Anders Peterson

English 342

Talking on the Phone in Silence: Learned emotional skills and false emotional performances

Both We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Everything I Never Told You

explore families where children use false emotional performance to attempt to please their

parents, while a misreading of emotions along with believing these false performances cause

familial relationships to deteriorate. Tracing how character learn to perform and read emotions

demonstrates how characters are able to hide their true emotions, culminating in children

performing inauthentic emotions to protect (or care for) their parents, trying to protect their

families from dissolution.

In Everything I Never Told You characters learn how to perform their emotions both

inside and outside of the family. Jensen and Wallace argue that we can learn how to feel by

being socialized and I would argue that not only do we learn how to feel socially, but how to

understanding the emotions others are presenting and how to present one’s own emotions are

also learned this way (Jensen and Williams 1252). When a teacher is shocked that a classmate

would ask James about his eyes, “he realized that he was supposed to be embarrassed;” (Ng 43).

James unknowingly violated the expectation of social conduct – that he should be embarrassed

by the racist question – and an authority figure has made the ‘correct’ emotional response

apparent. This is an application of the feeling rules, the guidelines for expected emotional

actions, of the classroom, carrying with it the force of an authority figure, the teacher. Hoschild

argues that ‘it is mainly the authorities who are the keepers of feeling rules’ and in this classroom

the reaction of the teacher cues James into thinking that he acted inappropriately (75). This

enforcement of these rules causes James to alter his behavior going forward as ‘he had learned
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his lesson and turned red right away’ (Ng 43). James learns what is an appropriate emotional

performance at a young age through the authority of a teacher, demonstrating how feelings and

their presentations are socially encoded.

Similarly, in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, early childhood education is a

main source of the enforcement of rules about appropriate emotional performance, as feeling

rules are enforced in Rosemary’s kindergarten class. Even prior to going to kindergarten

Rosemary’s mother works with her on what is socially accepted appropriate behaviors, most of

which are physical but her mother also tells Rosemary to ‘mut[e] my excitement over tasty food,’

(Fowler 102). Her mother, a familial authority figure, prepares Rosemary for school by telling

her how to alter her emotions and her response to these emotions; and much like James school

enforces certain feeling rules. Foreshadowing the future of her family’s feeling rules that push

her toward silence, Rosemary learns ‘that school was about being quiet’ (Fowler 103). The

school echoes her parents’ insistence in saying one out of every three things she has to say, and

later her parents will push Rosemary to be even quieter. The tamping down of emotional

performance is enforced on Rosemary by both her parents and by authorities at school causing

her to alter her emotional performance while James adds a new response to his emotional

performance at the prompting of authorities.

Rosemary’s father also teaches Rosemary and Fern how to perform their emotions. In a

game they played as children their father would move his hand over his face and reveal a

different emotion, switching between smiling and scowling, an exercise described by Rosemary

as ‘tragedy and comedy performed as facial expressions’ (Fowler 89). The connections to

theater, with Rosemary marking her father as ‘Melpomene’ and ‘Thalia’ respectively point to the

performative element of emotions (Fowler 89). Her father is acting in a dramatic capacity not for
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an audience but for his two children. The performance is intended to teach Rosemary and Fern

how to present their emotions and give them a greater capability for reading emotions on others’

faces. In the Cooke family, however, it is questionable if this lesson applies to each daughter

equally. Rosemary, while learning in her kindergarten class, comments that children have less

expressive faces than chimps; calling into question whether Fern would read the emotions on

their father’s face in the same way that Rosemary may (Fowler 103). This exercise also shows

the children how quickly someone can change their expression and the emotions conveyed with

that expression, because they see the almost immediate changes in their father’s face. Rosemary

learns emotional performance both at home and at school, being similar to James at school since

they are both marked as other and they alter their presentation as a result.

James, like Rosemary’s father, also teaches emotional performance to his children. After

Nath is bullied at the pool during a game of Marco Polo, James’ inability to act shapes Nath’s

emotional responses going forward. James is caught between two reactions, wanting to

empathize with Nath versus making Nath respond differently than James himself did when

bullied as a child. This dilemma results in James waving off the incident to Marilyn, devaluing

Nath’s emotional experience and reaction and teaching him that his father either lacks

understanding or does not care enough to help Nath unpack and confront his emotions. This

dynamic continues when James does not support Nath’s interest in space, even slapping Nath for

talking about it, and through the Lee family placing more emphasis on Lydia attempting to keep

Marilyn in the family. Foregrounding Marilyn’s emotional wellbeing over Nath’s, and the other

children, prompts Nath to temper his emotions and the emotions he displays to his family.

