I saw Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.  When I watched it again recently, I was puzzled by a few things that I didn’t notice before, and since the movie was said to closely follow the novel on which it was based, I decided to read it to see if it would clear things up.  It didn’t.  In any event, what follows is an analysis of the movie supplemented by what I was able to get from the novel.

It often happens in a movie that someone commits a little sin and is subsequently punished severely for it, all out of proportion to what he or she deserves.  In Storm Warning (1950), for example, a saleswoman ends up being whipped by the Ku Klux Klan because she took advantage of her good-natured colleague.  And in Colossus:  The Forbin Project (1970), a man ends up being enslaved by his supercomputer because he stole an ashtray.

As for the novel Rosemary’s Baby, a married couple, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, played by John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow in the movie, find out that an apartment they really wanted, one in the Bramford, has become available right after they have signed a lease for another apartment. Rosemary talks Guy into lying to their landlady, to get them out of that lease.  It would have been bad enough if she had done the lying herself, but she compounded her sin by making her reluctant husband to do it instead.

But even before that, as the novel puts it, she was guilty of disobeying her parents:

She was the youngest of six children, the other five of whom had married early and made homes close to their parents; behind her in Omaha she had left an angry, suspicious father, a silent mother, and four resenting brothers and sisters.

Later, we get more information as to why her Catholic family was angry with her:

[T]hey were all hostile now—parents, brothers, sisters—not forgiving her for A) marrying a Protestant, B) marrying in only a civil ceremony, and C) having a mother-in-law who had had two divorces and was married now to a Jew up in Canada.

There used to be a lot more religious animosity than there is today.  My mother was a Catholic.  She said that when she was a teenager, in the 1930s, the priest in her church pointed out the window to people entering a Protestant church across the way and said, “You see those people over there. They’re all going to Hell.”  And a girl I knew in the 1960s said that sometimes people she met would react negatively upon finding out she was a Catholic, saying things like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about people like you.”

In any event, for these peccadilloes, lying to get out of a lease and disobeying her parents, Rosemary ends up being severely punished by having Satan impregnate her with the Antichrist.

I use the word “Antichrist” only because so many critics and people in general refer to the baby that way.  That word does not occur in either the movie or the novel.  In fact, the Bible says that anyone who denies that Jesus is the son of God is an antichrist, and the world is full of them, presumably more so now than back then.  See, for example, 1 John 2:18, 1 John 2:22, and 2 John 1:7.  Bowing to convention, however, we can say that Satan’s baby is a special Antichrist, so indicated by being capitalized, instead of just one of those ordinary antichrists.

Hutch, Rosemary’s friend, tries to talk her and Guy out of the apartment at the Bramford, relating its dark history of evil doings, including the Trench sisters, who ate little children, and Adrian Marcato, who had practiced witchcraft and had almost been killed by an angry mob when he announced that he had “conjured up the living Devil.”

He also mentions that a dead baby had recently been found in the basement, wrapped in newspaper. Normally, there would be no need to imagine a supernatural cause for that.  We periodically hear a report of some woman having a baby at home and throwing it in a dumpster.  But knowing that Rosemary will be having Satan’s baby later on, I guess this baby was supposed to be the Antichrist, but it wasn’t suitable for some reason.  Maybe it was a girl.

But then Hutch makes reference to the parties, presumably ungodly in some way, that were held by Keith Kennedy.  That struck me as peculiar.  In the 1960s, the name “Kennedy” was heavy with connotation.  In order to avoid that connotation, an author would normally find a neutral name instead, like Keith Williams, for instance.  Therefore, the author of the novel, Ira Levin, must have assigned the name “Kennedy” to one of the malefactors of the Bramford deliberately.  If I may jump ahead slightly, it was when I learned that there was explicit reference to the Kennedys in the book that I decided to read it to find out what that was all about. Given those references, by the way, one cannot help but think of Rosemary Kennedy, concerning whom there was a bit of a dark history too. And the fact that the Kennedys were Catholics would seem to dovetail with the bad feelings people had toward that religion in those days and conversely.

