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Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects
College Literature, Summer 2005 by Valerius, Karyn
Paranoid?
As Sharon Marcus points out in "Placing Rosemary's Baby," Rosemary is initially vulnerable to the coven's plot because she is not suspicious enough (1993,132). Yet, more than one reviewer of the film dismissed Rosemary as delusional and classified the plot as a paranoid fantasy (Marcus 1993,147).To attribute Rosemary's fears and suspicions to psychosis is to refuse a political interpretation of the narrative by failing to recognize the sexist social relations that conspire against her and, indeed, by failing to recognize any meaningful relation between the narrative and historical reality. Rather than pathologize Rosemary, Marcus locates paranoia in social relations of the 1960s, which are both represented by the narrative and the site of its initial reception. Specifically, she explicates an anxious discourse on privacy prompted by electronic surveillance technologies as well as what she defines as a paranoid discourse of pregnancy (132-44). According to Marcus, this paranoid discourse circulated during the 196Os in popular manuals for pregnant women, which associated pregnancy with fear precisely through habitual reassurances that their readers had nothing to fear about pregnancy (133). It also materialized in new fetal visualization technologies like ultra sound, which extended medical surveillance of pregnancy, and in revised medical knowledge about the placenta that positioned pregnant women as potentially toxic environments for fetuses (134-41). Finally, the legal prohibition against abortion except in circumstances that endangered a pregnant woman's life or mental health meant that in practice, abortions could be legally obtained only on the paranoid grounds of "fetal perniciousness and women's susceptibility to insanity" (134).
In Rosemary's Baby this pervasive, paranoid discourse on pregnancy becomes horrific. The antagonistic relationship between pregnant women and fetuses formulated by medical and legal discourses takes an aggravated form in the satanic fetus and the toxic effects of the pregnancy on Rosemary's body, while commonplace characterizations of pregnant women as needlessly fearful and even prone to insanity undermine Rosemary's credibility and put her in jeopardy. Both Guy and Sapirstein, her obstetrician, assume a paternalistic authority that enables them to easily discredit her as psychotic, and later Guy unsuccessfully attempts to convince Rosemary that she has suffered a psychotic episode brought on by "prepartum syndrome." The narrative substantiates Rosemary's claim that there is a plot against her, but as she becomes acutely aware, no one will believe her. Those interpretations of Rosemary's Baby that dismiss Rosemary as delusional assume the authority of this paranoid discourse on pregnancy, despite the work the narrative does to expose its pernicious effects. By contrast, Marcus follows Naomi Schor's reading of Freud, which appropriates "female paranoia" as a model for feminist theorizing, and affirms Rosemary's justified suspicions as an oppositional form of paranoia advocated by the narrative.6 This feminist paranoia leads Rosemary to the devastating recognition that her most intimate relationships have been the site of her exploitation (Marcus 1993,146-47).
