What's in a name?
In this short story, Ursula Le Guin places the narration into the mind of presumably Eve, from the story of Genesis in the bible. Eve has a plan fueled by discontentment with her "husband" Adam and his perceived ranking above everything else besides God, and enlightenment of the concept of identity, individual, and community. She struggles with convincing the different animals who she's come to form a relationship with. Yaks, dogs, birds are all hesitant. Yet Eve presents to them a solution, you can keep names that you choose to be yours, but withdraw from the name given to you.
She was able to unname herself in order to see the beings she shared the Earth with in what they were. She became in tune with the sounds, sight, taste, and smell of the life off of the pedestal Humans were meant to stand on. To be unnamed allows for the instantaneous power of self, for Adam uses his power to name the animals God created to separate himself from them. To be unnamed, Adam cannot impose his power because identity is special and unique to the individual.
This highlights the start of placing man as not a demigod among God's creations but as an equal whose name can also be removed. Eve- Woman is now equal to Adam-Man. She defies the way the world was made so that she has power and she can live at peace.
It is with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs, that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. Bus as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdy in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lowercase (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations "poodle," "parrot," "dog," or "bird," and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail (p.954). |
The insects parted with the names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunneling away (p.954). |
None were left now to unnamed, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another's smells, feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
Hear the story
"Woman" is my slave name, feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity all together
-- ANN SNITOW, "A Gender Diary", Conflicts in Feminism
-- ANN SNITOW, "A Gender Diary", Conflicts in Feminism