Anyway, after Guy and Rosemary move into the apartment, Rosemary meets Terry Gionoffrio one day while down in the basement doing the laundry.  It turns out that she has been figuratively adopted by Rosemary’s neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), after finding her passed out on the street, almost dead from hunger and heroin.  Like Rosemary, she is also a Catholic but no longer observing.  As we find out later, the Castevets have been grooming Terry to be the mother of Satan’s baby.  Terry said that at first she thought the Castevets wanted her for some sex thing, but they turned out to be like loving grandparents.  Except for the sex thing.

Just as we are right to be suspicious of the fact that Ira Levin applied the name “Kennedy” to one of the evildoers in the history of the Bramford, so too must we wonder why Terry is another lapsed Catholic. Furthermore, the name “Roman” suggests Roman Catholicism.  This inspires the question, must the mother of the Antichrist be a Catholic or at least have been raised as a Catholic?  I guess it just wouldn’t be the same if the mother of Satan’s baby were a Baptist.  But even then, at least the mother would be a Christian.  It is out of the question that the mother of the Antichrist could be a Hindu.

A few days later, when Guy and Rosemary come home late from a party, they find out that Terry has died, having fallen from the Castevets’ window on the seventh floor.  Even when watching this movie for the second time, I figured she had been murdered, that her suicide note was faked.  But by playing closer attention, and by reading the novel, I found that Terry really did commit suicide.  As we gather from hearing the Castevets arguing on the other side of the thin wall separating their apartment from that of the Woodhouse, both while Rosemary is awake and again in a confused dream that she has about being back at school where she was taught by nuns, Terry committed suicide when Roman told her about the role that he expected her to play in becoming the mother of Satan’s baby.  Minnie had disagreed about telling her, and now she was angry that they would have to start all over again.  And there isn’t much time. They want the Antichrist to be born in June of 1966, or 6/66, if you will.  Make that right after midnight on June 25, 1966, which according to the novel is exactly six months after the birthday of Jesus.

Shortly thereafter, Minnie comes over to see Rosemary to thank her for saying how much Terry had appreciated all that the Castevets had done for her. Then she makes the following remark:

“She was cremated yesterday morning with no ceremony,” Mrs. Castevet said. “That’s the way she wanted it.

Had Minnie not said anything to this effect, we would never have noticed.  The author put it in the novel deliberately.  I suppose we’ll have to assume that Terry’s request in this regard was in the suicide note since we never got to read it.  Or is Minnie just making that up?  It seemed to me that Catholics used to disapprove of cremation, especially one without a ceremony.  I started to research the matter, wondering if this cremation business was supposed to be sinful in some way, but then another thought occurred to me.  Terry had committed suicide.  Since Satan exists, so does Hell. That means that Terry must burn forever in the eternal fire. Might as well cremate her.  It won’t make much difference now.

If this movie were not about the supernatural, if it were just a melodrama, life for Rosemary would be hell on earth.  First there are her neighbors.  In one scene, Minnie and her friend Laura-Louise barge right into Rosemary’s apartment for a visit, sit down, and start doing their needlepoint.  Then Guy begins siding with Minnie about everything, yelling at Rosemary when she doesn’t do what he tells her.  After Hutch dies, she doesn’t have a friend in the world.  Fortunately, this movie is not about real life but only about the supernatural, so we don’t have to take all this seriously.

As it is, Roman talks Guy into making a Faustian bargain, which allows him to get the part in a play that he had been hoping for, in exchange for which he agrees to let Satan have sex with Rosemary. When that night finally arrives, it appears Satan told everyone in the coven that he wanted them to get naked and stand around the bed while he’s doing it.  Some people are really kinky.

While Satan is screwing Rosemary, she thinks he is Guy.  She dreams she is on a yacht with some people that appear to be rich and sophisticated.  In the novel, it is made explicit that John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline are on the yacht for some reason.  Anyway, in the novel, Rosemary notices that what she thinks is Guy’s penis is much larger than usual, and she really seems to be enjoying the way Satan is ramming it to her.  Just to make it special, she dreams that she gets to kiss the Pope’s ring while Satan is humping on her.

