The Importance of Names : Final Blog Post

The big question : what kind of affect does an name actually have on someone? When asked to reflect on our Women’s Literature course and all of the material that we read, this is the question that kept coming back to me. Naming a character in a novel, short story poem or even naming your own child is very important. Names allow people to exist. Names can allow humans to be someone. Names can even make you so uncomfortable that you avoid saying it all together. Then there is naming things and then not naming things, and what that means? The names of things or characters of the novels we have read have a strong affect on their everyday lives, and this was very apparent in three of the novels we read this semester.

As I spoke about before in a previous blog post titled “Cat”, naming someone or something allows that person to exists. In The Handmaid’s Tale, there is a common theme of not giving people or things names in order to dehumanize them. The first example from this novel is when the husband of the main character realizes that they cannot bring their pet cat along with them to escape. The main character, Offred says, “and because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.” The husband knew that if he referred to the cat by its name, the situation would be much more depressing for the family. The other example is when one of the handmaid’s, Ofglen, decides to kill herself.  Soon after, a new handmaid is presented to Offred. When Offred asks where Ofglen is, she responds with, “I am Ofglen.” Offred thinks to herself soon after, “that is how you can get lost, in a sea of names. It wouldn’t be easy to find her now.” Because Ofglen never shared her real name, we never knew who she truly was, and there for she cannot exist. This entire story shows that a name is what makes us human, which is very important in itself. Without a name, we cannot exist in this world.

Now, The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler is another story. This is a novel that is to make women view their vagina’s as they should be, beautiful. Her whole goal is to first make us comfortable saying the name for the body part, then making us realize how wonderful it truly is and to be proud of it. As we should be. She starts off the novel by saying, “I’m from the down there generation,” and goes on to say how no one would say the word “Vagina.” Its amazing to me that the name Vaginia makes people so uncomfortable that people just forget about it completely. There is a women that claims to have forgotten how to use it. Its crazy too me.

Then we have the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. This women had three names, Joyti, Jasmine and Jane. These names gave her the power to be three different people. Jasmine was born in India and believed in reincarnation. So for her, through out the different periods of her life when her name changed, she felt like the old her died and a new Jasmine was reborn. She says on page 76 that, “I felt suspended between two world.” And the on the next page goes on to say, “He wanted to break down the Jyoti I’d been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city women. To break off the past, he gave me a new name. Jasmine. He said, “You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume.” Joyti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities.” And the concludes the novel going describing every person that she has been and wondering what person is to come with her move to California. “Tie will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and diapering into a cloud. I am out the door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope.” It once again amazes me, the power that the names given to Jasmine through out the book allow her to be three completely different people. 

To answer the big question: whether a name is the cause of your existence, makes you uncomfortable or allows you to be many different persons in one body, the importance of a name plays a big part in not only the daily life of the main characters in all three of these novels that we have read in Women’s Literature, but also our daily lives.

A Beautiful Life

Death is a topic that scares some and not others. Personally, death terrifies me. Even being raised in a Christian home and believing in Heaven, it is still is a terrifying subject to me. These past few English classes we have been focusing on the novel, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, but also watching a film called The Hours. The Hours is a very dark but terrific film that shows the lives of three women, Virginia Woolf, a wife who is currently reading Mrs. Dalloway, and a modern day Clarissa Dalloway, whose lives are all connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway. These women are all faced with some sort of suicide in their lives or the attempt of a suicide.

At first this movie was a bit hard to follow. But as the story went on, it became much more easier to follow. Not to mention it made reading the actual novel a lot more easy. In the novel and in the movie there is a common theme of life and death. The fear or death, but also learning from death, and taking life for what it is, making it mean something and cherishing it.

I think that is the problem with today’s society. We aren’t living or valuing the life we are given. In the movie, Virginia Woolf’s husband asks why someone had to die in the novel. She replied with, “someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It’s contrast.” We shouldn’t have to have someone die in order for us to value life. We should value it from the beginning. We should protect it with all our strength.

