Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

5 Creed defines the "ideological project" of cinematic horror as "an attempt to shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an imaginary Other' which must be repressed and controlled in order to secure and protect the social order. Thus, the horror film stages and re-stages the repudiation of the maternal figure" (1990, 141). Robin Wood offers a contrasting view of horror as "perhaps the most progressive, [of American Film genres] even in its overt nihilism-in a period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration which alone offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding" (1986, 84). Neither source analyzes Rosemary's Baby.

6 Judith Halberstam makes a similar argument for feminist paranoia in her study of Gothic horror (1995, 126-27).

7 In "Is the Gaze Male?" E. Ann Kaplan warns against the potential for essentialism present in such an argument but asserts the radical potential of mothering from a psychoanalytic perspective: "one could argue that since the law represses mothering, a gap is left through which it may be possible to subvert patriarchy" (1983, 323).

8 This is not to deny the material existence of fetuses prior to the emergence of a pro-life movement or ultra-sound but to insist that fetuses do not exist independently of pregnant women except as they are reified in discourse. see Austin's definition of performative statements (1962, 5-6), Butler on discursive materialization (1993, 30-31), and Poovey's explanation of a metaphysics of substance, "Despite the fact, however, that the law seems to recognize something that already exists, it actually creates that which it claims to recognize. The law creates the effect of a substantive core by "basing" rights on (the fiction of) that core" (1992, 214).

9 See Hartouni (1997) for other instances where medical, legal, and/or media discourse have rendered pregnant women fetal containers.

10 My argument here is indebted to Kelly Hurley's The Gothic Body (1996) and her essay "Reading Like an Alien" (1995).

11 In contrast to the pro-life fetal subject, Susan Squier proposes "the concept of fetal/maternal relations as a border, a creative space of contestation, both linguistic and experimental" as a "more workable and more accurate" representation of the fetus, which is also consistent with women's experiences of pregnancy (1991,18). Of course, for this fetal/maternal relation not to revert to a prescription for maternal self-sacrifice but to sustain contestation, both terminating and continuing pregnancies must be imaginable, accessible, and supportable options.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)". In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Austin, J.L. 1962. How To Do Things With Words, 2nd ed. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Baehr, Nina. 1990. Abortion Without Apology: A Radical History for the 1990s. Boston: South End Press.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.