Response Paper #5

Elizabeth Rosener

ENGL 3040

Response Paper #5

Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, Rosemary’s Baby, like many of the other films we have watched in this course, deals with a kind of possession of bodies. However, despite the covens and the satanic conspiracy that resulted in a devil’s spawn, this film does not deal with a supernatural possession. Instead, it deals with man’s possession and confinement of women in a patriarchal society founded on the subjugation of women. With second-wave feminism just beginning at the time of the film’s release, Rosemary’s Baby presents the idealized image of femininity and domesticity in the 60’s and then challenges it by exposing the unsettling realization of the threat against women’s rights and dignity by men in their efforts to preserve the conservative values of domesticity and marriage.

In the beginning of the film, the naïve, obedient, Catholic-raised country girl, Rosemary Woodhouse, played by Mia Farrow, represents the ideal housewife of the 60’s. Throughout the film, Rosemary’s life is constantly treated like a little girl, criticized and controlled by her struggling actor of a husband, Guy, and their aggressively invasive Satanist neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castevet, as well as other male figures who claim they know better. Someone is always instructing her on how to behave, what to wear, how to wear her hair, what and when to eat, and even what she can and cannot read, and she obeys. The only control over her body that Rosemary seems to maintain throughout the beginning is her ability to decide when to have sex, which is made evident by her oddly abrupt and commanding request, “lets have sex.” However, the horror truly begins when Rosemary loses the last bit of control over her own body during the rape scene, which we later find out was all part of a satanic conspiracy in which Guy essentially sold his wife to the devil in exchange for a mediocre acting gig.

Polanski’s film is chalk full of religious elements that cannot be ignored, and calls attention to the ideals of the time surrounding rape culture, women’s reproductive rights and motherhood as destiny that continue today. By 1960, the first birth control pill was FDA approved, and by 1965 a Supreme Court ended state laws restricting access to contraceptive pills on the grounds that it violated the right to marital privacy.  Although this was a huge step forward for women in taking back control of their bodies, it threatened with conservative values and in 1968 the pope released an encyclical that reaffirmed the Roman Catholic view on birth control, abortion, etc. These conservative “pro-life” views about motherhood as destiny, therefore contraceptives and abortions are wrong and should be restricted, were addressed in the film during the rape scene when Rosemary has a vision of the Pope.

In this this scene, Rosemary is drugged, tied down, and raped by the devil in front of her husband, neighbors, and other people who are more concerned with the life growing inside the woman than that of the woman herself. Similarly conservative “pro-life” views put the rights of an embryo above those of the woman. They try to confine women by restricting their rights and choices, and force them to accept any pregnancy, even in cases of rape, incest, and threats not only to the health but also the life of the mother. And sooner or later, the woman is expected to surrender to the pregnancy because it is for her own good. Similarly, the moment when Rosemary loses the last bit of control over her body, this is the moment that she becomes entirely imprisoned by Guy and their neighbors. The apartment she once loved so much becomes her prison cell and despite any attempts she cannot escape. She can only accept the fact that she was involuntarily impregnated by the devil and eventually surrender to the devil spawn that is her monstrous son. And as we watch Rosemary progressively lose all control of her body and her choices, we can’t help but feel a bit anxious. This anxiety comes from the troubling realization that Rosemary’s reality is not all that far off from our own in which oppressed women have been struggling to escape from the confines of a patriarchal society that perpetuates men’s efforts to control women’s bodies through violence.