Saturday, April 20, 2019
The Popular Topic of Names - Independent Study
Unlike last year's grade requirement of an oral presentation, we don't have the luxury this year of knowing what every single person's independent study book is about! As multiple people have mentioned already, names are quite important in Beloved along with other works we have read too. With multiple blog posts of this topic in the past few weeks, I would like to share a bit of my independent study book with everyone also revolving around this topic. My book is The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston and it is an autobiography but reads like a collection of short stories. One of the short stories is "the Unnamed Woman" who is actually Kingston's paternal aunt that failed to uphold, from Chinese society's viewpoint, her reputation. Spoiler: Kingston's aunt becomes pregnant but not by someone who is her husband and she suffers so much in society from this that she throws herself into a well along with the baby. This story and her existence itself is completely erased from everyone's memory and no one is allowed to speak of it. It was only once as a child that Kingston was even told this story by her mother, knowing she would get in trouble if those words were ever uttered again. Kingston shows great strength in resurrecting this story and giving recognition to her aunt. So I guess this goes to show: names do have significance in one's life but having no name is equally as significant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Your independent study sounds so interesting! It wasn't until I was looking for research articles for Jane Austen's "Emma" that I noticed the significance of some of the names in the book, such as Highbury, the village the novel is set in.
L.J. Swingle says in, "The Perfect Happiness of the Union: Jane Austen's Emma and English Romanticism":
""Highbury," conveying associations both of elevation and falling, is a most appropriate name for the novel's locale, wherein maintaining heights, falling into depths, seeking to rise or to avoid falling further are primary concerns underlying the most innocent interactions among the novel's characters."
It's amazing how a simple name can give such important information about a character. In fact, my independent study book too had names in it that said tremendous amounts about the characters. For example, in my book "Brave New World" individuals are mass produced, specifically in sets of 96 identical twins. Because of this mass manufacturing of twins, there are very few actual last names within the society. And the names that are there are historic/famous people from history. For example one of the main characters of the novel is named Bernard "Marx."
that last comment is by Ritchie Whitney, as is this one
Post a Comment