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Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects
College Literature, Summer 2005 by Valerius, Karyn
As her dreams digest real events and transform them into fantasy, Rosemary consumes her dreams, which in turn elicit real responses from her. This communication between fantasy and reality suggests by extension that between the fictional narrative itself and the audience. For instance, following the terror of Rosemary's lucid moment during the rape, she dreams she has an interview with the Pope. In the novel, but not explicitly in the film, Rosemary is concerned to conceal from him that she has just had an orgasm (Levin 1967,117). While this revelation is disturbing for the reader who recognizes the relation of Rosemary's pleasurable dream to the actual violation in progress, her orgasm demonstrates that dreams and fantasy can have real effects. Rosemary's alternating responses of fear and pleasure suggest the fear and pleasure experienced by the reader, which are real effects produced by the narrative. Likewise, Rosemary's protest "This is no dream . . ." penetrates a permeable fiction/reality boundary even as it distinguishes between Rosemary's dreams and real life. Her protest is delivered into the camera and makes a direct address that acknowledges the presence of the audience and therefore implicates us as voyeurs who watch as the coven members do. The direct address is also a warning to the audience not to mistake Rosemary's violation for fantasy as she will do the following morning. This warning both acknowledges the role of the audience in interpretation and seeks to enroll us as witnesses of her rape and potential allies.
Gothic History
Like Rosemary's dreams, then, Rosemary's Baby does not mimetically represent reality but is closely intertwined with it, both through the responses it provokes in the audience which consumes it and through its parasitical relation to the historical events and discourses it digests and rematerializes as Gothic horror. The story establishes a climate of fear and danger by invoking the coercive and sometimes deadly reality created by a conservative sexual morality in combination with the criminalization of abortion, where infanticide, suicide, and dangerous back alley abortions were the last resort of desperate women. When Rosemary's friend Hutch cautions the couple against taking the apartment at the Bramford because of its history of cannibalism and witchcraft, he mentions that a dead infant wrapped in newspaper was found in the basement there in 1959. Rosemary and Terry, the young, unmarried woman the Castevets rescue from life on the streets, later discuss the creepiness of the Bramford's basement. Soon after, Terry commits suicide. Both the audience and Rosemary come to understand why Terry killed herself as Rosemary's investigation of the coven's conspiracy unfolds.Those who listen closely to Minnie's voice during Rosemary's first dream sequence (which immediately follows Terry's suicide) know that Terry was the first woman the coven plotted to have impregnated by Satan. Rosemary overhears but does not comprehend as Minnie berates Roman for letting Terry in on their plan, an indication that Terry discovered she was pregnant and was informed by Roman of the coven's role in this. Rather than comply, as Roman assumed she would, she jumps out of the window. Terry perceives death to be the only exit from an intolerable situation, and although the circumstances of her pregnancy are fantastic, the precedent for her self-destruction is a grim history of suicide by young women who reached similar conclusions when faced with the stigma of unwedded pregnancy.
