Aaron Pharr
Dr. Rhee
ENGL 301
13 November 2018
For our spring and summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on Earth again save in memory. – J. R. R. Tolkien
The major reveal of we are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler is that Fern, raised as Rosemary’s sister, is a chimpanzee. After their sibling connection is revealed, Fern is tragically sent away, and Rosemary is told an important lie by her father; that lie will be maintained in the family for many years. “She has a different family now,’ he said. ‘on a farm. And there are other chimpanzees, so she has a lot of new friends.” (Pg. 90)
Rosemary is still young and naïve, so she takes this lie as a fact, and even after she learns that it is false, she maintains this farm in her own personal fantasy, for it is comforting. The truth hits hard when a note from Lowell, her runaway brother, reads, “Fern is not on a fucking farm.” (Pg. 118) Interestingly, the note is left in a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and is positioned in Fowler’s novel just a line away from mention of The Shire. The pop culture reference in we are all completely beside ourselves to The Lord of the Rings is given immense gravity due to the themes spawning from those novels, and in addition to the various mentions of Thomas More’s Utopia, affect how Rosemary constructs and loses fantasy.
My initial impressions prior to scholarly research, as someone who grew up reading and watching The Lord of the Rings, find its reference particularly important. While Rosemary also references Star Wars, its mention doesn’t seem to have the same gravity. The Shire is a metaphorical perfect place in its home series, and Rosemary, in Fern’s absence, wishes the best for Fern. This gives way for her father to make the lie about a farm, a nice place that could be compared to Utopia or The Shire, as Fern is supposedly happy there.
It cannot be overlooked that Rosemary isn’t particularly fond of Thomas More’s Utopia, but the mention of Utopia itself brings it into our discussion and her mental framework. When it comes to the ideal society of More’s Utopia, it is essentially an agricultural one. (Caudle 164) Agriculture as a prominent aspect of a society can be seen from the aforementioned Tolkien reference. As Chris Brawley puts it in his analysis of the Shire, “The images of the pastoral are presented at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: the Shire is a peaceful place, the occupations are largely agricultural, the dwellings of the hobbits are within the earth, and the Shire is largely unaffected by the outside world. Thus at the beginning of the novel, Tolkien immediately evokes a sense of home…” (Brawley 304)
Highlighting the nature of agriculture, I’d like to point out that one of the key words with an agricultural connotation and diction is Farm. From the Stone Age to the present, the farm is the functional setting for agricultural. A farm is Rosemary’s idealized construct for Fern’s new home, and as Brawley put it, The Shire represents a larger feeling of home.
“I just meant to take care of Fern first, get her settled somewhere good, somewhere she’d be happy.” He gave my hands a small shake. “Some farm.” (Fowler 218)
The fantasy of a farm, or a happy home for Fern, which directly correlates to Utopia or a perfect place like the Shire, is not exclusive to Rosemary. Her traumatized brother, Lowell, also dreams of this non-existent reality, as it’d be preferable to what Fern actually got being a science experiment.
The Lord of the Rings’ presence in Fowler’s novel extends beyond the Shire. Many of the themes of the fantasy series align with what Fowler has addressed through Rosemary. The most important of these themes are nature and the non-human. In his article on LOTR, Brawley touches on this: “Fantasy has the unique ability to subvert the normal categories of thought, such as those between human and non-human, in order for a fusion of new possibilities which are not available in mimetic works.” (Brawley 294) Some of my initial understandings were that Tolkien’s dynamic between Humans, Elves, and Dwarves related to Fowler’s dynamic between Humans and Primates, as the different species resemble and function similarly to Humanity. As Tolkien was able to make friends and protagonists out of the non-human Elves in his novels, Fowler has bypassed the normal categories of thought to an even greater degree. She, through Rosemary, was able to set up a situation in which readers first view Fern as a sister before viewing her as a chimpanzee. Rosemary intentionally set her story up in this way, and it affects the reader’s perception in a positive, yet tragic, way for the duration of the novel.
