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How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in Rosemary's Baby and Alien

2011; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2011.596386

1545-5866

A. Robin Hoffman,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would argue that this is the case regardless of whether the child has “his father's eyes” because his father is Satan or because the Satanists have disfigured a normal infant—the film prevents its audience from confirming either possibility by withholding visual access. In this respect, my interrogation in many ways complements Karyn Valerius's sociohistorical approach to the representation of fetal personhood in Rosemary's Baby. As the need for this collection on “Evil Children in Film and Literature” demonstrates, critical attention to the popular image of horrifying offspring has lagged behind public consumption. When Sabine Büssing's Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction was published in 1987 Büssing , Sabine. Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Childhood and Youth 4. New York : Greenwood P , 1987 . Print. [Google Scholar], it could rightly claim to be “the only study of its kind” in terms of both breadth and depth. Even though she relegates “The Child in the Horror Film” to an Appendix, Büssing offers a still-rare instance of commentary on the frequent appearance of children in horror movies. Robin Wood and Gary Hoppenstand are perhaps other notable exceptions, but Wood's discussion of “the Terrible Child” in horror films stalls with identification of the “recurrent motif” and links it to a “unifying master figure: The Family” (83), while Hoppenstand's “Exorcising the Devil Babies” is a single article. Ray Narducy usefully has pointed out that Rosemary's Baby “was influential in causing the horror genre to focus on the child as evil” (402) since it predates a rash of films with a similar theme, but accounts for the film as merely “a cultural reaction to the radical, protesting ‘children’ of the 1960s” (402–03). As many others have noted, The Exorcist might be seen as the culmination of a trend in representations of evil offspring initiated by Rosemary's Baby. Larsen also briefly notes that scientific imaging would contribute to “anxiety” about the potential monstrosity of fetuses but declines to pursue a historical reading of this phenomenon (241). For a more recent discussion of “fetal monstrosity” that is similarly tangential in its approach to the cinematic representation thereof, see Andrew Scahill, “Deviled Eggs: Teratogenesis and the Gynecological Gothic in the Cinema of Monstrous Birth." As Wells cogently points out, “The history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in the twentieth century. … Arguably, more than any other genre, it has interrogated the deep-seated effects of change and responded to the newly determined grand narratives of social, scientific, and philosophical thought” (3). Janelle Taylor's history The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram discusses the pivotal role played by medical imaging technology in motivating pro-life political campaigns. The issue remains pertinent in the specific context of fetal homicide laws; the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on April 1, 2004. Pro-choice advocates like the National Organization of Women have continued to voice concerns about the need to distinguish between legal abortion and fetal homicide, fearing that such laws may be used as leverage to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Silent Scream (1984) presents a sonogram image reacting to its helpless position and obviously relies heavily upon both technological “insight” and its ability to grant the fetus subjectivity. I would argue that The Silent Scream capitalizes on a pre-existing and growing acceptance of such imagery at the same time that it furthers it. See also Chapter 7, “Prenatal Technologies: Ultrasound and Amniocentesis” in Farquhar's The Other Machine, pp. 161–77, and Cheryl L. Meyer's The Wandering Uterus. For more on the rhetorical strategies that work to promote fetal personhood, see Newman, pp. 7–27, and Hartouni, pp. 1–66. See particularly Chapter 4, “The Evil Innocent,” especially “The Possessed Child,” pp. 101–05, and Chapter 5, “The Monster,” pp. 110–36. Rabuzzi is particularly concerned with the unnatural quality of women's “prebirth visual encounter[s] with the fetus” via ultrasound: “Instead of the almost unconscious unity of the baby invisibly resting inside the body, this is a sudden dislocation. Now what has seemed part of one's self, albeit a new part, is suddenly ‘other,’ separate, before its natural time for separation” (65). It is true that an extradiegetic projection of reptilian skin and yellow eyes appears onscreen. This image could be interpreted as a kind of “flashback” to her first glimpse of the baby. However, it could also be a flashback to her experience of conceiving the child, which included visions of Satan, and—in my opinion—does not settle the question either way. Instead, it reiterates our dependency on Rosemary's unreliable visual experience to draw such conclusions. I would agree with his claim that the “final vacuum expulsion” of the alien strongly suggests a reference to abortion (201), but it seems to me that Cobbs stops short of acknowledging the ways that fetal threats loom throughout the film and broaden the scope of its social warning. For example: “a womb-like chamber where the crew of seven are woken up from their protracted sleep” (Creed 129); “she expels the creature from the body of her spacepod” (Cobbs 201); “the gigantic womb-like chamber in which rows of eggs are hatching” (Creed 130); Nostromo as womb/mother-ship (Creed 130 and Skal 301); “the cozy womb-like atmosphere of the mess hall” (Bell-Metereau 15); “the dominant motif of [Nostromo] is the interior of the human body—the windings and curvings of organs and glands” (Cobbs 201); Kane as womb (Bell-Metereau 15 and Cobbs 201). I am indebted to Dr. Karen Renner for pointing this out to me. For an excellent reading of Nilsson's Life photographs and the rhetorical strategy of their captions, see Newman, pp. 10–16. See Rowland, Farquhar, and Gena Corea's The Mother Machine. Skal suggests that “the chest-bursting scene … became the seventies’ surpassing evocation of reproduction as unnatural parasitism” (301). Rowland testified to the currency of outer space metaphors prior to Alien's release with her characterization of “the [medicalized] treatment of the fetus as both person and patient”: “It is accompanied by the alienation of women, who now become merely the ‘capsule’ for the fetus, a container or spaceship to which the fetus is attached by a ‘maternal supply line'” (121). For additional discussion of such conditions, see “Woman as a Dissolving Capsule: The Challenge of Fetal Personhood” in Rowland's Living Laboratories, pp. 118–55, and “Reproductive Interventions” in Meyer, pp. 164–91. Additional informationNotes on contributorsA. Robin HoffmanSince 2007, the English Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh has served as A. Robin Hoffman's home base for interdisciplinary research in book history. Her teaching and writing address representations of childhood, word and image studies, and British print culture in the long nineteenth century, with dissertation research focused on Victorian alphabet books.