And now she is pregnant.  After Rosemary finally has the baby, she is told that it died.  But then she hears it crying through the walls.  Carrying a big knife, she gets into the apartment next door where everyone is having a baby party. They are saying, “Hail Satan!” and Roman says, “God is dead!  Satan lives!” Right after that, a man walks in named Argyron Stavropoulos.  He seems to have only just arrived, not being one of the people that stood around the bed naked while Satan and Rosemary were doing it.  Because he has a Greek name, a lot of people suggest that he is supposed to be the equivalent of Aristotle Onassis.  I guess the idea is that Onassis wanted Jackie, so he made a deal with Satan to have her husband assassinated.

Putting it all together, I can only assume that all this Kennedy stuff was thought to be the perfect context for a movie about Satan and the little baby Antichrist because the Kennedys themselves were suspected of being evil in some way.  Did Joseph Kennedy make a Faustian bargain so that his sons would become politically powerful, only for the Devil to undermine that bargain in the very act of keeping it, as he always does?

There is also a Japanese man at the party.  He is nearsighted, so he has to wear eyeglasses, and he is busy taking pictures with his camera.  We knew this was a realistic depiction of a Japanese man, for we had recently seen Mickey Rooney play one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). He seems to be most grateful to be included in all this because, as we all know, there is no way the Antichrist could be Japanese. He must be Caucasian.

Roman’s declaration that God is dead recalls an earlier scene.  After Rosemary becomes pregnant, she is pressured into going to see a Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who is part of the Castevet coven. Late in her pregnancy, while sitting in the waiting room, she picks up the April, 1966 edition of Time, on the cover of which is the question, “Is God Dead?”  This reminded me of what a critic said regarding this movie when it first came out:  “In a world where God is dead, the Devil is camp.”

Indeed!  When Rosemary sees her baby, she is at first horrified by its evil eyes, but soon thereafter, she is filled with love for it and begins rocking the bassinet.  This triumph of evil might have shocked some in the audience when they watched this movie, but most of us just admired its clever ending and were amused by it.

I was perusing the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century, and I noticed that most of the novels had been made into a movie or a television miniseries, as would be expected. One exception that stood out was The Way of All Flesh.  There was a movie entitled The Way of All Flesh made in 1927 and remade in 1940, but it had nothing to do with the novel in question. And so, while it can be useful to compare a novel with the movie that was based on it, in this case it might be worth considering why no such movie based on this novel exists or ever will.

The author of this novel was Samuel Butler, who published it posthumously.  He knew that many people would find it offensive, especially members of his own family, and he did not want to have to deal with that, for as the Modern Library indicates, the novel is semi-autobiographical.

Most discussions of this novel emphasize that it is Victorian, as if to say that its significance is restricted to England in the nineteenth century.  In the description given by the Modern Library, it is said to be a “depiction of the hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life.”  While it is true that the story is set in England in the nineteenth century, it hardly follows that the import of this novel is limited to that place and period.  In fact, regardless of the place or period in which a novel was written, if it is said to be worth reading, pains are usually taken to say that it transcends its setting, emphasizing the universal truths contained therein, assuring the reader that it has something to say to us today, though it was written long ago.  But just the opposite is done with The Way of All Flesh.  By narrowing its scope and relevance to a single century in a single country, those reviewing it give assurances that we today need have no concern that it applies to us.

The principal theme of this novel is its hatred of parents.  This is the reason Butler never married.  It is not unusual for someone not to want to have children, but in his case, it was more a matter of not wanting to become a parent, the thing he most despised.

We are not supposed to criticize our parents.  It is a sin so grievous as to be forbidden in the Ten Commandments.  Therefore, Butler’s fictional narrator, Edward Overton, has nothing bad to say about his own parents, except, perhaps, when his sisters give him a look, telling him not to disagree with their father, lest doing so lead to much unpleasantness.

Instead, Overton tells us about the Pontifex family covering five generations.  As he does so, he is able to digress on the different ways parents can make their children miserable, including everything from thrashing them, belittling them, imposing expectations on them, reminding them of how much has been sacrificed for their sake, making them feel guilty when they fall short, and controlling them through will-dangling.  Nor does he restrict himself solely to the Pontifex clan, but from time to time allows us a peek at other families whose relationships between parents and children are also less than felicitous. In so doing, Butler makes it clear that his novel is not about one bad parent in relation to one unfortunate child but rather is about parents in general and all the unhappiness they inflict on their offspring.

