Rosemary's Baby

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-10

Part 2, Chapters 1-5

Part 2, Chapters 6-10

Part 3, Chapters 1-2

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Deconstruction of Motherhood

Various characters throughout Rosemary’s Baby idealize pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, often acting protective and even worshipful of maternal femininity. However, the novel’s overarching vision of motherhood is a dark one in which the pregnant protagonist, through no fault of her own, loses all control over her body. Meanwhile, characters like Guy, the Castavets, and Dr. Sapirstein give voice to larger cultural and political fears about female empowerment and the separation of motherhood from institutional patriarchal dominance.

One way that the coven controls Rosemary’s pregnancy, and thus her own visions of motherhood, is through Minnie Castavet. As Rosemary and Minnie become closer, Minnie adopts a motherly role, making decisions about Rosemary’s body and giving her unsolicited advice. Even before Rosemary is pregnant, for example, Minnie says, “You’re young and healthy; you ought to have lots of children” (46), and later, “If your sisters have lots of children, chances are you will too” (59). After Rosemary becomes pregnant, Minnie becomes the delivery system for the coven’s control methods via the daily drink she makes Rosemary consume. While Minnie’s frequent visits and insistent questions about Rosemary’s well-being seem motivated by genuine care, she is using socially acceptable behaviors to exercise power over Rosemary’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

Through Dr. Sapirstein, the novel meditates on how the medical establishment exercises this kind of destructive control through rhetoric of professionalism and knowledge. Dr. Sapirstein discourages Rosemary from reading or asking questions about pregnancy: “Please don’t read books […] And don’t listen to your friends either. They’ll have had experiences very different from yours and they’ll be absolutely certain that their pregnancies were the normal ones and that yours is abnormal” (115-16). By alienating Rosemary from other pregnant or mothering women, Dr. Sapirstein twists motherhood into a purely individual experience rather than a communal one. He also uses his alleged expertise to imply that motherhood is something only he (and people he deputizes, like Minnie) can explain. Furthermore, by denying the validity of Rosemary’s questions and concerns, he does not demystify the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, but rather makes it more confusing and frightening for Rosemary. While this is obviously in service of the coven’s goals, the pervasiveness of these methods of control—hoarding knowledge, isolating pregnant women, making pregnant bodies seem strange and horrifying—suggest that the novel sees these as problems that exist outside horror literature.

The Unnatural Within the Natural

Rosemary’s Baby explores the role of the uncanny, grotesque, and unnatural that lies hidden beneath the everyday, expressing anxieties about what the trappings of mundane respectability might conceal. Rosemary and Guy have conformed to contemporary visions of what life should look like for a bourgeois white couple: They have a beautiful home, a seemingly happy marriage, and a thriving social life. Over the course of the novel, however, they become entangled with twisted and destructive supernatural forces that, even after the revelations at the end of the story, are still invisible to the outside world.

The unnatural atmosphere begins with the Bramford, a building that Rosemary has dreamed of moving into and that almost immediately becomes strange and threatening. Before Rosemary and Guy move in, Hutch inundates them with stories about the dark past hidden beneath the building’s venerable façade. He calls it “a kind of rallying place for people who are more prone than others to certain types of behaviors” and suggests that the building might contain “magnetic fields or electrons” that can “quite literally be malign” (17). Hutch believes that something invisible to the wider world attracts people to the Bramford in an unnatural way, and the Bramford becomes increasingly unnatural because of their presence. Rosemary stumbles upon an unsettling detail about the Bramford, a heavy desk in front of the linen closet, but she does not yet understand its significance at that point. At the end of the novel, she realizes the desk was meant to close up a hidden entrance to her apartment from the Castavets’ apartment, thus cementing the concealed but still important role the Bramford played in the coven’s violent control of Rosemary.

Various objects and experiences throughout the novel contain a similar duality of banal and supernatural. For example, Rosemary uses a Scrabble set to decode Hutch’s clue about Roman Castavet’s real identity, and the Castavets use black candles as part of their Satanic rituals. In both cases, benign, everyday items that exist in homes around the world are revealed to have connections with sinister, evil forces. Even pregnancy—something millions of people experience every day—becomes unnatural for Rosemary. She has unusual pains, does not have any cravings, and loses weight for a while. In all these cases, the novel suggests that even the most ordinary parts of life can camouflage malignant phenomena.

The Performance of Social Identities

Rosemary’s Baby has a persistent anxiety about how and why people perform different social, political, and familial identities. Part of this anxiety is apprehension about what might happen if those performances fail. While Guy Woodhouse, a struggling actor burdened with intense fear about the future of his career, is the most obvious example of the novel’s interest in performance, this theme touches other characters as well. The importance of performativity in the story thus goes beyond the significance of literal performances and suggests that people are constantly performing their everyday identities, often with varying degrees of success.

Guy’s apparent lightheartedness and playful demeanor mask his deeply malevolent plans for Rosemary as he performs the role of loving husband. Early in the novel, as Rosemary tells him he is a “marvelous liar,” he is looking in the mirror and complaining about a pimple. On the couple’s first visit to the Bramford, while Mr. Micklas expresses admiration for professional actors, Guy gives Rosemary “a look of stunned innocence” and then makes “a leering vampire face” at Rosemary over Mr. Micklas’s head (5). When Terry meets Guy and becomes flustered around him because he is an actor, Guy is “spurred” to give her “flowery compliments.” After Roman declares that Guy’s career will take off because he has “a most interesting inner quality” (58), Guy eats the overly sweet Boston cream pie with such enthusiasm that Rosemary wonders if he is “repaying compliments with compliments” (58). Guy’s performative reactions are direct responses to other people learning that he is an actor. In other words, he is reacting to a set of social expectations about how an actor should be. He is also “performing” his own feelings about being perceived as an actor: He believes this perception demands over-the-top, exaggerated rejoinders that acknowledge their recognition of his profession.

Rosemary also performs a predetermined social and economic identity, one that brings together the identities of homemaker, wife, and mother.

Historians of the mid-20th century in America often point out that after World War II, the traditional vision of the family was reconceptualized so that the woman’s role within the home was given an added element of consumerism. Rosemary’s enthusiasm about buying new furniture and appliances for the apartment aligns her with this updated notion of the ideal American family. While the family climbs the socioeconomic ladder because of the husband’s devotion to his career, the wife spends money making the domestic space into one of perfect comfort, beauty, and efficiency. Rosemary also performs the role of new mother through this consumerist lens when she tries to distract herself from her suspicions about the coven by looking at “a raspberry crepe dress” in a department store window, planning to pair it with “a pair of lemon-yellow hip-huggers” after she gives birth and is back to her pre-pregnancy weight (194). In the same way Guy performs his social role of actor by looking and behaving in certain ways, Rosemary fantasizes about performing the role of wife, mother, and homemaker, which also means looking and behaving in certain ways. In both cases, these characters are expected to adopt particular identities, and while they react to these expectations very differently, they both feel the weight of this demand throughout the novel.