Rosemary's Baby

“On Friday evening the apartment was theirs: an emptiness of high ceilings and unfamiliar dark into which they came with a lamp and a shopping bag, striking echoes from the farthest rooms.”

In this passage, words like “unfamiliar,” “dark,” and “echoes” highlight the Gothic characteristics of the Bramford.

“She thought of going to the library and reading the story in old newspapers like Hutch had done; but that would have made it more real, more dreadful than it already was.”

In this metanarrative moment, Rosemary decides to let Hutch’s story about the dead infant found in the Bramford basement stay fictional rather than become real.

“Mrs. Castavet put on her glasses and looked at her. Mr. Castavet looked up from the ground, his deep-socketed eyes glinting under his hat brim.”

When the Castavets look at Rosemary for the first time, the power of their collective gaze is emphasized. Simply by gazing at her, they already exercise a hypnotic force.

“A dream Rosemary had had a night or two earlier sparked in her mind—something about Sister Agnes bawling her out for bricking up windows—and she shook it away and smiled attentively.”

This is the first place in which Rosemary becomes aware of the newly collapsed boundaries between dreams and reality. In this dream, Sister Agnes’s identity merges with Minnie’s, which also suggests that Minnie has characteristics of an abusive authority figure, even if these characteristics have not yet revealed themselves.

“‘Well,’ Mrs. Castavet said with a pleased smile, ‘Terry didn’t know what she was talking about.’”

Here, Minnie inadvertently reveals how little Terry had actually known about her and Roman, highlighting how strange it was that they brought her into their home and emphasizing their malevolent motives.

“‘I thought his performance was considerably overrated,’ Mr. Castavet said. ‘I’d be most curious to see what you would have done with the part.’”

This passage, in which Roman expresses his distaste for Albert Finney’s performance in a play about Martin Luther, has a double meaning: By saying that Guy would have been better in the stage role, he implies that Guy might be a better religious figurehead than Martin Luther in real life. This is the beginning of his recruitment of Guy to the coven.

“And again this month he had won and she had lost, in this undignified contest in which he didn’t even know they were engaged.”

Rosemary has been secretly trying to get pregnant by not taking her birth control, and yet she has still not conceived. This passage reveals the distance already growing between her and Guy as well as her view of conception as competitive rather than collaborative.

“Now, when he should have been happy, he was dour and troubled, sitting with nothing moving except his cigarette hand and his eyes.”

Rosemary believes Guy should be happy about getting Donald Baumgart’s part, but in one of the first clues about his activities, he is not. The emphasis on his eyes following Rosemary echoes the description of the Castavets seeing her for the first time after Terry’s death.

“He was bright-eyed and a bit on edge, the way he had been the first time they slept together, when he knew it was going to happen.”

Guy’s behavior the evening of Rosemary’s rape foreshadows what is about to take place and implicates Guy directly: In the same way he knew they were going to have consensual sex for the first time, he now knows Rosemary is about to be drugged and assaulted.

“Rosemary went to him and saw at once that he hated all white people, hated her.”

The Black first mate in Rosemary’s dream embodies Rosemary’s self-consciousness about being white as well as larger cultural anxieties about the Civil Rights Movement.

“She spoke sadly, so he wouldn’t suspect she had just had an orgasm.”

At the end of Rosemary’s dream, she asks the Pope’s forgiveness, feeling shame for having had an orgasm during the rape. This moment speaks to Rosemary’s complicated feelings about her sexual desires, Guy’s violation of her body, and her ambiguous relationship with Catholicism.

“He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?”

Guy’s capacity to mislead and gaslight Rosemary is crucial to the narrative, and this is the first place she realizes that he might use his acting skills to intentionally harm her.

“I suddenly realized the other day that I’ve never been alone in my whole life—not for more than a few hours, that is.”

Rosemary says this to Hutch after asking if she can stay in his cabin. This passage emphasizes her lack of independence and self-sufficiency at this point in her life but also suggests that she is aware of this lack and wants to remedy it.

“Talk with Guy? No, that would wait. Everything could wait.”

After finding out she is pregnant, Rosemary wants the world around her to stop so she can simply enjoy being pregnant. This is ironic, given that her pregnancy was orchestrated by forces outside her control and her pregnancy is ultimately a means to an end.

“The smell of tannis root had changed; it was still strong but no longer repellant.”

This shift highlights the psychological and physical power the coven has over Rosemary’s pregnancy.

“Sleep, when it finally came, brought harried dreams in which she fought against huge black spiders that had cornered her in the bathroom, or tugged desperately at a small black bush that had taken root in the middle of the living room rug.”

Rosemary’s highly symbolic dreams during the difficult first months of her pregnancy seem to reflect the coven’s actions: The spiders are predatory and violent, and the small bush seems similar to the toxic plants in Minnie’s greenhouse.

“You look as if you’re being drained by a vampire.”

In this moment of irony, Hutch expresses concern for Rosemary’s weight loss but does not know that her body has actually been taken over by the parasitic coven.

“She smiled at the tender scene, laden with meaning and emotion that survived her agnosticism.”

As Rosemary looks fondly at the nativity scene in a department store window, she is able to reconcile (albeit momentarily) her Catholic upbringing with her adult agnosticism.

“The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemary—some center of resistance and remembered well-being—and she stopped reacting, stopping mentioning the pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts.”

This passage marks one of the first moments that Rosemary stops resisting the coven’s control over her and its withholding of information from her. It is also one of the first places in which she gaslights herself, refusing to acknowledge her pain.

“‘Hang on, David-or-Amanda,’ she said, and tasted it and found it great.”

After dumping Minnie’s daily drink down the sink, Rosemary drinks something she prepared for herself, thus taking back some control over her body and allowing herself some pleasure. This is also one of the first passages in which she speaks to her unborn baby, testing out potential names.

“[What] he says is that the death of God is a specific historic event that happened right now, in our time. That God literally died.”

A guest at Rosemary’s party makes this claim, foreshadowing what Roman will say at the end of the novel and speaking to Rosemary’s general feelings of anxiety about dangers in the world, her baby’s well-being, and her own religious beliefs.

“When she threw away the drink and the cake and took one of the large white capsules Dr. Sapirstein had sent, she felt just the slightest bit ridiculous.”

In this passage, Rosemary again gaslights herself: Even though she knows what the coven is doing, she refuses to internalize her own awareness of what is true.

“She didn’t know if she was going mad or going sane, if witches only had the longing for power or power that was real and strong, if Guy was her loving husband or the treacherous enemy of the baby and herself.”

This is Rosemary’s climactic moment of realization in which she accepts possibilities that she, an agonistic, would once have dismissed as superstition.