Similar to Rosemary’s family prompting her to speak less, Nath does not display many emotions

and instead focuses on going to Harvard, which he views as a kind of escape, like Rosemary and
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UC Davis. Rosemary and Nath pushing their emotions to the side is one shared component of the

feeling rules of the Cooke and Lee families.

How people perform their emotions are taught socially, in environments like school and

at home; how people read emotions are also taught in similar situations. Upon her return Marilyn

reads James’ emotions through his physicality. Based on how he walks and how he tucks her in

she understands James’ to be ‘so happy’ about Marilyn coming back to the family (Ng 145).

Marilyn uses physical markers to understand James’ emotions. Often emotions are thought to be

seen mainly on the face, such as Lavater’s Essay on Physiohnomy and its artistic depictions of

differing facial emotions, yet Marilyn uses how James makes certain actions to interpret his

emotions (Jensen and Wallace 1251). In spending time being married to James, Marilyn has

observed his actions and emotions enough that she has gained an understanding of his emotional

performance, so much that she can read the ‘little bounce at the end of each step’ as James being

happy (Ng 145). Marilyn likely would not be able to extrapolate a specific emotion from the

minute details of a stranger’s step but because she has spent large amount of time with James she

has learned with specificities of his movement.

Rosemary reads the physicality of emotions to a greater extent than Marilyn. Rosemary is

able to understand the emotions behind physical actions in others based on both physicality and

facial expressions, and unlike members of the Lee family, Rosemary uses smell to read emotions

in others. Rosemary can smell when Fern is unhappy, identifying it was ‘her usual sort of wet-

towel smell, but with a pungent, slightly acrid undertone’ (Fowler 81). Rosemary is able to

understand the subtleties of Fern’s scent much like Marilyn is able to read emotion into James’

small actions. Perhaps Rosemary is able read this smell because Fern is a chimp and not a

human, meaning that this skill may be gained through Fern’s difference and the Lees would
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likely be able to do the same; however, Rosemary has also learned the skill. Fern being a chimp

makes reading olfactory indicators of emotion easier but Rosemary has learned how to do so by

growing up with Fern. Just like Marilyn can read physicality of James’ because of their close

proximity, Rosemary can understand the emotions of Fern through her scent because they were

raised together.

Marilyn is able to read the emotion contained in James physical actions, and other

characters read emotion facially and sonically. Hannah is especially astute at reading the facial

emotions of others, a skill likely developed through her time spent hiding and observing the

family. After Lydia confronts Hannah about stealing the necklace that James gave Lydia,

Hannah looks back on their confrontation and examines Lydia’s expressions to glean information

about the emotions that fueled Lydia’s response. Hannah sees that ‘Lydia has looked more

anxious than angry … she had sounded almost sad’ (Ng 261). Hannah observes Lydia’s facial

expressions and makes a careful observation. Despite Lydia slapping Hannah – an action that is

likely to be read as angry and aggressive – Hannah is makes a judgement that Lydia was likely

feeling both anger and anxiety, but that anxiety was the main emotion Lydia was feeling a

minute and distinct difference that impacts how Hannah respond; being slapped by her sister in

anger would harm their relationship and her memory of Lydia more than with Hannah seeing

past anger to Lydia’s more nuanced emotional state. Hannah also reads the emotions Lydia’s

voice, again not seeing the anger of Lydia’s actions in her voice, instead reading sadness into

Lydia’s comments. Both vocally and facially Hannah reads Lydia’s emotions as contrary to the

expected emotions stemming from Lydia slapping Hannah.

