Lori Wheeler

What’s in a Name?

          The French sociologist Pierre Bordieu says that modern societies contain institutions such as proper names to unify the self and establish a consistent identity for an individual, or at least a “nominal consistency” (du Gay 29).  While a name does not invoke all aspects and history of a personality, it does designate a specific person with an individual identity.  Naming as a form of personal identity is a theme that appears in every utopia and dystopia I have encountered.  As a continuation of an idea argued in my midterm and thoughts I have returned to with each subsequent dystopia and utopia I read, I propose that naming in utopias/dystopias is also an event that marks the transition between the two types of societies.  Authors of the utopian genre[1] understand the importance of proper names to express one's individuality and go to lengths to discuss the selection or rejection of names.

Some of the most stereotypical and anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon of naming to signify the event of transition from dystopia to utopia is the renaming of oneself during the 1960s as young adults became part of the “Hippie Movement.”  In literature, students in this seminar have found many examples in both utopias and dystopias of the naming event as the boundary between the two.  Rand’s illustration of the importance of naming  occurs when Equality and the Liberty 5-3000 give each other new names in Anthem.  In naming each other The Golden One and The Unconquered, they were committing the sin of preference through identification, and later, after leaving the collective, the act of renaming for public purposes serves as a ceremony that marks their move from dystopian society to the utopia they create. The passages from Woman on the Edge of Time we discussed in class show naming as a critical step in the establishing of oneself in and committing oneself to the utopia.  Piercy’s Luciente says that after being named, everyone decides they are ready to fight for the text’s utopian village (101). 

Currently, YA dystopias are the popular branch of the utopian genre that today’s society uses to understand the concept of utopias.  Even these YA dystopias abound with examples of dystopian protagonists naming or re-naming themselves as they move from dystopia to utopia, whether they transition is a physical or intellectual one.  The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen becomes The Mockingjay when she officially joins District 13, Divergent’s Beatrice becomes Tris as she leaves her faction and discovers she is divergent, and in the unrealized utopia of the maze in The Maze Runner, all the boys are named after people who influenced society toward utopia. 

Illustrating the idea that names mark the event of transition between utopias and dystopias, Margaret Atwood’s Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale quickly and painfully imparts to the reader the importance of owning an identity through naming.  She protects her own and her daughter’s identities, or so she thinks, by never naming either by their pre-Gileadean names.  For Offred, self-expression has become obsolete and she compares her name to a “treasure” that was “buried” (Atwood 84).  She guards her name as a sign of the identity that she refuses to relinquish to her Commander in the same way she refuses to relinquish her hopes for the future.  In this particular dystopia, the shedding of names shows the transition to a dystopian society from what, in comparison, seems like Utopia. The handmaids of Atwood’s Gilead have lost their names in a completion of “their loss of individuality” by being named as “possession[s] of the Commander[s] [they] serve” (Stein 263).   In much the same way, Snowman in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is required to give up the name Jimmy when he moves from the comparatively utopian world to the dystopian world in which Oryx has decided that names cannot be representative of something found there and Crake has decreed that the Crakers be named after “eminent historical figures” instead of giving them their own names (100).  Snowman, Oryx, and Crake have had to give up their former names in this dytopian world, and anyone born into this dystopian world is destined to inherit someone else’s name.

Most of the naming events that mark the transition from utopia to dystopia, however, occur in utopias and serve as much as a barrier between the two extremes of an ideal world as they do a transitional event. As Will Weston introduces his readers to the people of Ecotopia, he specifically gives attention to naming as a barrier between the utopian world of Ecotopia and the dystopian world of the U.S.  He emphasizes the “realness” of Bert Luckman’s name and implies that he doubted it at first as one of the “new” names of Ecotopian design (33).  The reader understands this idea of adopted Ecotopian names when meeting Marissa Brightcloud, whose name is of the “self-adopted Indian-inspired” variety that so many Ecotopians use since Independence and moving to a utopian world (54).  The three wives in Herland refuse to take the surnames of Van, Jeff, and Terry.  The women’s rationale is that they already have names and identities that require nothing more than who they are in relation to themselves.  It seems as though these women understand the importance of naming themselves as part of the utopian schema and that relinquishing the right to do so invalidates the effectiveness of their society.  I would be willing to predict that in Perkins’s continuation of this story, Ellador does indeed take Van’s last name as they travel to the dystopia of America. 

As I come to the conclusion of reporting my research, I am energized.  Certainly, this is only the beginning of a much larger research project that can be developed into a thesis project or journal article should I find the time to do so.  The idea that started as a mere seedling over a year ago has grown into something much more substantial as I explore it again this semester in utopias as well as dystopias.  Naming as the mark of an event, the movement between utopia and dystopia, is a significant feature of the utopian genre that has been largely underemphasized in the face of more obvious, and perhaps more critical, utopian features. 

Works Cited

          Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1986. Print.

          du Gay, Paul. Organizing Identity. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007. Print.

          Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976. Print.

          Stein, Karen F. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Scheherazade in Dystopia.”

          Ed. Bouson, J. Brooks. Critical Insights: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2010. 261-275. Print.