Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in "Rosemary's Baby"

Abstract

Multiple Births. Contemporary popular culture has delivered us multiple embodiments of childbirth. In the supermarket, the slick cover of Working Mother presents a radiant television personality who is Pretty and Pregnant. Newsweek flaunts a responsible expectant couple purchasing Mass Mutual Insurance. Parent pictures a postpartum madonna gazing wondrously at her infant-nursing now, but planning to use Gerber Baby Formula. In the local video store, the self-help aisle is stocked with reassuring instructional tapes: Your First Baby and Childbirth Preparation. The neighborhood book shop features Pregnant and Lovin' It, a guide to one of the greatest, most pleasurable events of... life.3 The popular cinema of past decades has proffered alternate views of maternity. It's Alive (1974) opens with a woman in labor, trying to quell a premonition that something is dreadfully wrong. The sequence ends with bloodied doctors evacuating a delivery room where they have inadvertently birthed her murderous monster. This eerie scenario is extended in the film's two sequels: It Lives Again (1978) and It's Alive III (1987). In The Brood (1979) a female mental patient incubates heinous fetuses in external belly sacs; Embryo (1976) and Eraserhead (1978) pursue the theme of malevolent extrauterine conception. Our reflex is to keep these diverse impressions of childbirth separate: to deem some idyllic and others grotesque, some accurate and others apocryphal,

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