Lydia also shows a strong ability to read the facial markers of emotions in others. While

fighting with Jack, Lydia sees his face become guarded, like when they first met and ‘he grinned,
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but it looked more like a grimace.’ (Ng 269) Lydia observes the change in Jack’s face, directly

commenting on how it changes, as it ‘grew wary and pinched like it did with other people,’

tracking the changes from how Jack normally looks when talking with Lydia (Ng 269). Through

these observations Lydia also shows how emotional performance changes based on an inter-

personal context; Jack’s facial expression around Lydia is different than around others, he

changes his emotional performance based on who he is around with Lydia seeing more open

emotions from Jack rather than his normal wary look. Jack’s emotions also demonstrate how

similar differing emotions can look. He attempts to look happy with a grin but to Lydia it reads

as a grimace. Despite attempting to look happy, Jack fails with this performance and instead

Lydia sees a pained, negative expression. Jack may be able to pass of this attempted grin with

other people, but because Lydia knows him well – and he already alters his normal emotional

performance when he is around Lydia – she picks up on the grimace. Similar to how Marilyn is

able to read emotion in James’ small actions because she knows him well, Lydia understands

Jack’s emotions even past his given expressions.

Just like Lydia understands the differences in Jack’s facial because she has spent time

with him, Rosemary is able to read the emotions in Lowell’s body language because they had

been together as children. When Lowell reappears Rosemary, despite not seeing him for ten

years, still is able to read the subtleties of Lowell’s physicality. She sees in him ‘something that

looked less mad and more madness. It was subtle and deniable;’ and while she could deny it,

Rosemary is too aware of this anger in Lowell to push it aside (Fowler 226). Rosemary’s ability

to understand Lowell is remarkable because she was a young teenager when they last saw each

other, but she knows him so well she can pick up on minute details present in his eyes or how he
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holds his shoulders. Her ability is hardly diminished by the long gap during which she did not

see Lowell.

Following Marilyn’s disappearance and return the Lee family dynamic changes as the

parents emphasize and focus on Lydia, pushing Hannah and Nath to the side, and causing Lydia

to struggle under the pressure. While Marilyn is gone Lydia finds her mother’s cookbook, and

thinking that it was a positive memento for Marilyn, Lydia promises over the cookbook that if

her mother came back Lydia ‘would do everything her mother told her. Everything her mother

wanted.’ (Ng 137) Lydia’s choice to acquiesce to her mother’s wishes is Lydia’s way of

navigating the pain of her mother leaving. Lydia feels guilty and that her actions contributed to

her mother leaving and her response to this emotion is to make this agreement with herself,

setting Lydia up to be pushed into false emotional performances later under the duress of the

established family feeling rules.

Marilyn’s disappearance causes Lydia to make this promise and when Marilyn returns,

Lydia’s guarantee combines with Marilyn’s choice to raise Lydia to fulfill Marilyn’s abandoned

dreams of becoming a doctor. Marilyn feeling trapped was the major force behind her leaving the

family and attempting to reenroll in college; she had always planned on being a doctor but twice

her plans were stopped by getting pregnant, first with Nath and also with Hannah. Upon her

return home Marilyn changes her focus on her children. Prior to her departure she gave Nath and

Lydia about equal attention and did not push them very hard. Following her return Marilyn

makes the conscious decision to work to groom Lydia, ‘the way you tended to a prize rose’ (Ng

147). Marilyn projects her goals – being a doctor – onto Lydia without asking Lydia about her

wants or needs. Marilyn dehumanizes Lydia by planning to treat her like a ‘prize rose’, a rose

that blooms purely for show and withers shortly after, only made for the consumption of others.
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Lydia’s response to her mother’s absence, where she plans for compliance and minimizing her

own emotions, combines with Marilyn’s overlooking of Lydia’s wants to create a feeling rule of

a hierarchy of emotional importance within the family with Marilyn at the top above Lydia, but

with Lydia about Nath and Hannah.

The Cooke family also enforces new feeling rules following the disappearance of family

member. Following Fern’s departure and Rosemary’s mother falling into depression the family

changes their response to Rosemary’s verbosity. Prior to these events, the Cooke parents had

begun to enforce a rule of Rosemary limiting her amount of speaking – especially outside of the

familial context at school. These efforts intensify after Fern leaves with the family pushing

Rosemary toward silence and by extension an inability to express her emotions. Rosemary sums

up the change in her family, ‘before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After,

they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet.’ (Fowler 56) Rosemary is aware of her

parents’ emotions and she wants to perform in a way that makes them happier, which prior to

Fern’s departure was to talk more. Rosemary continues to work to please her parents even after,

yet their emotions have changed. Behaviors that formerly gave Rosemary the result she sought –

her parents being happier – now do the opposite. Rosemary alters her emotional performance as

a result of this, moving toward silence because her parents pushed her to do. In this silence

Rosemary’s emotions are neglected and not given space to occur. The key change in the family

causes Rosemary to become increasingly silent and removes to opportunities for emotional

expression.

