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‘Rosemary’s Baby’: Who Possesses the Pregnant Woman’s Body?

To what extent does a woman, pregnant or otherwise, “own” her body? To what extent can or should a woman’s (pregnant) body be subject to social concerns? Physically and socially, where is the divide between the mother’s body and the baby’s body? By raising these questions, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is not only concerned with the spiritual but, also, the social possession of the female body.

This post by staff writer Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Who possesses the pregnant woman’s body? In Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, Rosemary’s Baby, the answer is twofold. The film’s titular protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), becomes physically possessed after she becomes pregnant with a demonic Devil child. Yet, this heightened and fantastical narrative allows for a broader discussion regarding the wider possession of the pregnant women’s body as Rosemary becomes intensely scrutinised, manipulated, and controlled by outside forces. Rosemary is not only possessed by the Devil; she is also possessed by contemporary patriarchal social, medical, technological, legal, and sexual controls.

The poster for Rosemary's Baby — The poster for *Rosemary’s Baby*

Rosemary’s Baby tells the story of young newlyweds, Rosemary and Guy (John Cassavetes), who move into an apartment in New York where they befriend their seemingly harmless but overbearing neighbors, Minne (Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role) and Roman Castevet (Signey Blackmer). Rosemary quickly becomes pregnant, and the film then follows her painful, difficult, and confusing pregnancy. Despite the assurances from Guy, Minnie, Roman, and even her doctor, that her pregnancy is normal, Rosemary – and the audience – know that something is wrong. As her suspicion grows, in the film’s dénouement, Rosemary discovers that, in a pact reminiscent of Doctor Faustus, Guy promised his first born to a coven of witches, of which Minnie and Roman are part, in order to further his acting career. She discovers that she was raped by Satan, and has given birth to a Devil-child. The power of the film resides not only in its impressive combination of the naturalistic depiction of contemporary urban life with the surreal and fantastical depiction of the Satan-worshipping witches. It also resides in the way in which the film raises a number of complex questions: To what extent does a woman, pregnant or otherwise, “own” her body? To what extent can or should a woman’s (pregnant) body be subject to social concerns? Physically and socially, where is the divide between the mother’s body and the baby’s body? By raising these questions, Rosemary’s Baby is not only concerned with the spiritual but, also, the social possession of the female body.

The primary horror of Rosemary’s Baby lies not only in the creation and realization of an abject, grotesque, and demonic baby, but in the little control Rosemary has over her body and her pregnancy. After she discovers she’s pregnant, Minnie and Roman recommend a doctor who tells Rosemary not to read books, talk to friends about their experiences, or take vitamin pills. Instead, he recommends that Minnie makes her a daily drink. Discouraging Rosemary from gaining alternative opinions and pieces of advice from books and friends, and conspiring with Roman and Minnie to force Rosemary into consuming a strange drink, the doctor abuses his position of power; he controls Rosemary both physically and mentally. Even after Rosemary loses weight at the beginning of her pregnancy, complains of being in crippling pain for a number of months, and generally looks ill, the doctor assures her that this is perfectly normal. Betrayed, controlled, and manipulated by seemingly trustworthy people – her husband, elderly neighbors and doctors – Rosemary’s Baby plays on contemporary social, legal, technological, and medical anxieties regarding the “ownership” of the pregnant female body through this heightened and fantastical narrative about spiritual possession.

Rosemary's neighbors are a bit overbearing... — Rosemary’s neighbors are a bit overbearing…

Released in 1968, Rosemary’s Baby reflects a time of change regarding the control over the reproductive female body. The Pill was approved for contraceptive use in 1960 giving women, at least in theory, greater control over their sex lives. The 1960s was an intense period regarding abortion laws in the States, eventually culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision Roe v. Wade. For A. Robin Hoffman, situating the film within its social and historical context is crucial as “we cannot understand what is horrifying about a horror movie without understanding the contemporaneous fears and concerns that penetrated both its production and the viewing public who first screened it.” Although Hoffman suggests that Rosemary’s Baby is a “social document of the growing horror of pregnancy…as reproductive technology and legal actions colluded to empower the fetus at the expense of the previously sacrosanct pregnant woman,” I relocate the horror of the film away from the visibility of the fetus and back onto the woman’s pregnant body. The horror, as played out in the narrative, is not primarily that the baby is a Devil-child, but that Rosemary has been coerced into carrying and then giving birth to this monstrous child. In this way, through the spiritual possession of Rosemary’s body, the film plays on the contemporary social anxieties surrounding the changing reproductive and sexual authority and autonomy women gained over their bodies due to the advances in medicine, technology and the law during this time.

