Imitation: the action of using
someone or something as a model. Rosemary’s life: an imitation. She grew up a
pawn in her dad and his grad students’ psychological experiments with her
sister Fern, a chimpanzee. Rosemary and Fern were attached at the hip. They
became more and more alike as their time together went on. Fern’s actions
became more human-like, and Rosemary’s actions became more chimp-like. When
Fern was taken away from Rosemary’s life, Rosemary didn’t really know how to
act. The experiments were over, and the habits she had gotten from them were no
longer acceptable. She was told to talk less, and she couldn’t show the same
types of affections towards people.
With Fern no longer around,
Rosemary learned to act more like Lowell and her mother. She talked less and
became engulfed in her own personal bubble. While her mother “emerged from her
bedroom only at night and always in her nightgown” and Lowell escaped the house
as often as he could, Rosemary was left alone, or sometimes with her babysitter
Melissa (p.60). Rosemary had nobody to grieve with or explain things to her.
She couldn’t act the same at school as she had at home with Fern, so she began
to live a silent life, one in which she behaved only as she thought others
wanted her to or expected her to.
When Rosemary meets Harlow, all of
this imitation wears off. Harlow is a wild, accepting girl that wants a friend,
and Rosemary becomes that friend. Rosemary finds herself falling back into her
habits of talking nonstop and acting more free and wild; she becomes herself
again, the self she was with Fern.
I find imitation to be one of the
biggest themes of the novel. It restricts Rosemary from being all that she
wants to be. In fact, she doesn’t even really know what she wants to be. But
with Harlow around, Rosemary finds herself wanting more, looking for the things
that she has wanted all along. Rosemary starts the quest for all that she has
lost… “In my head, I finished the grid I’d started in the holding cell, the
grid of what was missing and for how long. One, my bicycle; two, Madame
Defrage; three: the journals; four: my brother. Five: Fern” (p.181). This quest
is for more than that. It’s Rosemary’s quest to finally find herself.
While imitation is a relevant part of Rosemary’s life, I also believe that Rosemary does not understand her need to imitate those around her. On page 103, Rosemary confesses: “I learned that different is different. I could change what I did; I could change what I didn’t do. None of that changed who I fundamentally was, my not-quite-human, my tabloid monkey-girl self.” From this quote, it seems as though Rosemary understanding that her imitation of Fern for the first five years of her life have shaped her to the person she is today. While she did start to imitate the silent actions of Lowell and her mother after Fern left, she still has tendencies she learned from Fern throughout the novel. Rosemary feels the need to imitate those around her because she was never able to fully understand who she was meant to be individually: “For me, Fern was the beginning…Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.”(108) Fern’s longing for acceptance and imitation stems from her lack of self-understanding.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think Rosemary’s imitation is more prevalent when she begins spending time with Harlow. She feels secure and comfortable with Harlow and feels as though Harlow imitates Fern’s mannerisms and characteristics. The topic of imitation is one throughout the novel that both supports and counters the idea of nature versus nurture. Is Rosemary’s need to imitate those around her a result of her humanistic nature or her abnormal upbringing?
I find this viewpoint very interesting. I believe that Rosemary develops a sense of imitation, but I think this need to imitate becomes more conscious after Fern leaves. When Fern is around, Rosemary becomes very competitive for her parent's affection. She tries to do things better than Fern. It could be described as basic sibling rivalry. The audience later learns that Rosemary has picked up on habits that Fern exuded; Rosemary talks a lot, she is aggressive, and she always had the need to touch people, just like a chimpanzee. I believe that these imitation efforts were not conscious. Rosemary imitated Fern because that is all that she had been raised with. Fern was human to her, so she treated Fern's chimp-like actions as what the norm should be.
ReplyDeleteHowever, after Fern left her life, Rosemary began to see a distance between her and her parents. Rosemary feels unimportant when she says "One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone" (108). Because of this feeling of unimportance, Rosemary then decides to imitate the qualities around her to become important to her family and classmates. Rosemary never gets to find herself, and through this, she spends her childhood imitating others to figure out how to please those around her. When she meets Harlow, she finds someone who questions who she truly is, which is something that Rosemary hasn't encountered often and is surprised by.
Imitation is surely a major theme of the novel; however, we must ask ourselves how conscious the imitation is at times.