Sunday, September 7, 2014
Courtney Christensen, The Concept of Normalcy.
‘“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, ”and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”’ asks Scully, Rosemary’s first college roommate on page 130. This comment really plays on Rosemary’s biggest insecurities, her family life and her childhood, and makes her think about them, something she always tries to avoid doing by sleeping, as she mentions on page 135. Because Rosemary never really fit in with other human beings, especially children her age, she always viewed her situation as incredibly “abnormal,” while she perceived all of the other children as “normal.” However, she never really defined “normal” and neither do we.
Normalcy is a concept that all people seem to idolize, especially as they are growing up, but it seems that there is not one universal definition. “Normal,” therefore, seems to be an impossible state to achieve. Since other children were not very accepting of Rosemary as she mentions on page 111 when she describes how children used to tease her so badly that she had to switch schools, she never interacted with them or got a sense of perspective of the lives of other children. She assumed that her life was the only weird one.
When Rosemary goes away to college, she desperately tries to push away the “abnormal” in her life and find the “normal” again. She explains on page 128 that, “I came to UC Davis both to find my past (my brother) and to leave it (the monkey girl) behind.” In doing this, she refused to tell anyone about her family life. However, she is surprised to find that other people have issues in their lives too. On pages 130 through 132, her classmates start sharing their own stories. One girl was grounded for a B+, another said her father sang in the grocery, and another had a sister who was supposedly abused by their father. Suddenly, it became apparent that Rosemary was not quite as out of place as she had thought. Everyone thought that their weird was the weirdest, was ashamed by that, and tried to brush it off as no big deal. One girl was quoted on page 134 saying “whatev” to imply that her situation was not really as big of a deal as it sounded, even though to her, it really was a large issue.
In light of Rosemary’s college experience, if she had had this perspective on which to base her idea of “normal” all along, would she have realized that she was not the only one suffering and more easily brushed off her own problems? Although most people may have been helped by this realization because they could discuss, connect, and bond with other people, I do not think that Rosemary would have been changed. Since Rosemary always struggled with connection and rarely thought of others, this probably would not have helped her very much. She is stuck in her own “abnormal” world.
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I think the idea you present here is really interesting because Rosie's abnormality is such a major assumption in the novel. She's obsessed with her own abnormality and, as our narrator, makes the reader constantly aware of it as well. She is the reader's only source of information, and so her regular references to her social difficulties and sense of non-belonging lead us to believe that the situation is just as she sees it. In my reading, it certainly didn't occur to me that Rosemary may be better adjusted than she feels and represents to the readers. While Rosemary's psychology was doubtlessly impacted by her upbringing as a test subject and alongside a chimpanzee, it's very possible that her social isolation is less a product of these than it is a result of the way she perceives herself to be incomprehensible to fellow humans. In the conversation above, the girls in the dorm bond over upsetting things from their childhoods. Had Rosemary not been so focused on her own abnormality, so intent on hiding it, she very likely would have made a strong connection to others in this scene. The block to intimate human relationships here is not part of her that is chimp-like, but the part of her so intent on hiding it that she misses out on the opportunity to be vulnerable and therefore foster strong bonds with others. She later describes how she is hurt when these early college acquaintances go on a skiing trip without her. Their rejection intensifies her belief in her own abnormality, although ironically the friendships may have taken off if Rosemary had been brave enough to expose her abnormality.
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