We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Prison/Cages

Rosemary, Lowell, Ezra, and Fern all spend time behind bars in this story. There is one major difference, which is that Fern’s enclosure is called a cage and considered necessary, while the others’ enclosure is called prison and is generally considered a temporary punishment. This symbolizes the way that humans treat both people who are considered socially deviant and nonhuman animals as second and third-class citizens; animals are not even allowed the luxuries that “deviant” humans are allowed in prisons. Lowell immediately understands that calling something a cage rather than a prison is a semantic difference, deciding that he needed to find Fern the minute he learned that she was being held in a cage and later, deciding to be tried in court as a nonhuman animal. Both times that Rosemary ends up in jail are a result of her letting go of her control and rationality, letting her instinct and “monkey-girl” side take over. After her second stint, she thinks: “The monkey-girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum” (183). Ezra and Lowell are both incarcerated for their efforts to free nonhuman animals from inhumane treatment; notably, neither of them hurt any people or animals.

The trauma of being held in a cage is made clear through the text. Both times that Cooke family members go to see Fern while she is in a cage, she reaches through the bars and will not let go. When Ezra tries to free monkeys, many of them are so traumatized that they stay inside their opened cages. After witnessing how Fern acts and what her life is like in the lab, Rosemary wishes that the roles could be reversed: “In my fantasy, humans are confined to the house and chimps run free over the property, the six from the center but others as well, maybe even my nephews, Basil and Sage” (297). Even after being locked up herself, Rosemary wishes that humans were the ones behind a wall rather than the chimps. As a whole, the book appears to argue that both cages and prisons are unethical solutions to issues that humans do not want to face. That is to say, rather than facing the differences between humans and animals, animals are locked up. Rather than examining the harm that Lowell is fighting against, Lowell is locked up as well.

Female Spaces

Female spaces are symbolic of safety and feminism throughout this text. For Rosemary, it appears that her experiences with gendered oppression have made it easier for her to understand and empathize with the unjust ways that animals are treated. In one of Rosemary’s unadulterated, happy early memories, she is in a female space: “We are dancing together, all the girls—Mom and Grandma Donna, Fern and I, and the grad students, Amy, Caroline, and Courtney” (94). Later, Rosemary looks to find this safety in Harlow, but is unable to because Reg, whose main character trait is arguably sexism, is always tagging along. At one point, Harlow tells Reg and Rosemary about the upcoming performance of Macbeth, which is going to reverse the genders of each character. Harlow has opinions:

Wouldn’t it be more challenging,” she said, "more of a mind-fuck, if the costuming didn’t change? That would suggest a place in which the dominant paradigm was female; all those things coded here in our world as female would represent power and politics. Female would be the norm (160-61).

Again, in response to Harlow’s idea, Rosemary finds herself imagining a female space. After Dr. Sosa’s harrowing lecture, which included details about the frequency of rape in chimp colonies, Rosemary thinks about her own sister, locked in a cage with multiple male chimps: “What did they do to her in that cage? Whatever it was, it happened because no woman had stopped it […] we had exile her to a place completely devoid of female solidarity” (166). Rosemary believes that if Fern had been in the presence of women, the gendered violence she almost inevitably went through could have been stopped.

Madame Defarge

Madame Defarge is used as a symbol to expose the fundamental differences between Rosemary and Harlow. Immediately upon finding the doll, Rosemary is concerned about using it because it might be fragile and rare, whereas Harlow sees the doll as a fun prop to bring along on her day. When the two of them meet back up later in the evening, Rosemary walks into the bar and sees Harlow holding the doll: “‘I’m being careful with her,’ Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn’t even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions” (160). While Harlow uses the doll to push at her boyfriend’s buttons all night, Rosemary finds herself anxious about where the doll might be. This dynamic is symbolic of the larger differences between the two: Harlow is action-oriented while Rosemary is not; Harlow uses people when she needs them and discards them when she does not, while Rosemary lives in deep fear of losing people; Harlow enjoys pushing boundaries while Rosemary is still figuring out who she is and what she believes in. This fear of losing people is shown when Rosemary thinks about returning the doll to its owner: “Suddenly, weirdly, I felt a pang at the thought of losing her… I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. ‘Please don’t go,’ she said. Or maybe I said that” (186). Ultimately, in a final display of their differences, Harlow brings the doll with her on her next adventure, leaving Rosemary and everyone else in the dust. Notably, Madame Defarge is a Dickens character who symbolizes revolutionary spirit and a penchant for death, so Harlow bringing this doll with her into her new life as an activist makes sense. At the end of the book, Rosemary uses Madame Defarge as a way to simplify her sister’s story. Through the hypothetical mouth of a doll, she is able to strip away all the convoluted layers of memory and tell Fern’s story as a moralistic tale.