Saint Rosalind
a review by ladyfreyja
a review by ladyfreyja
The manga is about a cute and innocent little girl called Rosalind, who murders dozens of people in quite gruesome ways. And it is glorious.
The manga was republished numerous times: for this review I base myself on the 2017 edition, which contains a "chapter 0" specifically written for the edition, 44 years after the original edition.
At the time of writing Saint Rosalind, Watanabe was an experimented author, since she started her career in 1949 and is among the pioneers of horror manga with Aoi Kitsune Honō (青いきつね火) in 1967.
In the 1960s decade and a little after, it wasn't uncommon for shōjo manga to be based on movies. It is the case of Saint Rosalind, which is clearly inspired by The Bad Seed, a psychological-horror novel written in 1954 by William March, which in turns is adapted into a Broadway play the same year, then the play is itself adapted into an Hollywood movie in 1956 by Mervyn LeRoy.
I haven't read the novel, but I watched the movie, and if the movie and the manga are vastly different works, they share striking similarities on major plot-points and little details.
Now it isn't the first time that The Bad Seed inspired a manga, for example Inōe Satoshi wrote Akuma no Otoshigo (悪魔の落とし子) in 1958, and the concept of murderous children was explored in earlier works, like Kawaisō na Mama (かわいそうなママ) by Moto Hagio in 1971.
Saint Rosalind doesn't have much of a plot, you simply follow the main character, Rosalind, murdering people after people. But the manga isn't episodic either as the events are directly connected to each other.
The manga is divided into 17 chapters of approximately 20 pages. Most chapters follow a similar construction and work as would do a scene in a play with one chapter equal a place and a set of characters. This way is very similar to The Bad Seed's movie, as it was adapted from the Broadway play.
Thus in each chapter Rosalind enters an new place (in Greece, England and France), meets new characters, get a reason to kill a character or more, then kill them. There is of course some exceptions to this schema, notably when you follow Rosalind's entourage or the police trying to catch the devilish child, and of course the final chapter concludes the story and thus follows a different schema.
As for the characters the only notable one is Rosalind herself. There is over 30 characters, but most of them are background characters or don't survive long. The only recurring characters worth mentioning are the direct entourage of Rosalind: Alfred the butler, Hathaway the father, and Mycenae the mother, but they stay quite simple. In the end Rosalind is the only complex character, she was made as an enigma, she is the "monster" after all, and the goal is to understand the monster. The other characters don't need to be really developed.
To focus on Rosalind, she is a 8 years old girl who "looks like an angel" but "is the child of devil".
My first reaction about her was "she is probably a sociopath, she doesn't feel any compassion nor empathy". But she isn't, as she genuinely cry when people around her are suffering (albeit, never for very long). But nonetheless something is wrong with her, as she understand what death is but still kill people, some times with the goal to help them!
From my understanding, in Rosalind's eyes, going into paradise is a good thing, thus dying isn't bad.
The first few murders are driven by greed: Rosalind wants an item in possession of someone else. So Rosalind manage to get them make a promise about giving her the item after their death, then she kill them. As they kept their promise, they are able to enter paradise. At least I think that's the reasoning behind those first murders, since she is pretty adamant about "liars aren't able to go to heaven" during all the story.
After few murders her reasons for killing start to vary: for vengeance, by accident or worse: to help people!
This is the disturbing thing with the murders, they are never done out of malevolence. And this is the real difference with The Bad Seed, where the girl is mean, cruel and doesn't feel any empathy but put a smiling face before her family members. Meanwhile Rosalind is innocent and nice, she is just amoral: the best example of this is probably when a girl get into an accident and is losing a lot of blood. Rosalind is both fascinated and amused by all this blood, but is also willing to help saving the girl (and as you can guess, will only makes the situation worse :p).
But I am writing all of this based on assumptions: shōjo manga are well-known for their internal monologues where you have access to the mind of the protagonist. Internal monologues are usually quite central in horror shōjo manga.
In Saint Rosalind however you don't have access to Rosalind's internal monologues, you can't really know what she is thinking, you can only guess. But Rosalind speaks out loud to herself. Maybe we don't need to have access to her internal monologues, because she seems to say everything that comes to her mind without any filter. This trait can only reinforce the impression of innocence that she is giving.
Before entering into details of the art, I have to say that the "chapter 0" at the beginning of the book was drawn 44 years after the rest of the manga, and it shows. If Watanabe managed to keep the flow of the panels coherent between the bonus chapter and the rest, I can't say the same about the character designs, which changed quite a lot, with a strong influence of her redikomi style that she nowadays use: the face structure is more sharp, the eyes are more light, the hairs are less fluffy.
Now onto the original manga, Watanabe is at the prime of her shōjo style: she opens her panels and use the whole set of the visual techniques developed during the 1960s decade by shōjo mangaka, with extensive decorations and layered paneling, some side artworks and three-row overlay style pictures.
Overall the author gives a Gothic style to her manga: the story take place in European countries, the side artworks are full of flowers and blood and you find here and there Christian and angelic symbols. In the visual atmosphere everything is done to underline the ambiguity between Rosalind the angel and Rosalind the devil, between good and bad.
Rosalind is most of the time portrayed with either a great smile on her face, or in the other hand she shows sadness or is crying. She is really cute and innocent looking, pure and naive. But there is few panels, very few of them, which suggest that Rosalind may not be an angel.
First are the blank eyes. Rosalind makes them in two situations: when she feels a particularly strong emotion, usually sadness or anger, but they are not the ones that are interesting here. It is in the second situation, a very ominous one. I'm under the impression that Watanabe drew them not for showing a particular emotion, but rather to show that Rosalind is a monster, that she is doing a pretty bad thing:
In the same way, in two situations, where she is killing someone, Rosalind makes a pretty ecstatic expression, like she is enjoying herself:
These faces are really making us doubt the fact that Rosalind is innocent and naive…
The Bad Seed, as implied by its name, features a character that is inherently evil, thus it choose to focus on the mother character, who is the protagonist, and asks the question "what would you do if your cute child is in fact a serial killer?". The movie, unlike the novel and the play, don't let any doubt here, as the girl meet a divine punishment at the end of the story.
Saint Rosalind takes the opposite route, and it is again implied by its name, "saint". You can't help but to ask yourself "is this child is an angel or a devil?". And the manga gives the answer at the end of the story, since it seems that Rosalind meets a form of redemption, unlike the girl from the movie who is punished by God, Rosalind enters into the grace of God.
But still, what she is doing is far too horrible, and you can't help but to doubt: why did she meets redemption?
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