Monkeys

Monkeys are part of the African environment in which Cady Heron spent twelve years before attending North Shore High School. They appear both as wildlife among her childhood companions and as participants in her parents’ research, giving her account of animal life a concrete, personal basis rather than leaving it as a distant metaphor.

Life in Africa

Cady describes her parents as research zoologists and recalls that, for much of her childhood, her classmates were animals, including lions, cheetahs, and monkeys. She presents this upbringing with comic understatement: her family was ordinary, she insists, apart from its long residence in Africa and its unusually animal-filled surroundings. The monkeys belong to the setting of a life she remembers as a good one, before her mother’s professorship at Northwestern University brought the family to Evanston.

Research and Learning

Monkeys also figure in Cady’s account of her education. She says that a monkey acted as a laboratory assistant, dressed in goggles and a lab coat, while she learned science at home. The image makes the difference between her earlier schooling and a conventional classroom immediately visible: her education came through her zoologist parents and their field of study, with animals close to the work. The recollection is affectionate and humorous, but it also establishes that animals were not merely scenery in Cady’s childhood; they were part of the practical world through which she learned.

From Animals to High-School Society

After arriving in Evanston, Cady applies the observational habits she attributes to her scientist parents to North Shore High School. In the cafeteria, she reads tables as territories occupied by distinct groups, comparing the students’ boundaries and behavior with those of animals. The monkey recollections help ground this way of seeing: animal life is a familiar point of reference for her as she tries to understand an unfamiliar human social order. The analogy belongs to Cady’s perspective, not to any claim that the animals themselves explain or determine the students’ behavior.

Comic Echoes and Limits

Later, at Cady’s house party, Jason Mandrino laughs while browsing her parents’ music collection and calls for a track titled “The Ramayala Monkey Chant!” The moment brings monkey imagery back into the social world Cady has entered, but as part of Jason’s joking use of the household’s unfamiliar music rather than as a return to her childhood research. Across these references, monkeys help mark the contrast between the life Cady left behind and the culture she is learning to navigate. The evidence presents them through her memories and comparisons; it does not give them an independent role in the human conflicts of the plot.