Every Beverly’s Feverish Folly

Karen Joy Fowler alludes to the Garden of Eden in order to layer the women’s choices with Eve’s. The short story, What I Didn’t See, employs female characters that must choose whether or not to allow the men to sidetrack their ambitions. On the expedition’s first trip through the jungle, the protagonist is happy and excited. She describes the jungle as, “Furrowed fields below me, banana plantations, and trellises of roses, curving into archways that led to the church. How often we grow a garden around our houses of worship. We march ourselves through Eden to get to God” (344). Beverly and the protagonist are both hopeful before they discover their fate. Only a few paragraphs later, Fowler foreshadows Beverly’s disappearance with, “Soon Beverly sand out for the gorilla to come and carry her the rest of the way” (347). Almost immediately the protagonist mentions her earlier comparison with Eden, “I revised my notions of Eden, leaving the roses behind and choosing instead these remote forests where the gorillas lived…” (347). Fowler fuses her comparison of the jungle and the Garden of Eden with these adjoining statements. Additionally a character from nowhere via hearsay tells the protagonist how they must hunt, “Anyway Russel says that Burunga says we’ll never see them, dressed as we’re dressed. Our clothes make too much noise when we walk. He told Russel we must hunt them naked” (348). Eventually the protagonist hunts gorillas naked, only to be interrupted by someone else from her crew. This layering of the Garden of Eden leads to one of the possibilities of Beverly’s disappearance.

Although not likely, Fowler does want the reader to entertain the idea of Beverly choosing to go with the apes. Did Eve embrace her animal side when she chose to eat the apple? Once finally out of her jungle situation, the protagonist contemplates Beverly’s choice, “My attention is caught instead by these young women who’d sooner live in the jungle with the chimpanzees or the orangutans or the great mountain gorillas” (354). Beverly could have curiously followed the apes into their shyingly human yet overtly animal homes. Fowler does not want the reader to step in any sort of particular direction. This open-ended style for finishing the story does not force any particular reading on its audience. Instead, Fowler weaves several possibilities in order to keep the reader entertained and thinking.