However, the issue of bodily possession not only reflects the contemporary anxieties over a woman’s ownership of her body through pregnancy, but the assumption and investment in the pregnant body as a social issue. In the film, Rosemary’s body is subject to intense and constant scrutiny from other characters. She’s told she looks too chalky, too tired, too thin. Although these comments often stem from a place of genuine concern for Rosemary’s health, there’s an underlying assumption that the pregnant body is one on which we can freely comment. Indeed, at one point, as Rosemary’s (male) friend, Hitch, claims that “I was alarmed by her appearance”, Roman responds, “She has lost some weight, but that’s quite normal. Later she’ll gain, probably too much.” Roman’s response demonstrates the way in which the pregnant body, particularly with reference to weight, is constantly kept under surveillance. This is also true in our wider culture today. A regular feature in celebrity gossip magazines and newspapers, the “baby bump watch” observes the female celebrity’s weight gain (and then weight loss after the baby is born), maternity style, and diet and exercise regimes. As in the case of Kim Kardashian, the pregnant woman is viciously mocked and chastised if she does not fulfil the desired expectations. Likewise, among “normal” people, if a pregnant woman should choose to drink or smoke, she becomes the subject of disgust and disapproval due to the moralizing attitude society has towards her. Whilst there may be good health reasons not to drink and smoke (once again, we trust the doctors for this advice), it is the demand that women fulfill certain expectations, and the assumption that people have the authority to comment and criticize on another women’s body which is most worrying. Crucially, it demonstrates the extent to which a women’s autonomy over her body is limited. The child, the human race’s investment for its own continuation, and the embodiment of society’s futurity, becomes such a critical and crucial concern that the pregnant women’s body becomes a site of fleshy societal possession.

Gossip magazines and newspapers have a firm idea as to what constitutes the "acceptable" pregnant body, and they ridicule those who don't conform to it — Gossip magazines and newspapers have a firm idea as to what constitutes the “acceptable” pregnant body, and they ridicule those who don’t conform to it

The final way in which Rosemary’s body becomes possessed is sexually. When Guy “sells” Rosemary to the witches, demonstrating his consideration of patriarchal entitlement over her body, Rosemary passes out after eating a drugged dessert made by Minnie, and is then raped by Satan in a bizarre, surreal, and extremely disturbing sequence. Later, after she’s awoken from this “dream” – the boundary between the imagined and the actual are indistinguishable at this point–, she finds scratches over her body, and Guy tells Rosemary that he “didn’t want to miss baby night”. In other words, he admits to marital rape. Although Rosemary seems a little upset and distressed at this, the film glosses over this fact. Given that marital rape, astoundingly, wasn’t made illegal in all 50 states until 1993, the film offers no position for Rosemary to be outraged at this violation. Her body, it seems, really does belong to her husband.

Rosemary wakes up from "baby night" with scratches all over her body — Rosemary wakes up from “baby night” with scratches all over her body

Famously and controversially, the sexual possession of the female body is not contained within the intertextual parameters of the film. In 1977, Roman Polanski, the film’s director, was arrested and charged with five offences against a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey, including rape. Although he initially pled not guilty, Polanski later admitted to the charge of rape, but fled to France before he was sentenced. The United States authorities have failed to extradite him and, to this day, the charges remain pending. For some, particularly in the case of Woody Allen, the need to separate art from the artist is crucial. I remain skeptical over the auteur approach to filmmaking because, although film directors often have a pervasive vision and the overall authority when making creative decisions, it also neglects the contribution made by other departments including producers, screenwriters, and cinematographers. In this way, I do not read Rosemary’s Baby as wholly Polanski’s vision. Nevertheless, the crimes of which he has been accused are abhorrent, and a discussion of the possession of the female body, particularly the sexual possession of Rosemary’s body, must be read in light of these crimes. For me, on a personal level (for I do not wish to speak on behalf of women who have experienced sexual abuse and may perceive and react to the film differently), these crimes lessen the impact of the moments of resistance in the film. At one point, at the beginning of her pregnancy, Rosemary gets a haircut, suggesting her desire to reclaim her body, even in a small way. Similarly, at another point in the film when Rosemary, looking particularly ill, throws a party, a group of her female friends rally around her and encourage her to seek a second opinion due to her current doctor’s failure to acknowledge her difficulties with the pregnancy. Crucially, they shut Guy out of their conversation, claiming it’s for “girls only”. This moment, whilst in other circumstances, may powerfully demonstrate the way in which women, as a communal force, are able to undermine patriarchal dominance, for me feels hollow. Infiltrating the way in which I read the film’s inter-textual moments of the resistance, the extra-textual events forcefully undermine the moments of power and autonomy offered to these women.

