Rosemary's Baby

If you were to ever ask anyone if they can think of a piece of pop culture about the horrors of pregnancy, the answer you'd probably hear is Rosemary's Baby. Most people would mean the Polanski film, but that cinema classic (one of the few horror movies even I enjoy!) was based on Ira Levin's original novel. It's quite short, almost more of a novella. It tells the story of young newlywed Rosemary Woodhouse, who begins the story by moving into an exclusive Manhattan apartment building with her up-and-coming actor husband, Guy. A friend from her time in the workforce tries to warn her about the bad reputation the place has, but the couple is excited and moves in anyways.

Rosemary, estranged from her own Midwestern family, is eager to have a child, but Guy is hesitant until he starts spending time around the Castevets, their elderly next-door neighbors, and he gets a promising role when the originally-cast actor is struck blind. The night they conceive, Rosemary's drink is spiked and while she remembers an oddly demonic evening, Guy claims nothing unusual happened. She's steered away from her first choice of doctor to one the Castevets prefer, who counsels her to not talk about how her pregnancy is going with her friends. After months of agonizing pain (and daily nutritional drinks provided by the Castevets), Rosemary complains to a friend, who starts looking into what could be wrong. He's struck down suddenly, and his last message to Rosemary is a warning about her new friends. Heavily pregnant and with no one to turn to, Rosemary is suddenly terrified about what exactly she's going to be giving birth to.

What came through the most strongly to me, from today's perspective, is a warning about how abusers work. Rosemary is cut off from her family, from the doctor she wants to go to, from her friends and a community of women who would be able to tell her that her experiences aren't normal. Her husband and neighbors do all of it cheerfully, in the guise of caring about her, but they're really isolating her so they can better control her. It's incremental enough that she barely even notices the noose tightening around her until it's too late. That, as much as the reality that you have no idea what your baby is going to be like until it comes out, is the horror.

Honestly, this is a situation where the movie is better. The book isn't bad, but it's unspectacular. None of the characters is all that compelling, the dialogue doesn't spark, the prose is unremarkable. The performances (particularly Mia Farrow) and atmosphere Polanski was able to render on film flesh out the bones of the interesting idea Levin's work presents and explores. The book on its own isn't unworth your time, particularly because it's so short, but its not anything special.

I'm not sure what I would've felt had I read it with no knowledge whatsoever of the story. Do yourself this favor, have this experience: if you don't know what Rosemary's Baby is about, read it. Just do. Before starting, I believe I knew all the main plot points; that is, I knew that there was this satanic cult, and I knew that they led the main character to have the son of Satan. It didn't spoil my experience per se—it really was a great one still—, but it did make the book a little predictable to me. It made it easy to second guess every character's actions or motives.

First of all, I think Rosemary is a great character. Being this a book from the 60s, I admit I was a little suspicious of how a female main character would be developed, but I think I have no complaints—even though she is helpless, surrounded by Satan worshipers as she was. Second, this is one of the most well-rounded horror books I have ever read—not that i have read many, but it is surprisingly well-rounded even so. I intend to see the movie adaptation soon, but I don't know about reading its sequel, Son of Rosemary—it most certainly didn't need a sequel; the ending is pretty perfect as it is.