It is this that makes the novel unacceptable as material for a movie.  By way of contrast, consider the movie Mommie Dearest (1981), based on the tell-all book by Christina Crawford, in which we learn what a terrible mother Joan Crawford was. Aside from the criticisms of the book and of the movie, one thing is clear:  it is only about one bad parent, from which no inferences are supposed to be drawn about parents in general.

Furthermore, Joan Crawford was Christina’s adoptive mother, which is pretty much the same as a stepmother, the difference between the two being more a legal matter than a moral one.  As with fairytales, so too with movies, it is acceptable to have an evil parent if he or she is a stepparent, as, for example, David Copperfield (1935), Double Indemnity, (1944), Peyton Place (1957) or, of course, The Stepfather (1987).

Biological parents in a movie might also be evil, provided their children are adults. Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) is a badman with children in My Darling Clementine (1946), but that’s all right since all his children are adults and just as bad as he is.  But a truly evil person is usually not allowed to be the biological parent of a young child.

One reason for this is that it would ruin the good feeling we get when that evil person is killed in the end. Consider the movie Shane (1953).  We are given to understand that the Ryker ranch is owned by the two Ryker brothers, who live there alone, except for the hired hands.  Now imagine somewhat younger Ryker brothers, who have wives and young children at home.  At the end of the movie, after Shane has killed the two brothers and ridden off into the mountains, there are widows and fatherless children back at the ranch, with perhaps a five-year-old girl asking her mommy, “What happened to Daddy?”

In reality, we know that evil people have children just like everyone else, but we don’t like to think about that, and we certainly don’t want to see it in a movie, where something deep inside us insists on the redemptive effect that a young child confers on his or her parent.

If the relationship between parent and child, especially that between father and son, is as awful as Butler would have us believe, can we imagine that the family as a whole could possibly be a happy one?  Of course not.  Butler also portrays marriage as something best avoided, along with the children that arise from it, although the requisite wisdom to do so is usually acquired only after it is too late.

This attitude of misogamy is fully expressed by the character Alethea, whom Overton refers to as a freethinker. She is perhaps the nicest person in the novel. She and Overton were friends as children.  He says he proposed to her several times, but she refused to marry him or anyone else.  She has nothing against men. She just doesn’t want to be married.  Thanks to the money she inherited, she does not have to work for a living or depend on a husband to support her.

And how much money was that?  Well, converting pounds in the middle of the nineteenth century to dollars in the twenty-first is a dubious endeavor, but Alethea’s net worth of £20,000 would be the equivalent of about $3,500,000 today. Invested as it was in sound securities, this provided her with an annual income of £900, or $150,000 per year today.

In fact, everyone in the Pontifex family is well off, financially speaking, so that those who are employed in one manner or another are so by choice. Like Alethea, Overton also appears to be well-fixed, although he presumably derives additional income as a playwright.

Alethea is very fond of her nephew Ernest Pontifex, the central character of the novel, and he is fond of her.  In fact, the best relationship between an adult and a child in this novel is that between Alethea and Ernest, much in the way that the best relationship between a man and a woman in this novel is that between Overton and Alethea.  Overton does not say so, but given the overall attitude about family relationships in this novel, we cannot help but suspect that Alethea and Ernest might not have gotten on so well had she been his mother, just as Overton and Alethea might not have gotten along so well had they been married.

Before Alethea died, she left the bulk of her estate to be held in trust by Overton on behalf of Ernest, his godson.  The money was to be turned over to Ernest when he reached the age of twenty-eight.  Ernest knew nothing of this.  Alethea was wise in realizing that Ernest might foolishly fritter it all away were he to receive it at the age of twenty-one, as indeed he would have.

Overton speculates that life would be ever so much easier if the generations never knew one another personally, but rather parents died before their children were born:

Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

The Way of All Flesh is also irreligious, which is not surprising since Butler was an atheist.  However, Butler’s feelings about parents and his attitude toward religion are not two independent features of this novel, but rather are closely related, which is hardly surprising given the metaphor of God as our Father in Heaven. Talking about God is an indirect way of talking about man, and so it is that just as a father may feel he has the right to impose his will on his son, so too is God conceived of as having the right to impose his will on man.  And just as that same father may be fully convinced that he is only acting in the best interest of his son, so too does God act with a complete sense of righteousness, regardless of what misery may have to be endured by those who are subjected to it.

