As I continue reading We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I keep thinking about Fowler's remarks concerning humans' self-perceived supremacy. When talking about the close relationship between humans and chimpanzees, she said something along the lines of, "Our brains are made up of essentially the same parts, the difference is how they're used." At this point in the story, I'm beginning to wonder if one of Fowler's main claims in this work is that the experience of emotion is the common thread between humans and their animal counterparts, chimpanzees in particular. Though this claim is still in it's infancy, I've definitely noticed that emotion has been a common thread throughout the novel. This seems ridiculously obvious, as emotion drives every story, but its presence seems to have special significance in this work. First of all, the title of the piece is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, an expression which implies that everyone in the book is overcome with emotion.
Rosemary grew up in the midst of a psychological experiment, and her narration of her life almost reads like a case study of her family and the effect that the experiment they were involved in has had on their individual emotions and on their dynamic as a family. Rosemary chronicles the behavior of her family members in sections such as this one where she says, "Our mother was vaporous," (Fowler 60) and then goes on to detail her mother's complete withdrawal from her former life. The story of We Are Completely Beside Ourselves is centered around a study in which a chimpanzee was raised alongside a human child as if it were human, too. It's easy to think that the results of this study concluded when Fern, the chimpanzee, was removed from the home and the graduate students stopped collecting data. However, this is not the case. Rosemary is essentially continuing to record the results of the experiment by telling her story. The only difference is Rosemary is documenting the emotional effects of the experiment on all of the people involved, rather than the effects on the chimp; she's telling the side of the story which is so easily and so often neglected when research first begins. As Rosemary noted, "There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science" (Goodreads).
There's a noteworthy emotional dichotomy present within the novel represented by the relationship between Rosemary's brother and her father. Her brother, Lowell, is an advocate of Fern's ability to communicate; his character is often the one to humanize Fern. This was especially evident in his telling of his reunion with Fern. He describes her fervent signing that she would be good and wanted to go home, and he then described as she sacrificed her self-defense against the alpha male in order to cling to his arms (207-209). His telling showcased Fern's abilities to remember those she cared forc and to communicate her feelings in an animated fashion. Both of these reactions served to humanize her in the eyes of readers. Rosemary's father, however, often does the exact opposite. He speaks of Fern and the human members of his family in terms of science and psychological experimentation. At one point, Rosemary begins to recount a memory and she says, "My father would surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget's preoperational phaseout regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I'm am undoubtably...imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn't exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme" (52). This sort of talk led to conflict between Lowell and his father. The rift in their relationship serves to represent the rift between science and emotion. We discussed in class what Fowler's work could suggest about science as a field. From what I've gathered, it seems that Fowler suggests that the science of psychology is cold and fails to provide accurate answers to questions regarding humanity and beyond because it cannot take into account and measure the experience of emotion, a stronge force in shaping the human experience and, arguably, a uniting force across the animal kingdom.
Fowler, Karen J. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. New York: Plume, 2013. Print.
Fowler, Karen J. "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Quotes." Goodreads. N. P. 2013. Web. 7 Sept. 2014.
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