Rosemary’s Baby is the story of Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, a young couple living in New York City in the 1960’s. Living on Guy’s salary (he’s a barely making ends meet actor), they, or mostly Rosemary, decide they have to move into the Bramford, Levin’s answer to the Dakota. Welcomed by their neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet and their tenant Terry Gionoffri, Rosemary and Guy quickly settle in. Guy becomes very close to the Castevets, especially after poor Terry throws herself out their window which is the bad before the good, because now Guy is getting the lead in plays (the first choice tragically went blind suddenly), and Rosemary is expecting. If only Edward “Hutch” Hutchins, Rosemary’s father figure from her pre-marital apartment building, wasn’t constantly bringing up that the Bramford was a big place for cannibals and Satanists, or if Rosemary could remember anything from the conception night other than a strange dream about a trip through the linen closet, and being brutalized while a bunch of her elderly neighbors stood around naked chanting and playing the recorder. (Which may I add as an aside, I can not take seriously as an instrument of Satanism the instrument my 4th grade music teacher taught the class how to play Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” on).
You have to love a book that you can’t stand one character in from the beginning to the end. Guy I wanted to nut-punch, Minnie and Roman were just condescending and irritating, Laura Louise I just thought of as a blue-haired Karen, and for most of the book if Rosemary got locked in a room with a zombie it would die of starvation.
We certainly get a description of Rosemary’s baby, even if we don’t really get one of any other charcter. Mittens on his hands because his “pearly little claws” would scratch him is not that big of a flex; all babies need their hands covered to stop them from scratching themselves. But he has little horns, a little tail, little hoofie-woofikins, not toesie-woesikins (sorry, wrong Antichrist), and little yellow slit-pupiled eyes with no whites. So I guess newborn Adrian Steven Andrew John (or “Andy-Candy” to his mother; barf. And sorry Roman, but I guess Minnie decided that if changing his name is what it’s going to take for Rosemary to not yeet the Antichrist, then a name change he shall have!) looks like this only not as cute:
I have no idea how they’re hiding Andy’s horns, tails, talons, and eyes from average New Yorkers; I suppose that’s a problem for future AARP Satanists: NYC Branch
And with all the Satanists and their “Hail Satan!” (or “Hair Satan!” if you’re Ira Levin writing a somewhat offensive Japanese character into the novel), “Hail Adrian”, “Hail Andrew!”, “Hail Rosemary, Mother of Adrian, Andrew, Whoever!” for some reason struck me as absurdly funny: you have a bunch of people who are apparently in their 60’s up standing around like at a cocktail party chanting their support to whoever the crowd decides on.
If I was Rosemary I would not have drawn from the toes with Guy (as satisfying as that was to read); I would have gone up with the knee. I wanted to ask “What? No ram skull, pentagram, bat, black cats, or random statues/prints of Baphomet to decorate the bassinet?” But of course it’s black taffeta, because the only other fabric that screams “Satanist” would be velvet, and that would be a real witch to clean up after a baby. I can suppose that the main reason the Satanists (and Guy) believed Rosemary would not connect “baby on Eighth floor (because obviously the floors are as tissue-paper thin as the walls, it just wasn’t mentioned before) cries”= “women come in to tell her to express milk so she’s getting rid of it (this is not how biology works)”=”they take it away and a few minutes later baby stops crying” is because she has been up to this point a barely functioning moron. Truly a book of its time; women nowadays wouldn’t tolerate Guy’s behavior, and Dr. Sapirstein would be reported to the AMA. Plus, the marital rape while your wife is blackout drunk excuse would only work if you hadn’t made it so passive-aggressively obvious that your wife wants kids and you don’t, Guy. So I guess you have two morons married to each other; one just happens to be a selfish self-centered idiot who’s willing to prostitute their spouse for their own career, and the other lets life happen to them. And if you really think that Roman and Minnie will actually continue to help your career now that Rosemary has delivered the goods (literally), then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Moral of the story is I guess that all those women who say that they have problems bonding with their newborns truly have something wrong with them; because if Rosemary Woodhouse can bond with the Antichrist after wanting to throw him and then herself through a window, then women should be able to bond with ordinary babies.
I take offense to the insinuation that red hair is a sign of evil; I know it’s an age-old superstition, but as a ginger I resent it.
I felt the writing style came across as very clinical and abstract, like Ira Levin had put a sheet of glass between the audience and the characters, and you were watching performance art, not reading a book. Rosemary’s Baby is probably one of those books that everyone should read once in their lives. I can’t say I regret reading it; I will however never read it again, though I may read the sequel, Son of Rosemary just to finish up the story.