Extended Response - Rachel In Love

Pat Murphy’s Rachel in Love explores the experiences of Rachel, a half-ape half-human girl whose father dies at the very beginning of the story. When Rachel was a girl, she and her mother were killed, at which point her father is able to take Rachel’s human DNA and implant it into an already existent monkey to preserve her character. Thus, Rachel lives in duality: she has memories from her life as a human as well as her past as an ape, and often struggles to find solidity in her identity. Shortly after her father’s death she is taken to a research and breeding center for primates where she encounters other monkeys who cannot speak using sign language, nor do they have the human mentality that Rachel possesses. She befriends and falls in love with the janitor of the center, who is mute and also speaks ASL, only to feel rejected. At this point she takes another monkey as a companion and returns to her father’s home.

Rachel in Love touches on many issues that science fiction addresses as a genre. The first is confusion of identity. In many science fiction stories characters find themselves placed into strange environments, or in places where they fail to easily fit in in one way or another. In this story, we witness Rachel’s inner psyche as both a monkey and a human. As reader’s we easily empathize with the struggles that a young girl would face upon being left alone in a world where there is essentially no one who understands her. Beyond the external difficulty of a human placed in an animal body, Rachel has to try and make sense of who she currently is in relation to her two separate histories. The strangeness of this situation reflects the exploration of the bizarre within the science fiction genre.

Another identity-based motif in this short story is the combination of humans with other non-human forms. Often in science fiction we see cybernetics or some kind of technology integrated with humans. This idea is taken in a different direction with Rachel, where a human mind is morphed with an animal mind and body. These unusual combinations allow for literary exploration of identity within the applications of love, reproduction, and living rights. Both in Rachel in Love  and other science fiction works, the plots encourage readers to examine our own culture by presenting us with something unusual within a fictional scenario, causing us to ponder the ever-present question “what if?”

Asking this question often leads us to ethical issues. Although fantastical scenarios often prompt these concerns, they—if the story is well structured—relate in some way to issues that are present in our own society.  In Rachel’s case, we connect her strange situation to ethical questions regarding some human rights of certain groups of people (perhaps along the lines of severely disabled people, those with mental disorders, the rights of unborn children, etc.) Overall, Rachel in Love is an interesting reflection of the science fiction genre and uses unique literary plot and storytelling techniques to do so. The stories that resonate most with readers are those that are memorable. Evaluating our own identity is something that all of us experience, and following Rachel’s unusual problems in exploring her own identity is thus an engaging conflict. Rachel in Love ventures beyond the stereotypical science fiction story and uses our close relationship with primates as well as our tendencies in developing our own identity to create a fantastical yet relatable story.