The Devil's at the Door: Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby
Levin winks at you and suggests there’s something lurking in the walls that Rosemary so eagerly decorates.
The clock’s ticking. Its hands turn further past your bedtime yet you keep reading. You can’t help yourself. You’ve burnt through the pages of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby with such enthusiasm and you’re just a few pages away from the end and you can’t go to bed without knowing “Has Rosemary really given birth to the Devil’s child?”
It’s likely the last question the heroine of this horror novel would want you to ask. The sweetly named Rosemary Woodhouse begins the novel by moving into a new apartment in New York with her husband Guy. Rosemary thinks their new home is a lovely place and she wants to fill it with children. She runs around buying wallpaper and furniture for the apartment and in the evening she and Guy make love (although Levin only describes it with those two words). Rosemary’s dreamlife is likely hanging on a wall somewhere in a painting by Norman Rockwell.
She’s so focused on domestic bliss that she fails to notice “All those weird gargoyles and creatures climbing up and down between the windows” of her new apartment building.[1] She makes a friend from a new neighbour but shortly after her friend ‘falls’ from a window and dies “her face gone to red pulp”[2] on the pavement outside the apartment building. It’s almost like there’s some conspiracy against Rosemary that doesn’t want her to get the house-wife happy ending she craves. There’s always some ghoulish freak accident or strange occurrence that jumps out to blot her plans with blood.
Levin on the page is much like Hitchcock on film. He winks at you and suggests there’s something lurking in the walls that Rosemary so eagerly decorates. Levin does it through tossing details like the gargoyles in after Rosemary and her husband have taken the apartment convinced it’s the perfect place to settle down or dropping his usual, above-board grammar for discordant, broken sentences when they find a dead body on the front door as they’re coming home, but there are moments when Levin does more than just wink. At times, he tears Rosemary’s wallpaper off to show the demon’s head underneath and where the occult terror he hints is gurgling beneath the surface seeps and rushes to the foreground and washes everything else away. One night, Rosemary passes out in bed.
She imagines Guy coming to make love to her only she sees above her “yellow furnace eyes, smell[s] sulphur and tannis root, [feels] wet breath on her mouth, [and] hear[s] lust grunts” as this “hugeness [keeps] driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.”[3] Levin’s usual and direct style gives way to Satanic erotica as he shows what seems to be Rosemary’s rape by the Devil.
But in the next chapter she wakes up. Was it just a nightmare? Or has Guy sold her to the Devil in exchange for the sudden rise in his career prospects? In his introduction to the book’s Corsair edition, Chuck Palahniuk writes that “Before Ira Levin, horror always happened somewhere else.”[4] Like Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt, Rosemary’s Babyis a tale of evil’s infiltration of your home. The white picket fence and the manicured garden are not impenetrable granite walls but porous ones of sand. The Devil can pass through them as easily as he can anything else. Your home is not safe from him, in which case nowhere is.
Horror may find you anywhere. That is what lies on the other side of the equal sign after you add together every word Levin spins so well in this book.
[1] Corsair Edition. Page 12.
[2] Page 33.
[3] Page 82.
[4] Page vii.