We have a tremendous cultural need to understand marital relations as consensual and harmonious, notwithstanding the contrary evidence we confront about the nature of some unions. [...] Never do we hear more about the joys of marital love, trust, and intimacy in a contemporary legal context than when courts, lawmakers, and commentators justify the preservation of a husband's legal right to rape his wife.
- Jill Elaine Hasday, Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape
I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
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American culture in the 1960s signified an in-between stage, a ramp built off the conservatism of the 1950s towards the intense political upheaval of the 1970s. In the book, Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, Alexander Bloom describes a disillusionment with the system to ensure stability, which resulted in rigid social structures being 'redefined', and the personal and political becoming interconnected, alongside counterculture and revolt 'filter[ing] through the nation'. If the normative human body comes to represent a country, which it often does within fiction, then the translation of massive amounts of change happening in a small amount of time does not go quietly, least because domestic horror binds itself to the present moment. It just so happens that in 1967, the scariest place to live was in New York City on the Upper West Side.
Distinctly anti-suburbia, The Upper West Side in the 1960s was built on top of the rubble of abandoned buildings and slums, apartment complexes shooting up to accommodate an increasingly middle-class population. It was described as both multi-racial and distinctly Jewish, and the prejudices against both influenced the desire to revive it, to save it from its reputation of filth and decay. The apartment building in this sense cannot distinguish itself from the outside world. Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues in the book, The Apartment Complex: Urban Living and Global Screen Cultures, that this mode of living 'situates the urban inside the home', inducing a 'porousness' to the domestic simply not available within a detached house with a nice front garden. As a result, the 'decay' supposedly disrupted by urban planning doesn't disappear. It creates ghosts, the whispers of neighbours in the kitchen and living room rather than across the street. The world became permeable and so did its tenants.
Rosemary Woodhouse is naive. Rosemary Woodhouse is in denial. Ira Levin's seminal novel, Rosemary's Baby, is both a satire of middle class prejudice against the other, and a horrifying depiction of obscured marital rape. It's a novel that asks the reader to believe in sacrifice and begs us not to trust its promise of a shinier, better world. Levin barely lingers on what the satanic spawn is materially for, simply that he exists to usher in a beginning, and that all it took was some murder, rape and faith in a system that cannot be seen. Organised religion and patriarchy are skewered by the inversion of the birth of Christ, with our Mary being just...Rosemary. A young woman who wanted a nice marriage, a nice baby and an apartment like the ones in magazines. She's just like you.
'Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world.'
If the domestic space is the womb, then everything that Rosemary does to prepare for her new life is of the utmost importance. The decorating of a living space can seem trivial, and is often described so, but in Levin's novel, it's the most important thing to Rosemary, a way to assert some kind of ownership over her new home. The fact that the walls shift and closets open to reveal secrets is both indicative of the multitudinous state of the housewife and the surveillance placed upon her during pregnancy. The trade for a nice place to live is access to every part of a woman, without question, expecting no conflict or pushback. Rosemary has a hard time pushing back. Every time it seems like she might, she falters, second guessing her own judgement. Rosemary is in denial. Rosemary was raped by her husband or by Satan, or by both.
Hers is a godless life, and the ceremony of home-making doesn't imbue the Bramford with a feeling a wholeness either. Stuck in the cracks between blasphemy and belief, Rosemary is left to the whims of a patriarchal force inverted from her Catholic upbringing, gifting her with the purpose of motherhood as a replacement for a rejected god. Levin primes the reader to accept that Rosemary will love the monstrous parts of her demon son, implicitly arguing that a secular world that does nothing to replace the grand narrative of religion is highly exploitable.
It's not that Rosemary is unable to imagine the apocalyptic implications of her unwillingness to throw a newborn out of the window. Rather, she has experienced a world that doesn't trust her instincts or value her opinion, and she has seen the parasitic apartment womb, and accepted that there is nowhere left to go. Her son, Andrew, retains some humanity - her own unwilling contribution - and therefore has the potential to live a good, pure life. Rosemary comes to accept the lack of control. There is no one coming to save her. She must comfort her son.
