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Gothic Pregnancy,
and Fetal Subjects
Karyn Valerius
osemary's Baby, a 1968 horror film adapted by Roman Polanski from Ira Levin's
1967 best selling novel, invites feminist
speculation. It is a story of violence, deceit,
and misappropriation of a wfoman's body by
people she trusts that makes pregnancy a
Gothic spectacle. This discussion reads
Rosemary's Baby in relation to the contestations over abortion that have inflamed the
pubhc sphere in the United States for forty
years. 1 The film explicidy situates itself in
Manhattan in 1965-66, and it is a product of
and widely distributed participant in the anxieties and conflicts of that specific moment.2 In the intervening years, the heat of debate has been a powerful catalyst for reactions among medical, legal, religious, poHtical, commercial, feminist, and antifeminist agents in reproductive politics, and the debates
have changed shape in response. Nonetheless, what was at stake in the 1960s
and what presently continues to be at stake in the high profile pubHc debates
on abortion is the status of women as legitimate political and legal subjects.
Thus, Rosemary's Baby continues to resonate as a cautionary tale relevant to
the historical present. As the discourse on generation mutates, so do the
meanings that can be read into and out of this narrative.
Gothic Pregnancy
118
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.^
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 essentiahst 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 firightening 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 iU 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
120
Paranoid?
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.^ 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).
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.
122
For Marcus, "the moral that Rosemary's Baby holds for women is pure
NewYork: trust no-one, not even your own husband; don't talk to strangers,
even if they do live next door; and rememberthere'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 is
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.
This is really happening!
124
ing a family. Unlike Terry's situation but like Finkbine's, Rosemary's story
embodies what was considered, according to the conventional morality of
the time, the unfortunate but more respectable circumstances addressed by
abortion reform. Her pregnancy hyperbolically involves not one but all three
of the circumstances in which the American Law Institute's model penal
code provided for legal abortion: not only was she was raped, but pregnancy
compromises her physical health, while the third circumstancepotential
birth defectsis established through anachronism. That is, until the twentieth century, "monster" was a term used to refer to people born with congenital deformities, and copulation with the devil was one traditional explanation for the cause of monstrous births. Rosemary's pregnancy synchronizes
this historical tradition of monstrosity with contemporary anxieties about
thalidomide provoked by Finkbine's experience. At Dr. Hill's ofBce when
Rosemary takes prescription pills out of her purse and repeats the word
"monsters" as she looks at the pills, the association between monstrosity and
pharmaceutically induced birth defects is further secured. Of course,
Rosemary carries her pregnancy to term, although Finkbine did not, and it
is precisely the satanic contamination of white, bourgeois maternity that elicits horror in Rosemary's Baby.
As Finkbine's story did, Rosemary's Baby addresses itself to an audience
invested in the sentimental ideal of motherhood, exploits that investment to
produce a horrified response, and thereby makes abortion compelling. At the
same time that Rosemary is a figure of sympathetic identification for the
audience, and her wasted physical appearance creates fear on her behalf, dramatic irony renders grotesque her nurturing, emotional investments in her
pregnancy as she goes about her preparations for the baby's arrival. While
Rosemary's status as a married woman initially establishes her respectability
and ensures the sympathy of a wide audience, as the narrative progresses such
conventional moral distinctions between the sexually respectable Rosemary
and the streetwise Terry become irrelevant. The willingness of Rosemary's
husband to subject her to violence and his appropriation of her body as a
medium of exchange in a transaction for worldly success position Rosemary
as a victim of exploitation who needs to reassert control over her own body
by some means. When Rosemary protests "I won't have an abortion!" to
friends worried about her health, she simultaneously proposes and refuses an
alternative to the horrible course of events underway. In the next scene,
Rosemary's pain suddenly ceases, and for a moment she believes her fetus has
died, but then she feels it move for the first time. As Guy recoils in horror,
Rosemary joyfully yells "Its alive!" Given the circumstances of her pregnancy, this unmistakable reference to James Whale's 1931-film version of
126
Frankenstein portentously suggests that it would be in Rosemary's best interest if it were not.
