Keen to make the presentation of Fern’s character as plausible as possible, Fowler references non-fictional accounts in her novel, utilising her research into chimpanzees and bonobos living in laboratories as well as those in the wild and on preserves. In addition to The Ape and The Child which documents Gua’s development, these include The Ape in our House about chimp Washoe, who learned to use American Sign Language, The Ape in Our House about Viki, the The Chimp Who Would Be Human about Nim Chimpsy, and Growing Up Human about Lucy. Several accounts of cross-fostered chimps have been documented and these are referenced in Fowler’s novel. Fowler’s daughter continues the family’s animal behaviourist heritage, devoting herself to working on the development of diving and foraging behaviours in sea lions. Her book is a contribution to this long-running debate with her father, who has since passed away. Compared to her father’s cautious and scientifically collected data, Fowler would base her conclusions on personal observations of the family’s dogs, cats, birds and rats. By the end of the novel, she is using her voice again to tell the story of her brother and sister.įowler’s father was a psychology professor who studied animal behaviour and, in an interview, she confesses she argued with her father from a young age about animal intelligence. Rosemary is an incessant talker as a child, then grows silent when Fern is sent away. Rosemary minimises her mother’s role in the experiment, presumably due to her mother’s breakdown when Fern leaves the family.Ĭommunication and language are important elements in the novel. With age, she suspects that it was she and not Fern who had been the real subject of the study, and that her father was not trying to raise a chimp who could talk to humans but rather a human who could talk to chimps. Rosemary appears uncertain as to her father’s experimental goals, perceiving them to be the potential in Fern’s capabilities were she to be raised as a human. She is taunted by her classmates for being a ‘monkey girl’ and internalises this image so that it forms part of her identity. Like the Kelloggs’ experiment, Rosemary begins to take on chimp behaviours she finds it difficult to keep her hands to herself and sees space around her as vertical and horizontal. In the novel, written in the first person from Rosemary Cooke’s perspective, Rosemary is raised by her parents alongside a chimp for five years.
The experiment ended after nine months when it was rumoured that Donald was adopting Gua’s behaviours. Fowler’s inspiration for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves came from a real-life 1930s experiment in which a husband and wife, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, raised an infant chimpanzee, Gua, in their own home alongside their child, Donald.
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