'What about what's fair to me?'
The 1968 film is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Ira Levin's book. Personally, I don't consider this to be a compliment. Still, the work aligns with Roman Polanski's eye for claustrophobia and the coding of womanhood as an innate psychosis reacting to hostile worlds imbued with misogyny. Like Levin, Polanski presents a middle-class life as sparse and ridiculous, distinctly anti-relational and obsessed with surfaces. Mia Farrow's Rosemary is observant, a trait made deliberately oppositional to her slight frame and doll-like clothing. There is a dissonance between the knowledge Rosemary seems to have about her surroundings, the missing pictures and moved furniture, and the way she is spoken to by those around her. Rosemary is aware, but she's aware in the same way a porcelain figure is aware. Static and easily broken, her eyes can only see so much.
The point of view shot is used throughout the film, orienting the audience with Rosemary's subjectivity specifically, making the deterioration of her body all the more upsetting. As she slowly becomes more gaunt and pale, we are acutely aware of the actress playing the infected mother at the centre, how she must portray madness as withering and fragile. The disorientation as the camera flips between Rosemary and those watching her mirrors the way the film slides between reality and a dream state. There is an ease in our identification in the same way there is an ease between what is seen and what is felt. Rosemary's state of mind is the truth because the camera argues that nothing this horrifyingly detailed could be untrue. How could you possibly imagine this much yellow in frame?
By treating an illusory world as concretely as a chic apartment, the audience is forced to consider the fragility of both, how a loud noise could wake Rosemary up and she would have nothing of substance to signify her existence. The very act of materialising a novel, turning words into images, provides a permanence to the emotional world that is often easily dismissible. Once Guy Woodhouse attempts to convince his wife that the decision he made regarding her body was a good one, Rosemary spits in his face, not just conveying her anger but also admonishing the crassness of stating something that had already been translated visually. She was there when it happened and has been begging people to believe that something was wrong for a long time. Guy's 'revelation' doesn't really reveal anything, it parrots the obvious. Rosemary knew that there was no glass behind the mirror and that a rape is a rape, no matter who is doing it. She moves towards her son with the director on her shoulder, the camera, a friend, a very heavy weight to carry. She chooses to sing her son to sleep in this room full of the people who harmed her because all she was looking for was evidence that something happened to her body.
'He's out of me'
Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976) is an interesting thought experiment and poorly executed made-for-TV movie that drags out the metaphor of the existing text and asks 'what if the satanists have no plan except to perpetuate?'. Rosemary, as played by the fiercely controlled Patty Duke, has become estranged from anything that may have tethered her to the world. She's in a constant state of escape, freed from her husband and now attempting to undo the demonic influence over her son. The nebulous ending of the original story has fallen away. Satanic witches are bad news and our protagonist is fleeing from them in a manner that deftly mirrors someone escaping domestic violence, panicked and frantic and constantly looking over her shoulder.
Her final image in this sequel is a nightmare. Andrew is ripped away from her and she's left banging on the back window of a bus as she is driven away from her son. They will never meet again and Andrew is now Adrian. Duke's voice is intermittently played throughout, as if Rosemary haunts every frame now. Where he lived inside his mother, she now lives in him, a conscience, a teacher, an antidote to what he has been groomed for. The body is no longer familial but estranged, becoming a means of extraction, purpose-driven and useful, but with very little actual magic involved. The pain of severed bonds is tedious here and therefore incredibly human.
The world created by the satanists is not whimsical or especially menacing. In fact, the cycle simply repeats itself. The film makes clear that women and children are objectified in the same way, moulded for a specific purpose, and not considered autonomous beings. This is most evident in the way the film hits the same beats of the original story. Adrian/Andrew is drugged and raped by a woman he trusted, in the exact same way Rosemary was. The film articulates that it is the cycle of sexual abuse itself that needs to exist. As detailed, or rather not detailed, by the film, the antagonists have no concrete plan for the Anti-Christ outside of him existing. He is an ideological flourish and a symbol, but never a leader, a worker, a person. Rosemary Woodhouse created the new world and it was just another means of extracting power.
