Naming and Not Naming
1. “Naming the Dead: Elegiac Ritual and Onomastic Intervention in Hemans, Landon, Barrett, and Rossetti”
Brandy Ryan
University of Toronto
Abstract: Naming the dead is an intrinsic part of any mourning ritual, but as the nineteenth-century elegies by Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett, and Christina Rossetti indicate, it is an act imbued with cultural, political, and poetic significance. The significance of the name for women who frequently underwent changes or additions through marriage and/or professional necessity (adopting male pseudonyms for publication) bears with it these cultural and political weights, but in death names raise bigger and more problematic questions. How do we name our dead, and does the naming of them always signify evaluation? How do names and acts of naming intersect or conflict with rituals of mourning, particularly the rituals of elegiac mourning? Ester Schor suggests that the “dead shape the lives we are able to live” (4); this paper asks how the naming (or unnaming) of the dead similarly shapes and is shaped by the lives of the living.
2. “’Making his name a name without a family:’ English Onomastic Schemes and the Cree Tradition in Three Day Road”
Joanie Crandall
University of Saskatchewan
Abstract: Names bear witness to heritage and to contact with various forms of community in the novel. Elijah Whiskeyjack is a sniper in WWI with a name bastardized significantly by his fellow Canadian soldiers, “making his name a name without a family” (154), as his friend Xavier Bird comments. Xavier, renamed “X” by their detachment after he wins a shooting competition, continues to self-identify as Nephew. Elijah’s Cree name, Weesageechak, is the trickster of Cree tradition; when Weasel does not appear to save him from the Windigo, Elijah transforms into the feared cannibal, and Xavier (like his Oji-Cree aunt and as the last in a Windigo killer family) must assume his responsibility. Xavier ultimately embodies his own patronymic when he takes a form of flight during a shell attack. Names in the novel suggest both movement toward and denial of that which is both necessary and feared by the character.
3. “On Not Naming: Onomastic Absence in Cather’s My Antonia”
Kerry M. Manders
YorkUniversity
Abstract: There are ostensibly two authors of My Ántonia: Willa Cather, who wrote the 1918 novel, and her protagonist Jim Burden, who writes the identically named elegiac memoir within the novel. This paper, however, remembers another author about whom many readers forget: the unnamed narrator, “I,” of the Introduction to Jim’s memoir. “I” erases itself, giving its text over to Jim’s; however, in that very erasure, “I” marks its own loss, marks itself as lost. Intriguingly, this loss is remarked in the Houghton Mifflin edition of My Ántonia (1995), where two different versions of the Introduction envelope Jim’s narrative. “I”’s loss reappears as textual excess in a concluding Appendix that gives us Cather’s “Original Introduction to the 1918 Edition” of My Ántonia. Here, we discover that the unnamed (and until now ungendered) narrator of the Introduction is a woman and that she, too, intended to write down her reminiscences of Ántonia. That text never materialized--“My own story was never written” (244), she says. That “I” is a female writer also marks as lost--and thus as possible--a same-sex romantic narrative, a Sapphic elegy. In her most famous passage of non-fiction, Cather invites us look for “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named” (“The Novel Démeublé” 837) in her texts, and many critics rightly interpret this “presence” as the love that dare not speak its name. This paper reads Cather’s invitation quite literally, exploring the interpretive possibilities of an instance of not naming in Cather; her unnamed narrator remains an apt metonym for sundry losses, including, crucially, lost mourning.