Alethea’s brother, Theobald, father of Ernest, is a clergyman, and as such, he fully embraces the idea that instilling obedience to God in his son is the best way to ensure obedience to himself, and so it is, as Overton puts it, “Before Ernest could well crawl, he was taught to kneel.”  Nevertheless, as the years go by, Theobald becomes so disappointed with the way Ernest has turned out that he is sure that if the little Egyptians had been like his own ungrateful child, their parents would have regarded the tenth plague as a blessing.

After several chapters covering the years of Ernest’s childhood, during which time he is made to feel bad about what a disappointment he is to his mother and father, he eventually comes to have a “cordial and active dislike for both his parents,” a sign that he has acquired the maturity of an adult.

When Ernest’s grandfather died, it was discovered that he had set aside £2500 for Ernest, which was to accumulate in the hands of trustees. When he came of age, it had increased to £5000 (about $730,000 today), providing him with an income of £250 per year ($36,500), enough to guarantee his independence from his father, financially speaking, that is. Psychologically speaking, that was another matter entirely:

So strong was the hold which habit and association held over both father and son, that the one considered he had as good a right as ever to dictate, and the other that he had as little right as ever to gainsay.

Later in the novel, Overton quotes Ernest bemoaning the hold parents have over their children:

“There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents—oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?”

Ernest at first intends to be a clergyman like his father, but in his religious enthusiasm, he allows himself to be swindled out of all his money. Furthermore, his belief that he should be celibate rather than marry is eventually too much for him. When his faith is weakened by a few comments from a freethinker, he makes advances on a young woman whom he imagines is a prostitute, only to alarm her so much that it all snowballs into a charge of sexual assault, for which he is sentenced to six months hard labor.  In the end, he becomes an atheist.

The attack on religion throughout this novel would, by itself, have been enough to preclude the possibility of The Way of All Flesh being made into a movie when the Production Code was in force, but censorship still exists informally, as the profit motive makes producers loath to offend a potential audience.  As Overton puts it, in another context, a lot of people would dislike seeing Christianity despised just as much as they would dislike seeing it practiced.  Nevertheless, Butler’s hostility toward parenthood remains the greater obstacle to there ever being a movie version of this book, as much today as in the past.

Speaking of which, once Theobald learns of Ernest’s imprisonment, he disowns him, telling Overton he never wants to hear from Ernest again. When Ernest and Overton discuss this while he is still in prison, he begins to gather that Overton does not like his parents.  Overton says he not only does not like them, but thinks they are horrid.  It is a great relief to Ernest on hearing this.  Overton goes on to say that except for Ernest and Alethea, the entire Pontifex family is horrid. But lest we think that this is the full extent of Overton’s willingness to generalize about familial relationships in this derisive fashion, he continues:  “The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.”

Back when Ernest was still living at home, the family had a maid named Ellen, who was quite pretty. When it became obvious that she was pregnant, Theobald fired her.  She is not heard from again until after Ernest gets out of prison and runs into her in the street.  One thing and another, he falls in love with her, and they get married.  It never occurs to Ernest to inquire as to the child she must have had, and the novel is silent on the matter as well.  In any event, the marriage at first seems to be a good one, but after she has two children by Ernest, it turns out that she is an alcoholic and becomes impossible to live with. Ernest thinks he is doomed, but it happens that it was John, the Pontifex coachman, who got her pregnant and eventually married her, thus rendering her marriage to Ernest invalid.  She takes off to America with some guy with whom she intends to live in sin and is never heard from again.

At this point, Ernest is less than two years away from receiving the money Overton is holding in trust for him, which by now has increased to £70,000, roughly equivalent to $10,000,000 today.  Needless to say, this would have been sufficient for Ernest to take care of his two children, either by himself, since there would be no need for him to have a job, or by hiring a governess, if he didn’t want to be bothered.

But even that would not do, as far as Ernest is concerned.  He decides that his children, being illegitimate, will be better off being brought up among the poor, so he decides to pay a couple that already has children £1 a week, the equivalent of $145 today, and they “jumped at the offer.”  His ultimate reason for not wanting to have anything to do with his children, as he explains to Overton, is the following:

“I shall be just as unkind to my children,” he said, “as my grandfather was to my father, or my father to me. If they did not succeed in making their children love them, neither shall I. I say to myself that I should like to do so, but so did they. I can make sure that they shall not know how much they would have hated me if they had had much to do with me, but this is all I can do.”