Through the fantastical spiritual possession narrative, Rosemary’s Baby powerfully and effectively reveals the contemporary social, medical, legal, technological and even, to an extent, sexual anxieties surrounding the possession of women bodies which remain relevant and pervasive today. However, although the film reveals these anxieties, it fails to resist them, and even, through the acts of the director, becomes complicit in them. Nevertheless, by continually challenging the way in which the female body – pregnant or otherwise – is considered to be “owned” by outside patriarchal forces, we can anticipate a future where the female body is unanimously her own. In other words, we can anticipate a future where the female body is neither spiritually nor socially possessed.

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Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

Seed & Spark: Gaslighting, Demonic Possession, and the Unreliable Female Brain

I love a good psychological thriller, especially if it involves insanity. The fear that I might be insane, that my perception might be warped, that instead of calmly walking to the bus stop, I am actually muttering to myself (scraping my clawed fingers along the yellow wallpaper) is a driving force in my creative process. The boundary between perception and reality is fertile ground for filmmaking, but I wonder why it’s always women whose brains get warped or permeated? I know our lady parts are conduits to Satan, and old Hollywood liked us vulnerable and prone to hysteria… But are we really getting tricked all the time, or is there a feminist edge to the gaslight thriller?

Juno Temple in "Magic Magic" — Juno Temple in *Magic Magic*

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Brooks

Gaslighting is a psychological term that actually comes from cinema. In the 1944 film Gaslight, an evil husband convinces Ingrid Bergman that she’s losing her mind, so he can steal her inherited jewels. (That film was based on an earlier film and a play before that, but let’s give the credit to Ingrid B. because she made it glamorous). Gaslighting is a form of manipulation and abuse where the victim’s sanity is questioned, and they are made to doubt their perception of reality. In real life, the use of gaslighting to undermine a victim is the terrain of deranged psychopaths and sociopaths, but like a lot of twisted stuff, it makes a great film plot.

Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight" — Ingrid Bergman in *Gaslight*

Take, for example, The Innocents from 1961. Miss Giddens, a blonde and naïve nanny accepts a job to care for orphans at a creepy English estate. The children behave strangely, and we’re not sure if Miss Giddens is insane or if ghosts have possessed the little ones (spoiler: the kids are possessed). Gaslighting creates unstable narration, a protagonist who doesn’t trust her own brain. The trick works best when it catches the audience. We see through the eyes of the heroine, and it makes us paranoid: Is she crazy? Am I crazy? The tension delights us.

Deborah Kerr in "The Innocents" — Deborah Kerr in *The Innocents*

In the classic film Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse is paranoid about her pregnancy pain, her neighbor’s herbal remedies and her husband’s secret plotting. The trick to good gaslighting is to hover on the edge of normalcy, to implicate the audience in the character’s insanity. But, like Miss Giddens, Rosemary was right to be paranoid. She had been raped by the devil and was carrying his child.

Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby" — Mia Farrow in *Rosemary’s Baby*

What I’m trying to say is that classic cinema is really hostile towards women, constantly questioning their ability to perceive reality, calling up the old “hysterical women” stereotype. These women, though, aren’t crazy. They live in fucked-up supernatural worlds. In that sense, a film like The Innocents actually affirms its female characters: Miss Giddens is a capable detective, in spite of her swooning and fainting.

Magic Magic, the best film you didn’t see in 2013, plays on some of the traditional gaslighting structures, but takes them in new directions. (You didn’t see the film because Sony got pissed that it wasn’t an out-of-the-box horror thriller and chose not to release it). Like The Innocents, it stars a young blonde, Alicia (Juno Temple), in the creepy and isolated environment of a vacation cottage on an island in Southern Chile. Her companions are hostile strangers, friends of a cousin who mysteriously left the group and returned to the city. The camera lingers in mirrors and paranoia blossoms.

