Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

We might say that the major theme of Rosemary's Baby deals with urban paranoia (as opposed to the small-town or rural paranoia we will see in Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers ), but that an important minor theme could be stated along these lines: The weakening of religious conviction is an opening wedge for the devil, both in the macrocosm (questions of world faith) and in the microcosm (the cycle of Rosemary's faith as she goes from belief as Rosemary Reilly, to unbelief as Rosemary Woodhouse, to belief again as the mother of her infernal Child). I'm not suggesting that Ira Levin believes this Puritanical thesis-although he may, for all I know. I am suggesting, however, that it makes a nice fulcrum on which to turn his plot, and that he plays fair with the idea and explores most of its implications. In the religious pilgrim's progress that Rosemary goes through, Levin gives us a seriocomic allegory of faith.

Rosemary and Guy begin as typical young marrieds; Rosemary is practicing birth control as a matter of course in spite of her rigid Catholic upbringing, and both of them have decided they will have children only when they-not God-decide they are ready. After Terry's suicide (or was it murder?), Rosemary has a dream in which she is being scolded by an old parochial school teacher, Sister Agnes, for bricking up the school windows and getting them disqualified from a beautiful-school contest. But mingling with the dream are real voices from the Castevet apartment next door, and it is Minnie Castevet, speaking through the mouth of Sister Agnes in Rosemary's dream, that we are listening to: "Anybody! Anybody!" Sister Agnes said. "All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn't have to be a no-good drug-addict whore out of the gutter. Didn't I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she's young and healthy and not a virgin.” This dream sequence does several useful things. It amuses us in a nervous, edgy sort of way; it lets us in on the fact that the Castevets were in some way involved in the death of Terry; it allows us to see shoaling waters ahead for Rosemary. Perhaps this is stuff that only interests another writer-it's more like two mechanics inspecting a nifty four-barrel carburetor than it is like classical analysis-but Levin does his job so unobtrusively that maybe it doesn't hurt for me to take the pointer and say, "Here! This is where he's starting to get close to you; this is the point of entry, and now he will begin working inward toward your heart.” Yet the most significant thing about the passage is that Rosemary has woven a dream of Catholic intent around the words her lightly sleeping mind has overheard. She casts Minnie Castevet as a nun . . . and so she is, although she is a nun of a rather blacker persuasion than that longago Sister Agnes. My wife also says that one of the basic tenets of the Catholic church she grew up with was, "Give us your children and they will be ours forever." The shoe fits here, and Rosemary wears it.