'Sometimes I lose sight of it myself, but Andy's not Jesus and I'm not Mary. I'm Rosemary Reilly, from Omaha.'
In 1997, Son of Rosemary, the sequel to the original novel, was published to a very tepid response. According to Nicholas Levin, Ira Levin's son, this sequel existed not necessarily to continue on the story of Rosemary Woodhouse, but to respond to the massively influential novel's impact on the world. More specifically, Ira Levin felt compelled to emphasise the satire at the heart of Rosemary's Baby and felt somewhat responsible for popularising domestic horror to such an extent that it caused the Satanic Panic. His intent may have been to poke fun at the middle class and what they will put up with to appear normal, but his fear was that he caused a wave of paranoia, especially with regards to child predation. As a result, Son of Rosemary is hyper-aware of itself as a sequel, as a parody of the New Testament, and as a fictive creation. Its much maligned plot twist ending, that Rosemary's life is essentially going to loop around forever and that the events of the book we just read were pointless, existed to give his lead character a fresh start and also to undo Levin's own success. It's not really surprising that readers were not excited to engage with a story that ended on the idea that it was superfluous.
Rosemary Woodhouse wakes from a 30 year coma to find that her son is a cross between a beloved politician and a messiah, seemingly overcoming his birthright and fighting his innate Anti-Christ behaviour. His mission to unite the world has apparently succeeded. Rosemary missed out on all of the fun and just gets to seep up the spotlight and anticipate the turn of the millennium. And yet, she is very jaded this time around, mourning the loss of the years and how they have appeared on her face. She is fighting an abject, incestuous attraction to her now adult son, who was just a young boy the last time she saw him. Most importantly though, her paranoia has not dissipated. She is still waiting for her room to reveal its secrets, even in a world made so perfectly for her. Like its predecessor, Son of Rosemary operates on the idea that what is most terrifying is an unsteady brain and the sneaking suspicion that you are correct about the cruelty intrinsic to humanity but that you could never meaningfully explain this to anyone. She hasn't had time for character growth, being asleep. It's 1999 and Rosemary still cannot trust her instincts.
The fears within Levin's two novels have related to encountering a world that is almost close to normal but is still impossible to assimilate into. Being the mother of Christ is not unrewarded but it is also thankless, especially because the son must still be sacrificed at the end. Levin presents a desire for rebirth, to undo the mistakes of the modern world and crawl back into the past, as a childish instinct, but that doesn't mean there isn't a thread of understanding there. Mistrusting the hive mind world created whilst she was dreaming is a reasonable response and that's what's so horrifying. Rosemary can never transcend her own perspective, her own views. In two books, she is a character who is forced to stay the same. Getting everything you desire is horrifying and who better to express this than the author of the world's most popular horror novel?
'You should always trust your feelings, Rosemary.'
The 2014 mini-series of Rosemary's Baby finds itself in a bind. It's a show that has to make changes to differentiate itself from the more well-known adaptation, and is also confined to the inevitable ending of Rosemary choosing a subjugated, heavily surveilled life, where her only purpose is to raise the child who is responsible for the wealth and youth of the Parisian socialites she has chosen to associate with. The tragedy of these four hours is not simply the bloated run time and extraneous cop plot that fails to excite - it's that Rosemary is in a much more privileged position, with seemingly more choice, and still ends up trapped by her pathetic husband, whose position doesn't become more sympathetic despite how much more time we spend with him in this version or how much he seems to regret his decision.
Rosemary is coping with her miscarriage by closing in on her support system, meaning she is choosing to abandon her career as a dancer to support her husband's writing career as he whisks them off to Paris for his new teaching job. Zoe Saldaña plays Rosemary as chipper and self-sufficient, able to chase down muggers in broad daylight. She does not simply fulfil her sexual role as a wife. She actively desires sex and, unlike the source text, feels very little shame about doing so. Still, her sex life is often tied with destruction, with her first sex scene causing a fire in their apartment.