Michael Cera’s character, Brink, relentlessly hits on Alicia in deranged and unsettling ways, one of them involving a dead parrot. Alicia retaliates by pussificating him, i.e. suffocating him in her crotch, but it’s not really her who’s doing it—she is in some kind of a hypnotic trance. The film hovers on the edge of sanity, builds layers of unreality, but it doesn’t reveal and redeem. Magic Magic ends with a sharp turn; instead of affirming good female detective work, it doubles back and eats its tail. I won’t say more because I want you to see the film, but it’s a real creeper.

Gaslighting isn’t inherently gendered. It’s just that our culture prefers watching a woman on the brink. Weird films, art films and experimental cinema have been writing weak-minded men for decades. My favorite example of a man in the gaslight is Possession, a 1981 French horror film by Andrzej Zulawski.

Isabelle Adjani in "Possession" — Isabelle Adjani in *Possession*

The basic plot is that this guy, Mark, comes back from a sketchy business trip (briefcases stuffed with cash) and notices that his wife Anna is acting really strange. She tells him that she wants a divorce and then she moves out. He hires a private investigator to follow her, and reality starts to shimmer like the tarmac on a hot day. Actors play multiple characters. Dialog becomes disjointed. Turn a corner, and you’re back where you started. We’re not sure if we’re inside Mark’s paranoid mind.

It’s hard to say that Possession is a true feminist film because it does turn out that Anna is having lots of sex with a demon/alien and she pukes extraordinary amounts of green, slimy bile in a subway station…but at least it’s Mark who gets confused. And Anna and the alien do win in the end, though it’s hard to say if she wins or if the alien devours her completely like it does Charlize Theron in The Astronaut’s Wife.

Given these examples, one might conclude that men can gaslight women, but only aliens can gaslight men. I say: stay hopeful, female fans of the supernatural thriller. One of these days, the women will overpower the aliens.

Elizabeth Brooks is the director of Kibuki: Spirits in Zanzibar. She is a mixed media artist and a member of the San Francisco experimental cinema community. Her work explores the boundary between fact and fiction, using film, video, writing, and sound to blur the line between memory and imagination. She holds an MA in African Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was a 2010 recipient of a Fulbright grant to Tanzania. She currently works as the Youth Curriculum Manager at the San Francisco Film Society, and her bilingual children’s book, Mama Has a Job, was recently selected for publication by Mkuki na Nyota publishers in Tanzania.

‘The Last Unicorn’ Is The Anti-Disney Fairy Tale

DVD Cover Art for The Last Unicorn

Warning: Spoilers ahead

I was probably 6 or 7 years old the first time I saw The Last Unicorn. And while I thought it was pretty, I found it incredibly boring. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I rewatched it and understood why it was so boring to Little Girl Me – this is not a film for children, and never should have been marketed as such. Such is the major pitfall of an animated film – unless it explicitly says it’s pornography (and sometimes not even then – people are stupid), people assume it’s for children. What makes The Last Unicorn so special is it might be one of the most bittersweet and poignant fantasy movies ever made. It is the Anti-Disney film – everything that Disney fairy tales are not.

The characters are incredibly well fleshed out. They are deeply, deeply flawed. The Unicorn is proud (perhaps even vain), Schmendrick is overconfident, Molly Grue deeply regrets her lost youth, King Haggard is depressed to the point of selfishness, and Prince Lir does not know the difference between real heroism and pointless posturing. There are no sweet singing Princesses who can charm the forest animals here. The handsome Prince must learn how to be valiant, it does not come naturally to him. The virtues the characters value are the ones that are hardest to achieve – sacrifice, acceptance of mortality, acceptance of regret, and the twofold rush of joy and pain that being in love causes.
The content of the story is very adult. Other than one brief bizarre scene (more on that later), there is no comedy here. The mood is melancholy and lonely. Death is very clearly discussed, and even depicted once the Harpy kills Mommy Fortuna and her assistant, Rukh. The film’s depiction of a Harpy does not shy away from visual adult content, as she is shown to have three large and pendulous breasts with nipples. The Harpy’s breasts are not the least bit sexualized, they serve only to show that she is terrifying and female. The scene in which Schmendrick accidentally enchants a tree into coming alive and falling in love with him is also very adult in content, and almost seems like a Big Lipped Alligator Moment because it clashes with the rest of the film. The tree squishes Schmendrick against her enormous enchanted breasts, and it is clear that he does not find this predicament the least bit desirable. It is hard to determine what the film’s goal in depicting the two characters’ breasts this way was, but my best guess is that they wished to depict breasts as mere visual signifiers of a character being biologically female, not as physical targets of sexual desire.