If someone were to offer such an explanation for abandoning his children in real life, we should doubtless regard it as specious reasoning to a self-serving end.  But in the context of this novel, we are supposed to take Ernest seriously.  He does not want to be a parent because it poisons the soul.

At any rate, now that Ernest has made a clean break with his parents, been freed of marriage to Ellen, and is rid of his children, it would seem that the path is now clear for him to live a happy, carefree life.  But then he receives a letter from his father saying that his mother Christina is dying and he must come to see her. When he arrives, she is glad to see him, but his father, brother, and sister all do what they can to make Ernest miserable again.

Early in the novel, Theobald, as a clergyman, visited a woman that was dying.  One might suppose that her religion, promising the hope of a future life, would be comforting to her.  Instead, her last few days are made even more miserable by her fear of spending eternity in Hell.  Theobald utters some platitudes about her being forgiven of her sins, but far from reassured, the woman fears otherwise.

“Can’t you tell me, Sir,” she exclaims piteously, as she sees that he is preparing to go away, “can’t you tell me that there is no Day of Judgement, and that there is no such place as Hell? I can do without the Heaven, Sir, but I cannot do with the Hell.” Theobald is much shocked.

“Mrs. Thompson,” he rejoins impressively, “let me implore you to suffer no doubt concerning these two cornerstones of our religion to cross your mind at a moment like the present. If there is one thing more certain than another it is that we shall all appear before the Judgement Seat of Christ, and that the wicked will be consumed in a lake of everlasting fire. Doubt this, Mrs. Thompson, and you are lost.”

And now it is Christina who is filled with the same dread.  Although no longer believing in Christianity himself, Ernest reassures her that she has been the most “devotedly unselfish wife and mother that ever lived,” that she has done all that was humanly possible.

At these words Christina brightened. “You give me hope, you give me hope,” she cried, and dried her eyes. She made him assure her over and over again that this was his solemn conviction; she did not care about being a distinguished saint now; she would be quite content to be among the meanest who actually got into Heaven, provided she could make sure of escaping that awful Hell. The fear of this evidently was omnipresent with her, and in spite of all Ernest could say he did not quite dispel it.

Such are the consolations of religion.

Notwithstanding all that Ernest does to assure his mother that she is a saint, she nevertheless suspects that if she does go to Heaven, he will be the only one of her children that she will not meet there.

After a few more days, she dies.

During his stay, Ernest can see that of the remaining members of the household—his brother Joey, his sister Charlotte, and his father Theobald—none of them like one another, much as they do not like Ernest. Years later, when Theobald dies, none of his children are sorry.

And so it is that, except for an occasional bad dream in which Ernest is bothered by some member of his family, either still living or now deceased, he is finally free of the lot of them, and given his wealth, he can at last “afford the luxury of a quiet unobtrusive life of self-indulgence.”

It often happens when someone becomes an atheist that he begins to attach a secular significance to what had previously been understood as having a supernatural meaning.  As Schopenhauer said, strictly speaking, all religions are false; allegorically speaking, all religions are true.  After Ernest got out of prison and decided to break away from his parents, Overton made the following observation:

When I think over all that Ernest told me about his prison meditations, and the conclusions he was drawn to, it occurs to me that in reality he was wanting to do the very last thing which it would have entered into his head to think of wanting. I mean that he was trying to give up father and mother for Christ’s sake. He would have said he was giving them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name.

So, whereas for a Christian, “Christ” refers to the Son of God, whose death on the cross makes possible the salvation of mankind and eternal life in Heaven, for Overton, Butler’s atheistic narrator, “Christ” denotes a secular salvation, the good life here on Earth.  This would also be the meaning that Ernest would attach to it, had his conversion to atheism not been so recent.

The passage in the Bible that Overton alludes to is Luke 14:26:  “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

Now that we have reached the end of this novel, it would seem that the secular meaning Butler would attach to these words is the following:  to be completely rid of one’s family is the surest path to a happy life.