There is, like other adaptations, the underlying paranoia that not all is well. This is especially evident in the extreme brutality other women in the series face. For example, a teaching rival at Guy's university is goaded (through satanic magic) into cutting her own throat during a meeting with her boss. Rosemary's chef friend, Julie, is killed at work after having boiling oil thrown in her face and hitting her head on a kitchen counter. It might not surprise you to learn that the writers for this series also worked on the Final Destination films, and as a result, the simultaneous fear and pull of death is present throughout. Rosemary fantasises about throwing herself out of the window as she sleeps. Paris is evidently not a place for a woman in search of agency or a stable career.
And so, the satanic socialites offer her an alternative. An easy life with little interrogation. All is required is discretion and submission to the role she was supposedly built for. Her race is elided, her sexual function is foregrounded and she is given a bob haircut. Pregnancy, like in the source text, is presented as both psychosis and the clawing of the real Rosemary to escape. And yet, even this dream is dashed. Her blue-eyed baby is both her and another, an in-between that only exists as evidence of a cloying want to be on the inside, in with the rich kids despite finding them strange and invasive. Rosemary can't stab her baby because he is her. It's not easy to kill a wretched part of yourself, even when you know it's the right thing to do.
There have been several attempts at progressive adaptations of Rosemary's Baby, both direct and otherwise. Stewart Thorndike's Lyle is a lesbian retelling of this story, set in modern day New York. Jordan Peele's claustrophobic Get Out uses the domestic space to talk about the cultish racism amongst liberals. False Positive (2021) attempts to satirise the intensely sterile process of accessing IVF treatment and John Carpenter created the lean abortion horror, Pro-Life, for the Masters of Horror anthology series. Some of these are more transformative than others and many that I watched attempted to invoke the spirit of Rosemary Woodhouse, even if they weren't that interested in the plight of a 1960s housewife directly. With each though, there is an admirable effort to give the protagonists of these stories something that Rosemary never really had - agency.
The most direct response to the text would be Apartment 7A (2024), a film that tries to turn a plot device into a person despite having very little to work with. Terry Gionoffrio is a character from Levin's novel who briefly chats to Rosemary in the laundry room of the Bramford and then leaps from a window. She exists to hint to Rosemary to leave and never come back, but also to show that she has no longer has allies in the building. Everyone else will be grooming her for a purpose.
In Natalie Erika James' prequel, there is a focus on another aspect of 1960s womanhood: working life. We get leering and harassment and rape in the pursuit of a dancing career, with the satanism being presented as a hateful collective of oppression, rather than a belief system with a plan. Once again, there is very little weight to the ideology on purpose. The subjugation of women is never presented as anything except a means to an intangible end.
And yet, I am sceptical of the assertion that Terry choosing her career, choosing to fight those controlling her, choosing to jump from the window at the end is the more feminist depiction. There is a misunderstanding about Rosemary that I think even Levin implies at times, that she wouldn't have been harmed if she chose to act instead of sitting still and taking what was coming to her. James does meaningfully refute this, arguing that misogyny and a loss of autonomy is a universal experience to women, but still, there is a hesitance to identify with Rosemary's passivity, viewing it as the weaker choice. Rosemary Woodhouse is living someone else's life and cannot change what has been mapped out for her, enacting the little power she has by choosing her baby's name and choosing not to kill him. Power in this adaptation is the freedom to escape the narrative and even then, this can only be done is by hitting the concrete. Life and death. Patriarchy or suicide. So many choices.
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Further reading:
Virginia Wright Wexman, The Trauma of Infancy in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby | American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film
Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity
Lynn Marie Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels, Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions
The Satanist (1968, directed by Zoltan G. Spencer)
The Haunting of Julia (1977, directed by Richard Loncraine)
You'll Like My Mother (1972, directed by Lamont Johnson)
Washington Square (1997, directed by Agnieszka Holland)
Hail Satan? (2019, directed by Penny Lane)
Last Call (2022, directed by Becca Kozak)
The Upper West Side During Its "Renaissance" Decade
Rhian Sasseen, Of Monsters and Men | The Baffler
Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory | Topical Cream
Adam Saraswati Rawlings, Is Satanism a feminist religion? | The New Feminist