent fetal subject with interests and rights of its own imaginable at the expense of pregnant women who are rendered invisible.