All I know about nuns is what I have seen in the movies.  The movies in question would be those like The Song of Bernadette (1943) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), where nuns play a prominent role, as well as movies where nuns are featured only in minor roles like Airport (1970) and Year of the Dragon (1985).  Not to be left out are movies where nuns are portrayed humorously as in The Blues Brothers (1980) and Nude Nuns with Big Guns (2010). I confess I never quite managed to get myself to watch The Singing Nun (1966).

I never watched The Nun’s Story when it first came out in 1959 either, but TCM featured it recently. It apparently was nominated for several Academy Awards, so I decided to take a look.  It is based on a true story. It begins in Belgium in the late 1920s, where Dean Jagger, who plays a prominent surgeon, reluctantly watches as his daughter, played by Audrey Hepburn, joins a convent for nuns that want to be nurses too. Hepburn wants to specialize in tropical diseases like leprosy and then be allowed to serve in the Belgian Congo.

In other words, unlike the other nun movies I have seen, this one takes us through all the steps a woman must go through to become a nun.  Whether all nuns have to go through something like this, whether all convents are like the one in this movie, I cannot say.  What I can say is that I was overwhelmed.

The restrictions placed on Hepburn and others are too numerous to list in full, but the basic idea seems to be that of giving one’s life to God through acts of self-denial.  It must suffice to mention just a few.  For example, Hepburn and others are told, “Your hands must learn to stay still and out of sight except when they’re needed for nursing or prayer.”  Presumably, meals would be an exception too.

Speaking of meals, they are told, “We, of course, never ask for things for ourselves. Each sister is alert to the needs of her fellow sisters.”  If no one offers you a biscuit, I guess you just don’t get a biscuit.

There is something called the Grand Silence, “from after chapel at night until after chapel in the morning,” during which they are not supposed to talk.  Even apart from that, they are supposed to avoid “useless conversations,” using sign language instead, especially during meals.

But more than that, they are supposed to strive for “interior silence.”  It is not enough to suppress bad thoughts, apparently, but all thoughts whatsoever, such as, “I wish someone would offer me a biscuit.”

As postulants, they are told they must detach themselves from friends and family.  Upon becoming novices, they must detach themselves from their memories.  Furthermore, instead of writing in a notebook any faults of which they are guilty, as novices they must proclaim their faults to their sisters.

Fine.  But then there is this:  “If any sister has observed you in an external fault which you have not proclaimed, it is her duty to proclaim you in charity so that you may be aware of your errors and correct them.”  This reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984, in which children are encouraged to spy on their parents and report any disloyalty to Big Brother.

About this time, while you are thinking there is no way you could submit to all these rules, Sister Simone tells Hepburn that she is giving up.  They have become best friends, but that’s not allowed, so they have to do penance for their attachment to each other.  Of course, she breaks the Grand Silence to say goodbye, but she’s leaving, so what does she care? In so doing, however, she leads Hepburn into the sin of also breaking the Grand Silence, for which she must do penance.  Simone offers to shake Hepburn’s hand in farewell.  Hepburn starts to extend her hand, but touching another nun is forbidden, so she withdraws it.  Anyway, though we never see Simone again, yet the scene gives us some emotional relief. At least someone is getting out of there!

[Note:  I watched this movie twice all the way through and, in writing this review, often returned to sections of the movie as needed.  Every time I got to the scenes where the postulants were being instructed on how to behave and made to participate in various rituals, I got the same creepy feeling I had when I watched Eyes Wide Shut (1999).  I kept telling myself that this was a notion peculiar only to me and that I should keep it to myself.  But it kept coming back to me with such force that I finally decided to mention it here, for what it is worth.]

Hepburn takes her vows and is sent to the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp.  Owing to what her father had already taught her, she excels among the other sisters hoping to be sent to the Congo as well. One of the other sisters, Sister Pauline, resents Hepburn and goes to see Mother Marcella, accusing Hepburn of thought crime.  I mean, sin of pride.

Hepburn admits that she sensed that Sister Pauline did not like her, but she didn’t know what to do about it.  Mother Marcella tells Hepburn that it would be a great act humility on her part if she were to purposely fail the examination.

At this point, there should have been an intermission.  A few minutes were needed to let that sink in.

Anyway, Hepburn is stunned.  She says she would be willing if the Mother House knows of this and approves.  Literally speaking, the Mother House is a building, so I assume this is a metonym for the Mother Superior.