Lowell has a starkly different reaction to Fern’s disappearance. While Rosemary moves

toward silence, encouraged by their parents, Lowell also removes himself from the family.

Lowell begins leaving in the mornings and eating dinner with the Byards and acting out by
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rejecting the imposed silence of the family. Rosemary is encouraged to be silent in a general

context without a specificity of what to be silent about. The entire family, however, has an

unspoken rule to not discussion Fern, especially in light of their mother’s depression. Lowell

violates this rule at a family dinner by talking about Fern’s love of corn on the cob before

questioning ‘“Remember how Fern loved us?”’ broaching the topic the family had carefully been

avoiding (Fowler 88). By breaking the family rule of not talking about Fern Lowell performs the

opposite of Rosemary. She sinks into silence, hiding her emotions from the family while Lowell

makes his feelings known – the only person in the family to do so – and with this openness he

breaks from the expected emotionality within the Cookes.

The Cooke family loses one of their younger daughters, leaving the family with two

children until Lowell leaves. The Lees, until Lydia’s death have three children, but Hannah, the

youngest, is often forgotten. Hannah takes on the role of the ‘lost child’ in the dysfunctional Lee

family (Polson and Newton 86). The ‘lost child’ is ignored and introverted, like Hannah, and

Hannah works to make herself like this by hiding and observing others. The emotional hierarchy

in the Lee family pushes Hannah to the bottom where her emotions are not given importance.

This begins from the time Hannah is in utero. As Marilyn gets her idea to grow Lydia like a rose

she is pregnant with Hannah and ‘Hannah began to fidget and kick, but her mother could not yet

feel it.’ (Ng 147) While Hannah is not developed enough to have her mother feel her this

interaction foreshadows their relationship. Fetal Hannah is upset yet Marilyn ignores this a

dynamic that is mirrored throughout Hannah’s childhood while Marilyn focuses on Lydia rather

than Hannah. Hannah feels this not just from Marilyn but from all of her family members who

Hannah sees ‘are too quick to shrug her off or shoo her away.’ (Ng 123) In this situations

Hannah is attempting to display love for those in her family, but they push her away. The feeling
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rules of the family devalue Hannah so much that even in her attempts to display affectionate and

loving emotions she is rebuffed.

In the Cooke family’s enforcement of silence Rosemary takes on similar traits of the ‘lost

child.’ Rosemary, like Hannah, does not have a place to display her emotions within her family

as her attempts are rebuffed by being told to be quiet. Lowell, like Lydia, take up the majority of

the parent’s attentions following disappearances – Fern and Marilyn, respectively. With the

parents focused on other children, Rosemary and Hannah fade into the background and both

remain largely silent.

The main result from the factors of how characters learn to present and read emotions and

the feeling rules of each family is that children learn the skills to adopt false performances of

emotions, which they do while they attempt to work within the rules of each family. Lydia bares

the brunt of this in the Lee family as she faces dual pressure to perform; James expects and hopes

for Lydia to be popular and Marilyn expects her to succeed in science courses and become a

doctor. Lydia falsely performs her emotions in both areas. For Marilyn, Lydia acts like she

enjoys science courses and she acts as if she likes Marilyn’s gifts of science books and diaries.

Marilyn believes this performance so much that after Lydia drowns Marilyn is sure that her

diaries will hold the answer to Lydia’s death. This complete misunderstanding resulted from

Lydia convincing that her mother that she uses the diaries and that Lydia wanted everything

Marilyn pushed on her. Marilyn rejects the idea ‘Her Lydia, always smiling, always eager to

please?’ could have killed herself (Ng 119). Lydia succeeded in following her promise that she

would do everything Marilyn asks of her, yet because of this she does not connect with her

mother or her family, not being seen as a real person but as Marilyn’s ‘prize rose’ (Ng 147).
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Lydia also fools her father into thinking that she is popular and fulfilled socially. The

main way she does this is by pretending to be on the phone at night with friends. Upon seeing

Lydia talking on the phone, James is pleased as ‘a lightness crossed his face, like clouds shifting

after strong wind.’ (Ng 179) The mere sight of Lydia on the phone and pretending to be having a

conversation, performing the emotion of happiness, is enough to full alter James’ facial

expression, with his happiness being performed in this instantaneous shift observed by Lydia.

