Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects

Marcus is right to value feminist paranoia as a form of oppositional thinking, but she misidentifies feminist paranoia with a defensive stance against invasions of privacy. Her analysis assumes the legal framework which positions the individual's right to privacy as a protection against state intervention, whether in the form of wiretaps, video surveillance, or laws prohibiting abortion. This is, of course, the legal basis for Roe v. Wade, which affirms the right to privacy in reproductive decision-making within the context of doctor-patient relationships. However, Rosemary's story would seem to expose the limitations of privacy as a protection against violence or coercion. As the feminist slogan "the personal is political" maintains, sexist power relations operate in and through the private spaces of the home, domestic relationships, and the bodies and psyches of individual men and women. Since Rosemary's exploitation occurs precisely within the privacy of her doctor-patient relationship, her home, her marriage, her body, and even her desires, her privacy is less a sanctuary which is violated than a trap which ensnares her. In these terms, privacy is not an alternative to exploitation since protecting a woman's privacy will not ensure her safety from violence. Neither will it secure her access to an abortion as court cases subsequent to Roe v. Wade have proved by upholding the right to privacy while eroding abortion rights (Petchesky 1984, xxiii).This is not to overlook the importance of the right to privacy, which provided a means to defend women's reproductive decision-making from state intervention in principle and thereby cleared the way for legalized abortion in the United States. However, insisting on the right to privacy cannot address the myriad manifestations of sexism, racism, and class domination in private relationships, nor can it address the socially determined constraints on what private choices are available to women in the first place. For instance, the right to privacy does nothing to make the choices of poor women realizable because it does not ensure them either access to abortion or adequate material support necessary to carry a pregnancy to term.

For Marcus, "the moral that Rosemary's Baby holds for women is pure New York: trust no-one, not even your own husband; don't talk to strangers, even if they do live next door; and remember-there's no such thing as too much paranoia" (1993,149).This may be good advice.To be sure, Rosemary's misgivings about her husband's culpable behavior and her suspicions of an evil conspiracy are legitimate assessments of her situation. Nonetheless, the conclusion "trust no-one" seems to recommend isolation over collective feminist action and short-circuits the more politically efficacious insight to be gained from Marcus's historical explication of Rosemary's Baby. What 15 crucially significant about feminist paranoia is its insistence that exploitation is real. As a power-sensitive analysis of one's experience, feminist paranoia takes fear and suspicion seriously as rational responses to exploitative circumstances. What is at stake is less privacy than credibility (which is a privilege produced in the first place by asymmetrical power relations), both for Rosemary as she confronts the authority of her husband and obstetrician and for the feminist critic who would claim a meaningful relation between Rosemary's story and reality.