Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

Second, in contrast to the highly visible, autonomous, and paradigmatically innocent fetal subject of pro-life discourse, the gestating fetus in Rosemary's Baby is invisible, dependent, and satanic. Like pro-life discourse, Rosemary's Baby has much to say about the unborn, but whereas pro-life discourse produces the fetal subject as rights-bearing individual, Rosemary's Baby elaborates the liminal ontological status of fetuses. The debilitating effects of pregnancy on Rosemary's body call attention to the parasitic physiological relation between every fetus and a pregnant woman. As Petchesky comments:

On the level of "biology alone," the dependence is one way-the fetus is a parasite. Not only is it not part of a woman's body, but it contributes nothing to her sustenance. It only draws from her: nutrients, immunological defenses, hormonal secretions, blood, digestive functions, energy. (Petchesky 1984, 350)

Rosemary's Baby gothicizes this parasitic relation by casting the fetus in the role of vampire, the traditional parasite of literary and cinematic horror; instead of the undead, in Rosemary's Baby it is the unborn that maliciously feed off the living. This is underscored in the novel (although the line is dropped in the film) by Hutch who remarks on Rosemary's deterioration, "You look as if you've been drained by a vampire. Are you sure there aren't any puncture marks?" (Levin 1967, 156). Of course, both Rosemary's satanic fetus and the undead are preternatural phenomena while in general the unborn are not. Nonetheless, like the undead, who continue to inhabit the world of the living although they are not alive and who cannot be killed although they are not dead, the unborn are liminal entities. Both the undead and the unborn exist in a transitional state denned by a threshold that has not been crossed, death in one case and birth in the other, and both require living human beings for sustenance.

Importantly, the relationship between pregnant women and fetuses is not solely physiological. As Petchesky argues, becoming a human person is a process accomplished within social relationships, beginning with the relationship between pregnant women and fetuses established during gestation and continuing after birth (1984, 350-351). In Rosemary's Baby, it is through the ordinary but significant act of choosing a name for her future child that Rosemary defines her own relationship to the pregnancy in progress and interpellates her gestating fetus into human social relations. That is, Rosemary's naming practice initiates her future child's formation as a social subject by "hailing" or calling it into social existence in the manner famously theorized by Louis Althusser (1971). When Rosemary addresses her gestating fetus, "Don't worry little Andy-or -Jenny, I'll kill them before I let them hurt you," or "Everything's okay now, Andy-or-Jenny. We're going to be in a nice clean bed at Mount Sinai Hospital, with no visitors," these are performative discursive acts that posit a fetal subject, just as pro-life discourse does. However, what Rosemary's Baby offers instead of the pro-life fetal subject is a provisional, subject-in-the-making specifically constituted by Rosemary, the pregnant woman, in relation to herself.11 As is signaled by the names Rosemary considers, which change in the course of her pregnancy from Andrew or Douglas for a boy and Melinda or Susan for a girl to Andy or Jenny, this is an on-going process the outcome of which remains uncertain. Of course, Rosemary's discourse does not in and of itself determine what this outcome will be, as we are reminded by the unresolved question of the future child's sex and the specter of monstrosity that haunts Rosemary's pregnancy. Nonetheless, in the account of pregnancy given by Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary is the crucial agent in a physiological and discursive process without which there is no fetus or infant. The coven needs her to accomplish their evil plot as she certainly does not need them.