Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

Rosemary's Baby articulates this charged public debate on abortion with a literary and cinematic tradition of horror.3 The result is a modern-day tale of witchcraft and demonic pregnancy, a Faustian story of destructive ambition, a tribute to Dracula in which the unborn rather than the undead perniciously feed off the living, and a perversion of the Christian narrative of the Immaculate Conception in which Satan impregnates a mortal woman in order to become human and intervene in world history. This feat is accomplished in Manhattan in 1965 at the Bramford (as in Bram Stoker), a Gothic apartment house with a history of witchcraft and cannibalistic Victorian ladies.4 In exchange for a successful acting career, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) secretly agrees to cooperate with the evil plot of his next-door neighbors, the eccentric and overbearing Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), who lead a coven of witches. On the night Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) believes she and her husband Guy are going to conceive their first child, she is drugged by him and transported through a false closet connecting their apartment to that of the Castevets. There the coven performs a ceremony to summon the devil, and Rosemary is raped and impregnated by Satan. During the malevolent pregnancy that follows, Rosemary endures excruciating pain, but she does not discover the preternatural constitution of her offspring until the horrifying last scene. Until this final revelation, Rosemary's misplaced fears for the well being of her much-desired first born compel her to piece together the conspiracy against her, and she suspects the coven is waiting for her infant to be born in order to steal it for a sacrificial ritual.

The film elicits horror from its audience through Rosemary's violation and the spectacle of her pregnant body, which harbors a monster. Although it exploits pregnancy as abject embodiment, I do not understand this as a misogynist repudiation of the maternal body or "the monstrous feminine," which Barbara Creed has identified as characteristic of cinematic horror.3 Rather, Rosemary's Baby turns horror to feminist ends. As Judith Halberstam explains in her study of the horror genre, Gothic is "a narrative technique, a generic spin that transforms the lovely and the beautiful into the abhorrent," and when this transformation of the sentimental into the grotesque "disrupts dominant culture's representations of family, heterosexuality, ethnicity and class politics," it can be particularly amenable to feminist and queer readings (1995, 22-23). I argue that the gothicization of bourgeois, white pregnancy enacted by Rosemary s Baby contests the essentialist conflation of women with maternity and the paternalistic medical and legal restrictions on women's access to abortion prior to Roe v. Wade (1973), which enforced that conflation in practice.

When Rosemary's Baby is located historically in relation to the criminalization of abortion and the idealization of maternity for married, middle class, white women, this story of a frightening pregnancy evokes feminist arguments for sexual and reproductive freedom. For one, a woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because abortion is illegal may feel betrayed by the reproductive capacity of her body and find the bodily transformations accompanying pregnancy profoundly alienating. Even for a woman who welcomes pregnancy, as Rosemary does, the experience may produce anxiety, fear, and ambivalence towards her own body, particularly if she is worried about the outcome of her pregnancy due to ill health. Indeed, both when Rosemary recognizes her sickly reflection in a shop window and when she is repulsed by the sight of herself devouring raw chicken liver, she becomes frightened and suspects that something might be wrong with her. Furthermore, although it is Rosemary's abject, pregnant body that horrifies the audience, the film nonetheless invites our identification with her and provokes our fear on her behalf. Finally, Rosemary's exploitation by her husband and the coven, who coldly pursue their own interests in her future child without regard for her desires or well being, might be read as an indictment of the more routine ways sexist social relations expropriate women's reproductive labor. For Rosemary, as for women facing unwanted pregnancies when abortion is illegal, coercive social relations make pregnancy a terrifying experience.