Rosemary trusts in modern medicine to navigate her safely through
pregnancy (an expectation that marks her class privilege since prenatal care
was and is a privilege not afForded to everyone).To her dismay this trust is
repeatedly betrayed. Here, too, Rosemary's story bears some resemblance to
Finkbine's in that both women seek medical intervention to resolve the
problems they face but encounter obstacles: Finkbine read about thalidomide
and sought a hospital abortion, while Rosemary reads about witchcraft and
goes to her obstetrician for safe haven. She learns too late that her deference
to Sapirstein's expertise has put her in danger. The success of the coven's plot
depencis on Sapirstein maintaining his position as Rosemary's sole source of
information, and he instructs her not to read books or heed the advice of
family and friends. Indeed, the experiential knowledge shared by the women
at Rosemary's cocktail party threatens to undermine him when Rosemary's
friends question his competency and encourage her to seek a second opinion from another doctor. Once she discovers that he is implicated in the plot,
she flees to Dr. HiU, the obstetrician Sapirstein replaced at the insistence of
Guy and the Castevets. HiU is not a coven member, but he fails to protect
Rosemary. Instead of checking her into the hospital as she asks, he placates
her and phones Sapirstein out of professional courtesy. What Rosemary
wants is security from the coven for herself and the infant she is about to
deliver, but her flight from one doctor to the next, her fear that she will be
intercepted, and her desperation as she pleads for help with an unreceptive
doctor who will not grant her access to the hospital reverberates with the
experience of women seeking illegal abortions.
This double betrayal by Sapirstein and then Hill is consistent with feminist criticisms of institutional medicine; historically, a male-dominated medical profession has colluded with sexist social relations generally, and its covert
administration of abortion is one particular form this collusion has taken
(Baehr 1990, 23-24; Petchesky 1984, 78-84). Sapirstein's benevolent paternalism is exposed as self-interested, fraudulent, and manipulative, and while
allegiance to one's colleagues is not conspiracy, HiU's disinterested professionalism contributes to Rosemary's coercion just the same. However, health
care delivered to women by women and rooted in women's traditional
knowledge about childbearing does not provide Rosemary with an affirming, feminist alternative to the abuses of the medical establishment either.
Minnie, who Lucy Fischer identifies as "an ersatz modern midwife, shrouded in misogyny" (1992, 7-8), is instrumental to the coven's plot, administering herbal concoctions to Rosemary and monitoring her contact with the
outside world. In the harrowing delivery scene, Rosemary suffers the worst
of both worlds: her traumatic home delivery is not the positive experience
proposed by a homeopathic health movement as a corrective to the overmedicalization of childbirth in hospitals, and she enjoys none of the benefits
of a hospital delivery but is nevertheless medicated and unconscious for the
delivery of her baby and entirely alienated from the experience of childbirth.
As Sapirstein injects an unconsenting, screaming Rosemary with a sedative
to prevent her from fighting him during labor, she objects "It was supposed
to be Doctor's Hospital. Doctor's Hospital. With everything clean and sterile." For Rosemary (and for many women) a hospital delivery promises sterile conditions and skilled care, and historically, these have been important
advantages given the risks of infection and hemorrhaging connected both
with childbirth and with back alley abortions. It is these risks that inform
both Rosemary's desire for a hospital delivery and Finkbine's desire for a hospital abortion.
The issue is defined here as one of access to the positive benefits of modern medical care. Since physicians act as gatekeepers controlling that access,
privacy within the context of a doctor-patient relationship is no guarantee
for pregnant women, who want and need access to skilled medical care when
they carry their pregnancies to term and when they do not, because that
relationship can itself be the site of coercion. In Rosemary's Baby both
Sapirstein and Hill betray Rosemary's trust. Sapirstein's alliance with the
coven, a group of religious fanatics who seek "To avenge the inequities visited by the God worshippers on [Satan's] never-doubting followers," and his
misuse of his medical authority to further the coven's agenda are especially
objectionable. By resuscitating the accusation of witchcraft to which midwives had once been particularly vulnerable, Rosemary's Baby criticizes the
modern medical establishment for its failure to be sufficiently modern.
Victorian pro-natalism, represented by the old crones, persists due to the professional cronyism of medical doctors: Sapirstein's unprofessional but characteristically witch-like mixture of religion and medicine goes unchecked
because HiU's own strong sense of professionalism prevents him from questioning Sapirstein's motives or practice. HiU trusts Sapirstein's reputation over
Rosemary's claim that she is in danger, despite corroborating physical evidence provided by a strange test result that had puzzled him early in her
pregnancy. As Rosemary's traumatic home delivery attests, this combination
of professional cronyism with a self-righteous mixture of medicine, rehgion,
and politics endangers the weU being of pregnant women.
