Thursday, September 4, 2014
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Parts 3 and 4
A lot happens to Rosemary between the pages of 104 and 209 in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She goes to college, meets her friend Harlow (a character I thought about as her foil), is reunited with her long lost brother, Lowell, and finds out the truth about Fern. What I found most interesting while reading this section of the book was the way in which Rosemary's unconventional childhood colors her adulthood, even from her teenage years. She seems to always have a certain darkness or self-doubt about her, like she blames herself for the fallout of her family. On page 125, she runs into her brother's ex-girlfriend who gives her information about his disappearance and a tidbit of info about Fern's whereabouts. After hearing it, Rosemary says, "It's hard enough here to forgive myself for the things I did and felt when I was five, hopeless for the way I behaved at fifteen." She goes on to say that, "Lowell heard that Fern was in a cage in South Dakota and he took off that very night. I heard the same thing and my response was to present that I hadn't heard it." Someone who feels so much guilt about their actions from when they were five, and even 15 years old, seems to be quite troubled. We later see when she begins college at UC Davis that she has a hard time relating to the other students on her floor. "Checking into the freshman dorms, I made a decision never to talk about my family," she says. Her peers deem her as incredibly "normal", which she decides is a great achievement. Still, this backfires, and she says, "weird is the new normal and, of course, I hadn't gotten the memo. I still wasn't fitting in. I still had no friends. Maybe I just didn't know how. Certainly I'd had no practice" (132). She accredits her lack of social skills to her upbringing, and here we note once again how her childhood has hindered her adult life. The level to which she is emotionally scarred from her childhood is extremely deep. It seems to affect her in ways she isn't even aware of, like when she breaks the plate in the cafeteria upon first meeting Harlow. Good or bad, she acts in ways that are directly related to her previous experiences with Fern, Lowell, or her parents. This makes me wonder, how much of adult behavior is the product of childhood experiences? We all know that our upbringings shape our views and ideas about the world, but how much of who we are has to do with how we were raised? Clearly, Rosemary's case is very specific, as few people were raised with a chimpanzee. Still, there are quirks and idiosyncrasies about everyone's childhood. This assigned section essentially made me wonder, how much of our personalities do we create, and how many of our decisions do we really make for ourselves? Better yet, how much of us is just the byproduct of the way our parents raised us?
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I have to completely agree with this assessment about how readers get to see Rosemary's upbringing influence her adult behavior. After Fern's "disappearance" Rosemary changed profoundly, not because her parents physically forced her to evolve; but because Fern was an essential part of Rosemary's personality and that absence created a gap in Rosemary’s identity. They were two living things that acted as one cohesive person. I also wanted to add to the idea of Rosemary’s lack of social skills by discussing how she describes people as she sees/meets them. The manner in which she describes people is interesting and peculiar. Most human beings see dialogue as an essential part of getting to know a person. Rosemary seems to put far more emphasis on body language and unspoken social cues much like a chimp would. For example, when she meets up with Lowell in the restaurant in chapter six, she bases almost all of her responses to Lowell on body language. At one point she says “Lowell put his scarred hand on my sleeve and left it there. That weight on my arm seemed like the only attention I had from him…” I think this is important to note because Rosemary only felt his love/ attention through physical touch and unspoken cues, not his verbal communication. Rosemary has a similar way of describing her first encounter with Harlow; which was completely based on the imitation of animalistic behavior. This is a feature that I find to resemble the physical closeness Rosemary had with Fern and has longed for in every relationship ever since.
ReplyDeleteI too agree with both of you that Rosemary went through a rather dramatic personally changed after Fern's disappearance. Before, she described herself as a loud child who could not stop talking, but after Fern was sent away, she became very quiet and showed lack of "normal" social skills. For example, she says "you didn't need a lot of friends to get through school.... you had to have one" (113). The one friend she makes in third is a Korean kid names Dae-jung who could not speak English. According to Rosemary, they were friends, but she also says "he didn't talk, but I was well able to supply both sides of a conversation." Dae-jung moved on and made new friends after his Enligh improved (thanks to Rosemary), and she describes the relationship as "beautiful, but brief" (113). I think this is extremely similar to the relationship Rosemary had with Fern: very "one-side" conversation and a relationship that came to an abrupt end.
ReplyDeleteThe "Fernesque" relationship/behavior continues to manifest in different forms. Her rather inexplicable affection towards Harlow, who she only just met under bizarre circumstances, and the way she interacts with Lowell as Morgan mentioned.
In general, I think our parents do have a palpable effect on our personality, but I think Rosemary was exposed to extreme circumstances that are not "normal", and perhaps that is why it had a greater influence on her than most of us. On the other hand, our parents may have affected us to an equal degree, and we just don't notice it because it falls under the spectrum of acceptable human behavior.
Sierra Vandervort: I love the questions that you brought up towards the end of your post. This is the entire basis for the nature/nurture debate that we were talking about in class. I also like your thoughts on whether Rosemary's circumstances as a child influence the way she acts as a grown woman. While I totally agree that the events you go through as a child influence your personality, I believe the character of Rosemary takes that to an extreme. I think she's letting this one event in her life overrule the way the rest of her life has gone. She chose her college based solely on her brother and Fern. I feel like if she had a stronger personality and was more of an individual then her life wouldn't be as "hard" as she makes it out to be. This is where the nature aspect comes in to play. She could have very well overcome the void that Fern and her brother left in her life, but she chose to dwell on it. She chose to make herself the victim. She was so young when Fern left; she had her whole life ahead of her. It almost frustrates me to some point. I feel like Rosemary is being extremely overdramatic and could make a better life for herself is she tried.
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