What’s in a Name? A Comparative Analysis of How Names Are Used in Literature

“I want you to call me Marie Magdalene,”[1] said Lamort of Edwidge Danticat’s “The Missing Piece”. In Edwidge Danticat’s “The Missing Piece” and “Women Like Us” and Karen Blixen’s “The Dreamers”, names play very significant roles in the female protagonists’ lives. One of the issues brought up by names and naming is the connection of names to death. There is also a distinction between names that reinforce the connections and names that break off the connections to the community. Lastly, the stories touch upon how names are related to the women’s identity. These various effects underline the importance of names in understanding the story of the women.

Whether it be through dialogue or imagery, death and names are prominent motifs both Danticat’s stories. However, what can be said of the relationship between these two seemingly unrelated topics? In the dialogue between the Emilie and Lamort, Lamort is asked, “How did your name come to be ‘death’?” (Danticat 109) She responds, “My mother died while I was being born” (Danticat 109). Through the manipulation of the syntax in Lamort’s answer, the sequence of birth and death is reversed. The result is that death comes before birth. Thus it can be reasoned that Lamort, as ‘death’, will later experience a rebirth of her life in which she find her own name.

There is also imagery being used to link the connection between death and names. “âÂ?¦she [Emilie] whispered as she plucked some leaves off my grandmother’s pumpkin vines. ‘I see my mother sinking into a river, and she keeps calling my name.'” (Danticat 116) The river is a symbol of death and the act of plucking leaves away from the vine reinforces the imagery of separation between Emilie and her mother in her dream.

Again, the name factor comes up immediately after as Emilie’s mother uses Emilie’s name in an attempt to reestablish the connection of mother and daughter. A successful example of this connection is Lamort, whose rebirth consists of taking her mother’s name, Marie Magdalene, as her own. Therefore, death and names are used in juxtaposition to emphasize how the strength of the mother daughter connection, through the use of names, can overcome the inevitability of death. This is further supported by the passage in the epilogue, “Women Like Us”:

When she was done she would ask you to name each braid after those nine hundred and ninety-nine women who were boiling in your blood, and since you had written them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this is your testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again (Danticat 224).

The figure nine hundred ninety-nine is a double entendre. First, the enormity of the number nine hundred and ninety-nine accentuates the far-reaching scope of the power of a name. Yet, the specific nature of that number, along with the words ‘blood’ and ‘tongue’, also indicates a certain intimacy between those that have lived and one that is living. Thus, even through death, the names become an innate part of who these women are.

While Lamort and Emilie struggle to patch in the ‘missing piece’ of their connection to their mother, they are also taking part in making sure their prosperity and community will remember them as well. In the last scene where Emilie and Lamort are talking, there is a sense of urgency. The scene is described as, “Her voice was weighed down with pain and fatigue. She picked up the coins from the table, added a dollar from her purse, and pressed the money into my palm” (Danticat 121). The contrast of Emilie being burdened and yet executing all these actions one after the other subtlety generates an atmosphere of urgency and importance. Right after, Emilie asks Lamort, “Will you whisper their names in my ear?

I will write them down” (Danticat 121). She then jots the names down and repeats a phrase she said once before, “for prosperity”. Though she writes for the sake of prosperity, she is, at the same time, acknowledging the inevitability of their own deaths. Indeed, it seems as if Emilie knows death is chasing at her, that she must hurry and ‘jot’ the names on the back of a picture. Thus, this sense of importance and urgency reveals how significant names can be in maintaining connections to community and prosperity.

In contrast to Danticat’s stories, Pellegrina Leoni of “The Dreamers” breaks her connections to her community by frequently changing her name. She explains to Marcus, “You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and his prisoner” (Blixen 345). By her personifying a name as something that is capable of enslavement and imprisonment, she is expressing her desire for freedom from the pain she has come to associate ‘Pellegrina’ with.

Her reason is as follows, “I will never be one person again, Marcus, I will be always be many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much” (Blixen 345). Again, the imagery of being ‘bound up’ gives a negative connotation to the connection between an individual and a name.

Thus, it can be deduced that her actions following her proclamation is her way of breaking free from the community she has known through ‘Pellegrina’. She uses names such as Olalla, Rosalba, and Madame Lola to distance herself from the community who has known and loved her as the opera star. Each time she uses a different name, as if the strengthen the degrees of separation she has from her former self. In this context, the purpose of names here becomes not a link that joins the longer chain, but something that takes the chain apart.

Although Pellegrina uses names to escape from herself, she never really succeeds because her name was already a part of her original identity. When describing Pellegrina, Marcus comments that, “She would never let herself become tied up in any of her roles.”[2] Although superficially, this is another declaration of her decision to be anyone and everyone, it can be interpreted as the fact that she has an identity that is potentially unaffected by these ‘roles’ because the actress behind the character never really ‘let herself’ change. There is a strong hint to this even as she is portraying other characters in the effort to change who she is.

She said to Lincoln, “That man whom you have seen outside-with your usual penetration you will easily guess him to be no other than this shadow of mine, with which I have no longer anything to do” (Blixen 287). Marcus has come to represent her shadow because she states, “I could not hear your voice without remembering the divine voice of PellegrinaâÂ?¦” (Blixen 348) Together these two quotes spoken from Pellegrina’s very mouth symbolizes the fact that she can never really break free of who she was, anymore than she can break free from a shadow. One cannot exist without the other. Pellegrina realizes this at the end, when she says, “It is Pellegrina Leoni-it is she, it is she herself again-she is backâÂ?¦Come back, my children, my friends. It is I-I forever, now” (Blixen 353).

She is then described that she, “âÂ?¦wept with a rapture of relief, as if she had in her a river of tears, held back long” (Blixen 353). The alliteration in the “rapture of relief” is used to emphasize how long Pellegrina has been waiting to return to being Pellegrina. Ironically, it is at the end of her life that she realizes that the name ‘Pellegrina’ has is an integral part of her existence, as indicated by the ‘I forever, now’. As she was trying to erase the name from herself, she is also suppressing who she is, which would be consistent with the observation of the ‘river of tears, held back long’. Her name not only represents what she is, but most importantly, who she is.

What is in a name and what is its purpose? Danticat and Blixen answer this question through the story of “The Missing Piece”, “Women Like Us”, and “The Dreamers”. In “The Missing Piece” and “Women Like Us”, names are used to overshadow death. The significance of a name is that it connects the past to the present and that is important because without the past, there would have been no present. Which is why the learning of the names provides reinforcement to the connection of mother, daughter, and prosperity.

Yet, names can also be used to obscure and even break the linkage of one person to everyone else, as shown with Pellegrina. Her name, which means “to take a journey”, foreshadows a departure and a severing of her bond to her community. However, she returns from her journey realizing the fact that she her bond to her ‘children’ and ‘friends’ as ‘Pellegrina’ is vital to whom she is as a person. Therefore, names are temporal objects that are links from the past to the present and the present to the future, much like that of a story.

[1] Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) p. 122.

[2] Blixen, Karen. “The Dreamers” (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934) p. 347