Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

136Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsthe text. Following Andriano, I shall produce a more “positive” reading ofthis Male Gothic work.Andriano emphasised that the female demons in his texts actually stoodfor the forbidden female elements in the male psyche. Analogously, themasculine Devil in Rosemary’s Baby is open to various interpretations: it is asymbol of sexuality and may well represent repressed sides of Rosemary’sself. The intercourse with the Devil initiates a crisis, which makes Rosemarypainfully aware of otherness in her life. However, the demonic Other is nottied to either sex; the Devil is not only an image of irrational, frighteningmale sexuality. Instead, this Protean figure is able to embody fears towardsthe body itself. Our biology is, after all, fundamentally “unconscious” in thesense that we have no control nor clear knowledge of the “corporeal” realityinside ourselves. 29 Rosemary’s Baby gives the internalisation of demonic horrora concrete shape in Rosemary’s pregnancy. 30The history of demonic imagery is a history of heterogeneity, and thepregnant mother with her coalescence of two organisms is a potent symbolof this condition. It is perhaps the single most important innovation inRosemary’s Baby to harness the (often unspoken) uncertainties inherent inmotherhood in the service of horror. The demonic Other is now rearticulatedas the baby, who is simultaneously a part of Rosemary, and someoneelse – a liminal being. An important concept for the modern Gothic hasbeen “body horror,” which has been applied mainly to the “Splatterpunk”variety of ultra-violent, naturalistic movies and texts following George A.Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and reaching its culmination inthe works of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. The movies of DavidCronenberg illustrate especially well the “internalization and recognition offears as generated by the self,” that Rosemary Jackson has discussed. Rosemary’sBaby can be seen as an important precursor to such works asCronenberg’s The Brood (1979), a bizarre story of an angry mother “expressing”(quite literally) her hatred by giving birth to monstrous killer babies.Cronenberg has himself analysed the impulse behind this variety ofhorror (and perhaps all horror) as based on the paradoxical division/unitybetween mind and body: mind is rooted in body, and body, on the otherhand, can develop physical illnesses as expressions of mental ill feelings. Accordingto Cronenberg, all cultures have tried to find ways to accommodateand explain this dual reality somehow in their systems of thought, but nonehas been able to make humans completely whole, unbroken. 3129 Gothic Bodies by Steven Bruhm (1994) explores the spectacle of suffering and otherforms of emphatic physicality as an important aspect of the Romantic tradition. Hewrites that the “obfuscation of boundaries between inside and outside, and the deconstructionof the central self that such obfuscation implies, are most readily accomplishedby the pained body whose experience as other becomes so forcefully one’s own” (p. 148).30Several scholars have recently paid attention to the way women’s procreative powerhas the capacity to evoke a specifically “internal” horror. See below, page 163.31Cronenberg 1992, 79.