Various scenes from the film

Dreams don’t come true. Yes, The Unicorn succeeds in her goal to free her fellow Unicorns, but to do so she had to give up her newfound mortality, and must live forever knowing regret, and remembering the love she once had. This taint of humanity even separates her from the other unicorns, as they would have no comprehension of human emotions such as these. The other characters don’t achieve their dreams either. Schmendrick does eventually prove that he is a talented magician, but clearly will never have true control over magic. Molly Grue has finally met her unicorn, and found second love with Schmendrick, but her youth and innocence are long since gone. Even King Haggard never truly achieved his dreams of genuine happiness, as he never gained control of all of the unicorns, and was otherwise miserable when he wasn’t looking at them.
The handsome Prince doesn’t get the girl. Lir’s love for Amalthea is such that he tells her not to give up on her quest in order to be with him, knowing that once she becomes a unicorn again she cannot stay with him. His love is also unrequited for a time, and is only reciprocated once The Unicorn forgets what she truly is and mentally becomes human enough to feel love. So, unlike in many Disney films, the “love at first sight” situation does not go nearly as smoothly. Their love for each other does not end once Amalthea becomes The Unicorn once more, but there is now no hope for them to marry. Both sadly accept that they are to be forever separated, which is even more painful for The Unicorn because she is the only one who will experience “forever.”
Molly Grue’s life story is a particularly sad and poignant one. As the commonlaw wife of an infamous outlaw known as Captain Cully, she has watched her youth fade, and become endlessly frustrated with having no money, no food, and endless mouths to feed. She is incredibly kind, but deeply dissatisfied with her lot in life. When she finally meets The Unicorn, she is enraged because, unlike in fantasy lore where the unicorn always comes to a beautiful young virgin, The Unicorn has come to her when she is middle-aged and, perhaps, sexually ruined. (Being the lover of an outlaw could not have done great things for her reputation.) “How can you come to me now, when I am this?” Molly bitterly asks her. This, I think, is a commentary on how fairy tales always seem to only value the young and innocent, and see women who are no longer young and virginal as corrupted, tainted, and worthless. The Unicorn, however, recognizes Molly’s incredible kindness, and, comforting her the best she can, tells her, “I’m here now.”

The Unicorn in her forest

The two antagonists of the story, Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard, contrast strongly with Disney villains in that they are very morally ambiguous. Mommy Fortuna is a powerful sorceress, who is one of the few humans who can recognize The Unicorn for what she is, rather than just as a beautiful mare. She uses illusions in her traveling caravan to give her patrons what they want to see, which is visions of terrifying mythical creatures. The Unicorn and The Harpy are the only real magical creatures she has captured. Mommy Fortuna knows that The Harpy will one day kill her, and, unlike Disney villains, is fully ready to embrace her fate and is unafraid of death. Her only desire is a perverted form of immortality – her body will die, but The Harpy will forever remember that it was Mommy Fortuna who captured her. King Haggard is even more morally ambiguous. He is not truly evil, but desperately depressed to the point where it has made him selfish. The sight of unicorns are the only things that give him joy, and make him recapture his lost youth. Unable to face life without knowing that his source of joy was available to him at any time, he instructed his pet, The Red Bull, to gather all the unicorns together and imprison them in the sea next to his castle. He has not done this for the sake of evil, but as an absolutely desperate attempt to cure his lifelong depression.
The themes of this story are incredibly abstract and deep. In most Disney films, you can generally glean themes about kindness, true love, achieving dreams, and conquering evil. Here, there are themes surrounding (im)mortality, regret, memory, lost love, tragic flaws, broken dreams, possessions, mental illness, revenge, and the very nature of human emotions. This is not a happy movie. It is bittersweet, at best, even though things turned out as well as they could have without there being a deus ex machina to solve everything. It is and never was intended to be a movie for children. It’s a movie for teenagers and adults who have already heard all the fairy tale cliches, and want something that will make them think rather than something that might give a superficial emotional catharsis. This movie made me incredibly sad, but it might possibly be one of the greatest animated fantasy films ever made.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

This is a guest post from Erin Fenner.

Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski 1968 adaptation of the novel with the same name, uses minimal effects. While it is a horror story about the mother of Satan’s child, we only briefly glimpse the arm and eyes of the feature’s supposed monster. And, while the plot against Rosemary is conceived by a coven of witches, we don’t see bubbling potions. That is because Rosemary’s Baby is not a horror story about Satan or witchcraft.

Rosemary’s Baby is a horror story about being a woman.

Watch the trailer:

Rosemary, played by the waifish Mia Farrow, is a young woman excited for her role as wife and soon-to-be mother. But, even in her acceptance and celebration of traditional gender roles she is exploited, robbed of autonomy, discounted as hysterical and ultimately must give up all control of herself and her body.

Sound familiar? That’s because her terrors are real ones with just a dash of supernatural motivations.

We meet Rosemary when she and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes, decide to move into a new apartment house. She is the picture of a cheerful stay-at-home wife – taking pleasure in decorating the house, filled with bubbling optimism and one who enjoys pleasing her husband. All she wants beyond her currently cozy situation is to become a mother.

She gets her wish when Guy, an ambitious actor, declares he’s ready to be a dad. The audience learns quickly that his motivations aren’t rooted in a comparable desire for fatherhood, but because he’s made a pact with peculiar neighbors we later discover are witches. He gets a shot at success if he delivers them a baby.

While the viewer can deduce this easily, we never see the world from anyone’s perspective but Rosemary’s. We spend most of the film cooped up with her, claustrophobic and powerless, in the apartment house.

The conception of Rosemary’s baby happens in a particularly brutal way – through rape. Guy drugs his wife and takes her to a ritual to be impregnated by Satan. Rosemary is semi-conscious and cries out, “This is no dream – this is really happening!” And, when she wakes up the next morning, Guy casually mentions that he had sex with her while she was sleeping. So, even though upon waking she concludes the rape was a dream, she still considers the conception of her baby as one derived through non-consensual sex. Her first step toward motherhood is one where she is deprived the right to control her own body.

Her journey into motherhood is further hijacked by Guy and her witch-neighbors who insist on her going to a different doctor – one we learn is part of the Satanist coven. Her new doctor, Dr. Sapirstein, played by Ralph Bellamy, demands she ignores the advice of her friends and books, and only listen to his instructions. Whenever she expresses concern about her pregnancy, he shoots her perspective down and shames her for self-education.

Rosemary (Mia Farrow)

We see the already thin Rosemary develop pronounced dark shadows under her eyes and become emaciated. She says she’s in a constant state of pain. It’s only when, during a party with her peers, that she is validated by other women. One of her friends even pushes Guy out of the room so that they can express their support and concern. It’s from this very brief exchange with her friends, where they insist her pain is abnormal, that Rosemary is empowered and encouraged to change doctors and take charge of her own health.

This empowerment is short-lived, because she gives up after a fight with Guy and her pain eases up. She relinquishes to her husband and her body.

Her small rebellions against others’ attempts to control her body – like not drinking the drink her witch-neighbors prepare for her – cease. She falls easily into passivity until she reads a book left to her by an old friend who we can presume was murdered by the coven next door.

The book details the history of the coven that had lived in her apartment house generations before, and helps her conclude that her pregnancy is central to a plot devised by her neighbors, husband and doctor.

With this new realization Rosemary rushes to her old obstetrician, Dr. Hill, played by Charles Grodin, to seek help. After pleading with him for assistance, Dr. Hill brings her into a room for rest, but then returns with Guy and Dr. Sapirstein to sedate her and take her away. She is dismissed as being a hysterical woman: pre-partum.

The next scenes are delirious. Rosemary is sedated, and when awake she attempts to make demands, but is denied. And, when she gives birth, she is not allowed to see her baby and is deceived about its condition.

Rosemary’s only motivation now is centered on her motherhood. It’s the only power she can claim. So, after recovering from giving birth, she sneaks around her apartment house, and finds a hidden passage to the witch-neighbors. There she finds the coven surrounding a satanic crib.

The scene is almost anti-climactic. There is no struggle and no high drama speeches. Rosemary discovers her baby is a monster – the son of Satan. She learns the truth – her husband and neighbors were plotting against her. And then, she resigns herself. She has already lost control of her body long ago and has nothing left but her role as a mother.

Rosemary lives up perfectly to the norm of womanhood. Unlike the women who we begrudgingly expect to be punished in films because they are promiscuous, independent, “bitchy” or uninterested in family life – we would expect Rosemary’s story to pan out positively because she adheres to gendered expectations.

