The Madness of Crowds

When Reine-Marie inspects the papers left behind by Enid Horton, she notices that Enid obsessively drew monkeys over and over. It is eventually revealed that the monkeys stem from the trauma Enid endured while supposedly receiving psychological treatment from Ewen Cameron. The monkeys symbolize the dehumanization that results when individuals are perceived as inferior and not worth protecting or treating with dignity. Throughout the novel, different plotlines depict the consequences of individuals being treated as less than human. Ewen Cameron experimented on innocent patients because he saw them as interchangeable with the animals he also used in lab experiments. Haniya witnessed the horrors of individuals being treated as subhuman because of their ethnicity, while Abigail bases her theory on the claim that some individuals are less worthy of life and human dignity than others. The monkeys are a particularly apt symbol for dehumanization because as primates, they have many traits similar to humans and yet are somewhat arbitrarily classed as animals. The monkeys thus symbolize how the rights and protection afforded to someone who is considered a human are actually not fixed: Individuals like Ewen Cameron or Abigail Robinson can renegotiate the boundaries of who is classed as human.