If Rosemary's exploitation by her husband, doctor, and neighbors and
the ensuing pernicious pregnancy contribute to a sense that, in her particular circumstances, maternity is not in Rosemary's best interest, the unease
elicited by the last scene confirms this. In this ambiguous scene, the impulse
128
head of the serpent. The Satanic rape of Catholicism has had a salutary end"
(1974, 220). Salutary for whom? Certainly not for Rosemary.
Even if the ending does indicate a return to Catholicism on Rosemary's
part or initiate a subsequent, feminist story of subversive parenting, the narrative has not prepared the audience to accept Rosemary's self-sacrifice for a
satanic infant. Rather, to this point it has fostered a desire for Rosemary to
prevail. For an audience invested in Rosemary's transformation fi-om naive
victim to critical, investigative agent, Rosemary's seduction by or consent to
motherhood compromises a subjectivity she has achieved at great cost, as
Marcus's argument points out. However, this is not necessarily a rejection of
feminism by the narrative but can be read as feminist provocation: by gothicizing bourgeois, white pregnancy, it renders maternal self-sacrifice as a
horrific resolution to a pregnancy engendered by violence and misappropriation. The drama of fetal perniciousness performed by Rosemary's Baby
makes abortion a compelling alternative to the exploitation that defines
Rosemary's predicament.
Fetal Subjects
130
The autonomous fetus is an efficacious fiction with material consequences for flesh-and-blood pregnant women. Its purpose is to marginalize
women who would have abortions, and it does. In effect the pro-life fetal
subject also disempowers pregnant women who intend to carry a pregnancy
to term. For instance, the Bush administration has revised the Children's
Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a joint federal/state program, to extend
government health benefits to what it insists on calling "unborn children"
(NARAL 2002). In doing so, it prioritizes fetuses as patients rather than
uninsured pregnant women, demonstrating a profound disregard for the
social, political, and legal status of these women, whom it reduces to environments for fetal subjects.^ Existing programs could be used to extend
health benefits to uninsured pregnant women, making medical care accessible to these women and therefore also to their fetuses (NARAL 2002).
Instead, under the guise of doing something beneficial for the poor, this
politically motivated policy seeks to undermine the legitimacy of abortion
rights by establishing fetuses as beneficiaries of government programs and
therefore as social subjects in practice, if not formally according to law. As a
consequence, this simultaneously pro-natal and anti-maternal policy disenfiranchises pregnant women both as patients and as social subjects deserving
pohtical and legal consideration.
Like Rosemary Woodhouse, then, the public has unwittingly been invaded by a pernicious fetal presence, and this has been accomphshed through the
efforts of the Religious Right, which, like the coven, is a religious minority
seeking to subvert the status quo. The challenge now faced by feminist theory and practice is how to contest effectively a powerful public discourse that
displaces fetuses from the bodies and lives of pregnant women and how best
to insist on women^pregnant, or not, or pregnant-but-not-wanting-tobeas legitimate social, political, and legal subjects. This is a complex task.
To oppose the pro-life fetal subject with the specificity of pregnant embodiment by returning women to the scene of pregnancy is a risky affair given
the historical conflation of "woman" with "mother," since this conflation is
precisely what opponents of abortion want to enforce in practice. As a feminist confronting this double bind, I find Rosemary's Baby instructive.^*^ It
continues to reveal the Gothic story lurking inside the idealization of maternity as the fulfillment of a woman's destiny as it did in 1967-68, but presently this frightening story of a parasitic fetus has acquired added significance
given the emergence of the pro-life fetal subject.
First, the preoccupation of Rosemary's Baby with pregnancy as abject
embodiment makes present without idealizing what the pro-life fetal subject
obscures: the pregnant woman's body and subjectivity. As the Gothic spectacle at the center of the film, Rosemary's pregnant body is objectified by the
camera, but her visibility on-screen and her narrative presence enable the
audience to identify with her subjective experience of pregnancy, just as ultra
sound images and pro-life discourse encourage identification with a fetal
subject. We encounter Rosemary as a subject whose body and whose hopes
for the future have been exploited. Although Rosemary has been objectified
as a fetal environment by her husband and the coven, it is her experience of
alienation that Rosemary's Baby brings into focus. This is an important shift
of perspective given the effacement of pregnant women in the current
regime of the fetal subject. If according to a historical reading Rosemary s
frightening pregnancy makes legalized abortion compelling, at the present
moment Rosemary's terrifying experience also suggests the dangerous effects
of anti-maternal, pro-natal public discourse and social policy for pregnant
women who wish to carry a pregnancy to term. Rosemary embraces pregnancy only to find her health jeopardized and her status as a legitimate social,
political, and legal subject negated by others pursuing their own interests in
her gestating fetus.