But, Rosemary’s Baby is not a film meant to encourage a fearful narrative about the value of following prescribed roles – instead it is about a woman who is victimized by the very gender roles she had enthusiastically accepted. Rosemary accepts her societal role as a woman. Still, she is punished and suffers. And, because it is so close to reality, it is horrifying.

Erin Fenner is a legislative intern and blogger for Trust Women: advocating for the reproductive rights of women in conservative Midwestern states. She also writes for the Trust Women blog and manages their social media networks. She graduated from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism.

Horror Week 2011: Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

The film, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968, has been written about at length, for its link to the era’s zeitgeist, its use of everyday people as agents of evil, even its shooting locations. Urban legends have been told about it; real-life events surrounding and following the film have been scrutinized. Rosemary’s Baby is essentially a fable about marriage and motherhood, and its magic is in the sleight of hand that all effective horror movies use: we focus on the scary yarn and are fascinated by it, so that the truth told (in this case, domestic unhappiness) goes down entertainingly. If it were told in a straight narrative arc, it would be kitchen-sink-drama depressing. Ira Levin, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, also wrote The Stepford Wives. How did we ever function without the phrase “Stepford Wife,” such a useful pejorative that has entered our lexicon? We all understand this shorthand phrase to describe a certain kind of too-perfect woman who seems to have lost the ability to articulate thoughts of her own. In Levin’s upper-middle class America of the 1960s, a male-controlled, male-centered marriage meant a slow death for a wife, as she loses control of her mind, her choices, and especially her body. In both novels, the husbands are able to transform the women’s bodies against their will—this is what marriage amounts to. Levin was acutely tuned-in to embarrassing truths about self-centeredness—the man who programs his robot wife to yell, “You’re the champ!” while having sex in the Stepford Wives; Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby, eager to sacrifice his wife for his acting career. And while we all know a Stepford Wife, we probably have met these husbands as well. I find them recognizable. Levin’s characters found themselves in predicaments that were hard to imagine coming true—but the motivations for their behavior (wanting a pliant spouse, selfish ambition) were not hard to imagine at all. These human foibles are at the heart of the matter.

In the film, Mia Farrow is Rosemary Woodhouse, and John Cassavetes is her husband, Guy, an actor whose career is stalled and going nowhere. The two of them move into a spacious apartment in the Bramford building (shot on location at the Dakota building) in Manhattan. Rosemary meets a neighbor in the laundry room, a young woman who speaks highly of the people she lives with, Minnie and Roman Castavet whom, she says, took her in off the streets and saved her life. Just a few days later she is found dead on the sidewalk outside the building, a suicide. Rosemary and Guy meet Minnie and Roman that night; they are both strolling home to the building and arrive at the same time. Minnie and Roman are an older couple, in their late 60s or 70s, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. They soon insinuate themselves into the younger couple’s lives, forcing themselves onto the couple, who are too polite to reject them, but soon Guy is seduced by them. You don’t see it happen but later you come to understand that Roman has proposed a deal to Guy and Guy has accepted it. Guy has sold his soul to the devil so that he can have success in his career, and it works. The man playing the role he covets suddenly goes blind, and Guy gets the part.

The price for his success? His wife will be impregnated by the devil and bear his child. The young woman who has fallen to her death was supposed to bear the child, but maybe killed herself or was killed when she realized what she was involved in. In a terrifying scene, Rosemary, surrounded by the coven that includes Minnie and Roman, is held down and raped. She is hallucinating as this happens but some of the action she sees is taking place, and eventually she screams what has become a signature line from the film, “This is not a dream! This is really happening!” The next day, Rosemary discovers long claw marks on her back, and Guy tries to pretend that he made the marks during sex with her the night before. Rosemary looks at him differently than she has; she had seemed to adore him and now she looks at him with confusion and fear. If he scratched her like that, it’s very strange; if he is lying, it’s worse still. Much of the rest of the movie is about Rosemary trying to figure out what is happening to her, understanding what is happening, and trying to convince others that it is “really happening.” After she gives birth, the coven members tell her that her baby has died, and Guy expects her to move on and forget about it. The baby hasn’t really died, and the ambiguous ending makes it clear that the coven will use the baby to gain power and wreak havoc.