She sees this change, feeling ‘hardly able to believe how easy it had been to bring that bright

flush of joy to her father.’ (Ng 179) Lydia connects her actions to the physical response of

emotion from her father. His joy is physically visible and was Lydia’s desired outcome from

sitting on phone for hours talking to the dial tone. James’ physical reaction here – flushing from

happiness – mirrors his learned reaction to be embarrassed in the classroom; a duality that shows

how different emotional responses can have similar physical expressions. Lydia, pressured by the

family feeling rules to act to please her parents, takes action to placate them. These actions are

Lydia’s attempt to maintain the balance in the family and uphold the feelings rules in place since

Marilyn returned from her disappearance. In her pursuit of this Lydia pushes her own emotions

to the side in her attempts to please her parents and keep the family together.

Rosemary performs in a similar manner to Lydia, altering her behaviors to please her

parents. Rosemary’s parents push her to be silent following Fern and Lowell’s departures and

Rosemary adopts silence as a strategy. Her silence is not quite a performance of emotions but

rather a lack of emotional performance, a negative space of emotions where Rosemary does not

share her emotions with others. Robert Solomon argues that anger can become ‘a continuous

structure of one’s life’ and for Rosemary she adopts silence and her lack of emotional

performance as a continuous structure for much of her life (Solomon 17). Rosemary’s silence is
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similar to Lydia talking on the phone for two reasons. First, both are used in order to please

parental figures. Rosemary’s parents encourage her to be silent and for her to not be open with

her emotions – the family at gathering often partaking in ‘a goddamn dance of avoidance

conditioning’ – and Rosemary falls into silence reacting to these pressures (Fowler 17). Second,

Lydia and Rosemary alter their behaviors in reaction to the disappearance of a family member

and in attempts to maintain their family structures; a goal that arguable succeeds for Rosemary as

her, Fern, and their mother are together at the end of the novel and while Lydia drowns, the Lee

family remains together at the conclusion.

Rosemary does not just perform silence; she also aims to appear ‘normal’ throughout the

book. This goal first surfaces in kindergarten, where she acknowledges and wishes to rid herself

of ‘monkey girl’ traits that mark her as different to the other children. This goal continues into

college where during her freshman year Rosemary hopes to be taken as normal. In her self

assessment she succeeds, stating ‘I’d finally erased all those little cues’, those monkey girl traits

that stuck out as a child despite coaching from her mother (Fowler 132). Rosemary is read as

normal by her classmates, largely because being normal is now the socially unfavorable thing to

be – her peers all complain about how abnormal their families are while Rosemary holds her

tongue about her family history. This reversal – Rosemary failing to be accepted as normal to

Rosemary being read as normal and that being the reason she is still ostracized – negatively

impacts Rosemary as she questions ‘Except now that I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t

sound so desirable.’ (Fowler 132) Rosemary performs a flat emotional state when she is either

silent or presenting as normal. She gives her parents and her classmates little indication of how

she is feeling.
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The members of the Lee and Cooke families continuously interact with their familial

feeling rules with the Cooke’s established silence, challenged by Lowell and embraced by

Rosemary, carrying over to interactions outside the familial sphere; and the Lees creating an

emotional hierarchy placing Marilyn at the top following her return with Nath and Hannah on the

bottom. Lydia is trapped in the middle, bearing the brunt of Marilyn’s attempts to shape her into

the doctor that Marilyn never was. These rules cause characters to adopt false emotional

performances that are often believed, because of the socialized skills of the characters, by those

trying to read them and this misinterpretation of true emotions negatively impacts the

relationships between parent and child in each family.

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Works Cited

Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,

2013. Print.

Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Print.

Jensen, Katharine Ann, and Miriam L. Wallace. "Introduction—Facing Emotions." Pmla 130.5

(2015): 1249-268. Print.

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin HC, 2014. Print.

Polson, Beth, and Miller Newton. Not My Kid: A Family's Guide to Kids and Drugs. New York:

Arbor House, 1984. Print

Solomon, Robert. True to Our Feelings. Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.