In an early scene of Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse, entering the dreary study of her new home in New York’s fabled Bramford apartment house, remarks that “white-and-yellow wallpaper would brighten it tremendously” (16). In Roman Polanski’s 1968 film adaptation, yellow wallpaper covers the “partition” through which Rosemary first becomes aware of suspicious goings-on in the neighboring apartment, and it is this yellow partition that forms the “backdrop” for the first of her strange dreams. Considering these and other details, it is difficult not to be reminded of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Are these conscious allusions to Gilman’s story or merely eerie coincidences? Either way, it is fruitful to explore the ways both Levin’s novel and Polanski’s film are “haunted” by the presence of this unacknowledged – and perhaps unintentional – intertextual source. Both stories employ a traditional gothic structure, presenting a dichotomy between seemingly opposite worlds. In each, we follow a female “discoverer” character as she moves from one world to the other, only to find that the two are not as separate as once believed – that the horrific, nocturnal world presents a gothicized mirror image of the familiar, everyday world from which she has come. In addition, both stories address the process of interpretation: both Gilman’s unnamed narrator and Rosemary are “readers” for whom the careful interpretation of various texts comes to assume life and death significance. I will use these similarities as a point of entry into a discussion of the larger sociopolitical issues at stake in each text, in particular the institutions of marriage, motherhood, and the medical establishment. I will conclude with some brief discussion of Agnieska Holland’s 2014 television adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby, considering the ways the miniseries addresses – and/or fails to address – these concerns for a contemporary audience.
About the presenterBrian Patrick Riley
Brian Patrick Riley is a professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College. He teaches American Literature, Popular Horror Fiction, and Academic Writing and Research. His interests include 19th- and 20th-century American fiction, 20th-century drama, film, and adaptation studies.