One of the reasons the film is so effective is because of the fine performances by all of the actors, even those in small roles such as Patsy Kelly as Minnie’s dim-witted friend, and Ralph Bellamy as a bellicose doctor. Ruth Gordon’s Academy Award winning performance, however, is a stand-out. She makes the conceit of devil-worshippers-who-look-like-your-grandma work, and it works beautifully. Her Minnie seems to be a batty old lady, kind of nosy but endearing and well-meaning, eccentric but not dangerous, and most importantly, harmless. It is hard to believe—nearly impossible to believe—that this old woman with her badly applied lipstick, gaping handbags and herbs from her herb garden, is sinister and evil. Gordon is entirely convincing as someone who is a skilled liar and con artist. She wiles her way into their lives because a person like Rosemary is too polite to refuse her. By the time she is sick of the Castavets and is ready to politely refuse them, Guy has been seduced and will not hear of her rejecting them.

If you take away the supernatural element, Guy could be any man who is seduced by his neighbors—wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to get in on the deal, wanting to be famous, wanting to impress the others, whether it be in the building, on the job, or to the world. These people are a ticket to a bigger life and more success, money, and fame. He is willing to use his wife’s body to make it happen. Surely this is a metaphor for a person who sells his soul for success. The wife in this situation can be sacrificed in many ways to make it happen: to work hard while he pursues his dream, to be ignored or be ashamed of when he realizes he wants another kind of life than the one she can offer, to help him become a success until he is successful enough for a trophy wife. One of the tenets of a religious marriage vow is the promise to keep sexually faithful and even, in some vows, to “worship” each other’s bodies, perhaps in a holy sense of worship; what happens in the Woodhouse marriage is a complete blasphemy of this idea. A selfish person puts his or her own desires ahead of the other—with that person, there can really be no union. Stories of the “black mass” and Satanic stories may even reinforce the validity of the religious idea that they purport to trample, as may Satanic fables reinforce our most basic values: when you think about it, there could be nothing more appalling than betraying your spouse, and when it happens to you it feels horrific, like being fucked by the devil.

I’ve watched Rosemary’s Baby at different points in my life, and when I watched it after giving birth, it resonated with me about the experience of childbearing. Rosemary finds herself craving raw meat and having terrible pains—due to the fact that she is birthing a devil baby. However, cravings, pains, sickness—these are real and miserable parts of pregnancy. Having had my pregnancy nausea and sickness start around Valentine’s Day, I only have to think of Valentine’s Day to feel nauseous, and that happened to me nearly twenty years ago! I remember the fear and mixed feelings I had about having a baby, and I wanted to have a baby, and so did my husband. But I had sensitivity to smells, felt dizzy, threw up every day, and felt completely out of control of my body; I felt invaded as well as afraid, in the first part of my first pregnancy. That changed; I felt happy and calm as time progressed. But having a baby is a change that marks your life forever, and there is no turning back once it happens. It’s something that is seldom talked about or admitted to; we are annoyed or disgusted by women who feel that their pregnancy is less than ideal, or that their passage into motherhood was not easy. We do not talk about how we fear that we could be bearing a monster or a “bad seed,” how we may not know what to do, that we fear we may not have enough love or patience or mothering instinct. We do not want to hear about those fears, and we do not want to hear about how pregnancy changes a man and woman’s relationship, maybe for the worse. In Rosemary’s Baby, Guy is shown as not caring much about the baby; he knows that it will be taken away and given to the coven. How many women have found that their husband is not really interested in their pregnancy, or feels it interferes with the attention given to them, to their needs? Guy is really only interested in his burgeoning career. The knowledge that one has made a mistake, that the person one is tied now to is not the person you thought you married—Rosemary’s Baby reveals that bleak, depressing, and real-life scary story. Rosemary realizes it when she sees the scratches on her back, and she never feels the same way about him again. When Guy sees what is waiting for him in a glittering future, he realizes he’s set his sights too low in a life with Rosemary. He is no longer an understudy and is ready for more.

Horror stories like Rosemary’s Baby tell the truth about our darker natures. We can look at our bad feelings, hatreds, misgivings and betrayals without knowing too well what the story really reveals about our feelings—it’s displaced onto a monster, a Thing, a killer, a mist, a contagion. We can see the truth and the horror refracted, like looking at a Medusa head in reflection so that we do not turn to stone. We can look at our darker natures, and accept that they exist somewhere, displaced into a place we call the supernatural.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.