Second, in contrast to the highly visible, autonomous, and paradigmatically innocent fetal subject of pro-life discourse, the gestating fetus in
Rosemary's Baby is invisible, dependent, and satanic. Like pro-life discourse,
Rosemary's Baby has much to say about the unborn, but whereas pro-life discourse produces the fetal subject as rights-bearing individual, Rosemary's Baby
elaborates the liminal ontological status of fetuses. The debilitating effects of
pregnancy on Rosemary's body call attention to the parasitic physiological
relation between every fetus and a pregnant woman. As Petchesky comments:
On the level of "biology alone," the dependence is one waythe fetus is a
parasite. Not only is it not part of a woman's body, but it contributes nothing to her sustenance. It only draws from her: nutrients, immunological
defenses, hormonal secretions, blood, digestive functions, energy. (Petchesky
1984, 350)
Rosemary's Baby gothicizes this parasitic relation by casting the fetus in the
role of vampire, the traditional parasite of Hterary and cinematic horror;
instead of the undead, in Rosemary's Baby it is the unborn tbat maliciously
feed off the living. This is underscored in the novel (although the line is
dropped in the film) by Hutch who remarks on Rosemary's deterioration,
"You look as if you've been drained by a vampire. Are you sure there aren't
any puncture marks?" (Levin 1967,156). Of course, both Rosemary's Satanic fetus and the undead are preternatural phenomena while in general the
unborn are not. Nonetheless, like the undead, who continue to inhabit the
world of the living although they are not alive and who cannot be killed
although they are not dead, the unborn are liminal entities. Both the undead
and the unborn exist in a transitional state defined by a threshold that has not
132
been crossed, death in one case and birth in the other, and both require living human beings for sustenance.
Importantly, the relationship between pregnant women and fetuses is not
solely physiological. As Petchesky argues, becoming a human person is a
process accomplished within social relationships, beginning with the relationship between pregnant women and fetuses established during gestation
and continuing after birth (1984, 350-351). In Rosemary's Baby, it is through
the ordinary but significant act of choosing a name for her future child that
Rosemary defines her own relationship to the pregnancy in progress and
interpellates her gestating fetus into human social relations. That is,
Rosemary's naming practice initiates her future child's formation as a social
subject by "hailing" or calling it into social existence in the manner famously theorized by Louis Althusser (1971). When Rosemary addresses her gestating fetus, "Don't worry little Andy-or -Jenny, I'll kill them before I let
them hurt you," or "Everything's okay now, Andy-or-Jenny. We're going to
be in a nice clean bed at Mount Sinai Hospital, with no visitors," these are
performative discursive acts that posit a fetal subject, just as pro-life discourse
does. However, what Rosemary's Baby offers instead of the pro-life fetal subject is a provisional, subject-in-the-making specifically constituted by
Rosemary, the pregnant woman, in relation to herself. ^^ As is signaled by the
names Rosemary considers, which change in the course of her pregnancy
from Andrew or Douglas for a boy and Melinda or Susan for a girl to Andy
or Jenny, this is an on-going process the outcome of which remains uncertain. Of course, Rosemary's discourse does not in and of itself determine
what this outcome will be, as we are reminded by the unresolved question
of the future child's sex and the specter of monstrosity that haunts
Rosemary's pregnancy. Nonetheless, in the account of pregnancy given by
Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary is the crucial agent in a physiological and discursive process without which there is no fetus or infant. The coven needs
her to accomplish their evil plot as she certainly does not need them.
To figure pregnancy as a physiological and discursive process, as
Rosemary's Baby does, is to attend to the specificities of the relationship
between a pregnant woman and the fetus she nurtures as the pro-life fetal
subject does not. Pro-life discourse suppresses fetal dependence on pregnant
women and conceals its own productive role in materializing a fetal subject
when it claims to mimetically represent real, material fetuses. Rosemary's
Baby, on the other hand, insists on the unborn as a liminal category, providing a compelling model with which to confiront pro-hfe arguments that from
conception a fetus is a human life and therefore a person endowed with
rights. Recognition that a fetus is a provisional being located inside of and
dependent upon a pregnant woman is necessary for any ethically adequate
134
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