Mother Marcella says that would be “humility with hooks,” in which Hepburn would have the satisfaction of knowing that the Mother House would be impressed with her sacrifice.  In short, Mother Marcella continues, no one else can know that Hepburn failed the examination on purpose. She tells Hepburn to talk it over with God.

At this point, I wanted Hepburn to come back the next day and say, “I talked it over with God, and he says he wants the best nurse to go to the Congo, and that’s me.”  Nothing like that happens, of course. Besides, if God really cared, there would be no such thing as leprosy.

Hepburn can’t bring herself to purposely fail the examination, coming in fourth as she does in a class of eighty.  Nevertheless, it is Sister Pauline who gets to go to the Congo, while Hepburn is assigned to work in an insane asylum.  When she gets there, she is told that the practical nurses only put in four-hour shifts, but the sisters put in eight- to ten-hour shifts. As we learn this, we are taken to a room full of women restrained in bathtubs, where they kick and scream without ever letting up.  Over in the corner, there is a nun, sitting on a chair, silently putting in her eight-to ten-hour shift.

Eventually, Hepburn makes her way to the Congo, where she hopes to find God’s cure for God’s disease.  However, she is devastated to learn that instead of tending to the natives, she will be working in the hospital for white Europeans.  The chief surgeon there is played by Peter Finch.  She is warned not to linger to discuss a case with him after surgery, which would mean being alone with him, because he is a bachelor atheist, and her habit will not protect her.  After all, we learned from watching Black Narcissus (1947) just how sexually arousing a bachelor atheist can be for a nun.

That ominous warning notwithstanding, the only danger Finch poses to Hepburn, even when they are alone in a room together, is his irreligious witticisms.  One of the rules Hepburn learned was never to look into a mirror. Shortly after her arrival, she opens a cabinet with a glass panel, in which she accidentally sees her reflection.  As she gazes at it spellbound, Finch walks into the room and says, “You will say six Aves and a Pater Noster for that bit of vanity, Sister.” When asked if she has ever assisted in an operation, she tells him who her father is, attributing much of her ability to him. Finch replies, “You’ll say another five Aves and beg your soup for that little display of pride, Sister.”  Hepburn is not amused.

At one point, he casually asks her if she’s ever gone fishing.  She does not reply, remaining silent.  “It’s impossible to talk to somebody,” he says with disgust, “who’s not allowed to remember.”  The restrictions that were placed on her, such as detaching herself from her memories, seemed bad enough while she was in the convent, surrounded by other nuns, but they really seem excessive now that she is out in the real world.

Eventually, Finch starts having serious discussions with her, telling her she is too tense, the sign of an exhausting inner struggle.  When she says nothing in reply, he snidely remarks, “The Grand Silence?”

In exasperation, she replies, “Do you realize that every time you talk to me like this, I should go down on my knees before my sisters and proclaim my fault?”

He tells her he is sorry.  But on another occasion, he tells her she is a worldly nun, one who is good with patients, but who will never be the kind of nun her convent expects her to be.

It becomes necessary for her to escort a mental case back to Belgium. Then war breaks out.  Her father is killed by the Germans while treating members of the resistance.  Her desire to help those who are in need becomes more important to her than the rules of the convent.  She is told in response, “You entered the convent to be a nun, not to be a nurse. The religious life must be more important to you than your love of medicine.”

Hepburn realizes that she can no longer be a nun.  She asks to go through the procedure for leaving the convent, something so serious that a cardinal has to get involved.  After the paperwork is done, she is told to go into the portress room. When she is ready, she is to press the button.

In the portress room are the clothes she wore when she entered a convent for the first time.  She changes into those clothes, picks up her suitcase, and presses the button.  I thought that someone would come in and say goodbye to her, saying things like, “We enjoyed having you with us as a sister,” or “Not everyone is meant to be a nun,” or “There is more than one way to serve God.”

But no.  Instead, a door automatically opens to the street, effectively saying, “Don’t let it hit you in the ass when you close it behind you.”

We see her walk down the street, turn the corner, and disappear.

And so, that’s the way it is.  At least, I think that’s the way it is.  But then, all I know about nuns is what I see in the movies.