Tolkien’s subversion against normal thought touches on the humanoid races of Middle Earth, but additionally goes beyond the periphery of humanity. The sentient tree race, Ents, is also addressed, along with Spirits, magic, and other things alien to our world. As Brawley points out, The Lord of the Rings focuses heavily on nature as a result of this. Rosemary’s primary concern is Fern, but Lowell’s is all of the animal species, and by extension, nature has an integral role in Fowler’s novel, often pivoted against science.
In Caudle’s discussion of Thomas More and Utopia, it is said that Utopians will want to live in harmony with nature, as nature is virtuous. (Caudle 165) I’m reminded somewhat of Rosemary’s youth on the original farm, and how she and Lowell liked the expansive land and streams they had to play in, and how the suburbs were too confined in comparison. Brawley reiterates time and time again that The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien emphasize that nature should be a community, not a commodity. (Brawley 294) This speaks to Rosemary’s initial shock at the fact that Fern could be bought and sold – that she was indeed property of the university and not a member of the family. Community is important at the end of Rose’s story, when she and her students often visit Fern and the other chimps. Despite the communal reality, she constructs a “fantasy,” as she puts it on page 297, at the very end of the story, that she can one day build a house for her and Fern.
Both Fowler’s novel and The Lord of the Rings invoke a feeling of tragedy and despair. The themes tie together delicately, and Utopia speaks to the cause of the decline. Utopians dislike idleness and value long days of hard work. (Caudle) I could parallel it to Benjamin Franklin’s virtue of industry, as he too valued hard work. Additionally, as a founding father and voice of capitalism and modernity, he could be paralleled to Saruman, one of the primary villains of The Lord of the Rings. Brawley points out that the etymology of the name Saruman could mean “cunning man.” (Brawley 302) Perhaps the comparison to Franklin is a little extreme, but what scholars claim Saruman to represent is what we see in individuals at the head of commercial and governmental positions in America and all around the world. Treebeard, in Tolkien’s “Two Towers,” says Saruman, “has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for things, except as far as they serve him in the moment.” Brawley quotes T. A. Shippey’s statement, “the Sarumans of the real-world rule by deluding their followers with images of a technological paradise, a modernist Utopia…” (Brawley 302)
It is easy to see how an agricultural utopia could be transformed as technology becomes readily available, while cunning men lead the charge towards industrialization. Technology could be associated with science, and science is fundamental to Rosemary’s story as she was an experiment, and the reach of science follows her throughout her entire life. She goes so far as to call it a religion. The world’s shift from nature to technology and science, led by men like her father, is sad in itself, but the true tragedy comes when it leads to the destruction of the beloved farm.
Brawley states that the threat to the Shire “is a threat of appropriation, a sense of ownership or possession of nature.” (Brawley 305) This is precisely true when it comes to Rosemary, the farm, and Fern. Rosemary’s fantasy, her utopia, and the perfect place for Fern and herself are destroyed, traded for the harsh reality of a cage. Fern is not on a fucking farm, as Lowell puts it, and she learns that her sister has been imprisoned. Fern is nature, and Rosemary wants to see her free, but humanity has claimed ownership of the animal and appropriated it for science.
While there are bits of hope and strong themes of connection to nature in Rosemary’s story and that of the Ring, an inevitable sense of failure and despair dawn on both accounts. Rosemary’s fantasy farm never existed, and by the end of the LOTR, the Shire has changed.
For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart – J. R. R. Tolkien
-Citations-
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Ballantine, 1954.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Return of the King. New York: Ballantine, 1955.
Fowler, Karen. we are all completely beside ourselves. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013
Brawley, Chris. “The Fading of the World: Tolkien’s Ecology and Loss in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 18, no. 3 (71), 2007, pp. 292-307. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24351004.
Caudle, Mildred Witt. “Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia.’ Origins and Purposes.” Social Science, vol. 45, no. 3, 1970, pp. 163-169. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41959507.
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