A small example of this for myself is fake tanning. I am a girl and yes I will admit that before Prom and other events I will go to the tanning bed once or twice to get a bit of color. So many times has my father told me to stop because I could get skin cancer, but do I listen? No. But now that my father has a cancer scare, it’s made me rethink the entire idea of fake tanning. Why do something that causes something so awful, when it is preventable? It’s sad because skin cancer is so preventable, but it shows that I don’t value my life as much as I should.

We shouldn’t have to learn from death in order to live. Life is beautiful and short. Its a gift given to us and we should cherish it. I am going to end this post with a quote spoke by Virginia Woolf. It is in the form of a letter that she leaves her husband.

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours” (The Hours)

"Solving The Girl Problem II" (17)

I realize that there has been at least 20 posts about the article that was in the last edition of The Standard titled, “The Girl Problem”. It’s been a few weeks since our class meeting where a panel sat in front of the entire high school and discussed some of the issues that they had with statements made in the article. Ever since then it is still a classroom, lunch table and after school topic.
Today, when someone called a male out for objectifying women, he took back his comment and immediately regretted it. It then made me realize that people don’t even realize that they are doing it, which may be a point that everyone realized already. It just took a real life example for me to realize it. How do we keep people from thinking things like this? And are we going to have to constantly remind people that the comments they make are not okay? I do realize however that it is not just boys that objectify women but also women that objectify eachother. Its something we need to work on as a group, but I think that once people become more aware we will begin to see a change in the way men view women.

Dependence on Men in Jasmine (16)

How often do we question our dependence on other people. Depending on someone can be a positive thing or a negative thing. Dependence is what makes a marriage. Dependence is what allows us to have a President, or anyone in an authority position. But dependence can also make us week and vulnerable. It can cause us to make decisions that we can never say we made “on our own”, but that the decision was made subconsciously because of dependence on someone or something.



In Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee the main character, Jasmine has been dependent on the many men in her life at that point in time. Once we all had finished the novel we began discussing Jasmine’s final decision to move to California with Taylor. Was this decision her own? Or will Jasmine go to California to cling onto Du and his new life there.

I see both sides of the argument, although I agree with only one. Certain arguments that were made in class were that she finally made the decision for herself, and she is incredibly proud of it, which is very apparent with the things she says. Things like,

“It isn’t guilt that I feel, its relief. I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane. Adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through uncaulked windows. Watch me re-position the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who flats corss-legged above my kitchen stove (240).”

This passage goes back to when in the first chapter when the astrologer fortold her of her widowhood and exile. This is her making a statement, that when he said “Fate is fate,” that that is not true, and that fate is in her own hands. Another instance is when she has made the decision to leave with taylor, “I am out the door and in potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope.” (241) Both of these statements that Jasmine makes before she leaves make it sound like she is finally doing something for herself, and she is very proud of it.

But listening to her make her decision about why she should move to California makes you wonder why she is really moving out there. When Taylor first comes to her house and asks her to move to California with him she reponds with, “What am I to do? I back off toward the window. The window’s caulking crumbles as I pick at it. The chilly sparkle of afternoon light temps. ‘I have family in California.’ “ (239) No ony do we hear a reponse filled with uncertainty, but we can observe her nervous habit of picking the window’s caulking crumbles and hear her thought process. Its interesting to see how uneasy she feels about the whole thing. And then at the end of the line when she says, “I have family in California.” As if she needs a reason to go. Why not just go because she wants a new life? Because she felt restricted by Bud, her handicapped husband. She then goes on later to say, “I have to see Du.” Another man to depend on.

After reading this post I am sure that you can tell which argument I agree with. I believe that you can’t change who you are just because you want too. Jasmine has always been dependent on men, and she will continue to be. It will take time to distance herself from that, but I do believe that when she goes to California she will cling to Du along with his new life, which will in the end cripple her.


*When looking through Jasmine at quotes while writing my final blog post, I came along a passage on page 78 that I realized fit in with this perfectly. It says, "He was twenty-four and I was fifteen, a village fifteen, ready to be led."