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.
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.
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