AccurateNaming Archer 1986

The University of Notre Dame
"Stalking Joy": Flannery O'Connor's Accurate Naming

Author(s): Emily Archer
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 17-30
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059311
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"STALKING JOY":
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S ACCURATE NAMING
Emily Archer
When the Georgia Writers' Association honored Flannery

in 1956 with its Scroll for her collection A Good Man is Har
the peacock breeder was at least as interested by their attenti
as with their praise of her work. She writes in a letter to "
installment I will describe giving of handsome scroll . . .
will come down I will also show it to you. It not only extolls
as a writer but spells my name in two interesting ways" (Le
Some six years later, she received the Scroll again for The Vi
It Away and thanked the same group for getting its name cor
she reports, it had been called The Valiant Bear It Always and
Bloom Away, among other things:
I'm delighted to have this scroll. In fact, I'm delighted just to know that
one remembers my book two years after it was published and can get th
of it straight. . . . Recently a friend of mine went into a bookstore look
a copy of my stories and he claims that the clerk said, "We don't ha
but we have another book by that person. It's called The Bear That R
With It? (Mystery 51-2)
Flannery O'Connor's humored irritation over these misnam

representative of an abiding, serious concern revealed in
fiction, and letters for "getting the name of it straight." He
to naming includes, but extends beyond, what some critics
tified as her "onomastic art," the craft of constructing name
tional characters. Of more importance here is a better unde
of O'Connor's implicit attitude toward language and being, to
ing and being named. This discussion, therefore, explores
R&L 18.2 (Summer 1986)

17
18 Religion & Literature
tionship between the few assertions about naming in

ters and the powerful events of naming in such fic
"Good Country People," "A Good Man is Hard to F
tion." What emerges is a kind of "theology" of wor
the prevailing modern notions of language as a prison
of arbitrary codes.
According to Flannery O'Connor, naming is inextr
ing, and seeing with truth. Inasmuch then as fictio
says O'Connor, "the accurate naming of the things o
basis. Further, "accurate naming" is an artistic aim
she argues, only by "trying to see straight" {Letters
naming and straight seeing both depend upon a
transcendence, which for her was "an unlimited Go
himself specifically" and who "has a name" {Myster
God is neither an abstract speculation nor a theolog
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," who calls eac
by name. His own name is "I AM," the name of pur
existence in its absolute perfection" which "stands a
ing mystery at the core of reality" (Gilson 63). T
names is both noun and verb, complete, personal, an
"the accurate naming of the things of God" in fictio
which attempts to see straight to the heart of a reali
by I AM.
Seeing straight, in O'Connor's view, means mor
clearly. Seeing straight also means seeing through t
not to hold it in contempt, but rather, as Conrad so
the highest possible justice" to it because for O'Co
universe is a reflection of the invisible universe" {L
essentially sacramental world, groomed pigs, idiot c
cocks all have the capacity to "pant with a secret life" {S
straight" is a synonym, then, for what O'Connor ca
sion," which finds both its source and its end in the d
with "anagogical vision" will penetrate the created u
to find at its depths the image of its source, the image
{Mystery 157). Grounded in a relationship with a be
the writer with anagogical vision is able to enlarge,
clude "most possibilities" of reality, often distilling
age or one situation" {Mystery 72) which will event
the Source. Without this vision the work will stop a
O'Connor diagnoses the difficulty this way:
EMILY ARCHER 19
We have to look in much of the ficti

which expresses its ultimate concern in
to show any recognition of a God wh
In her own fiction, acts of nam

that locus of reality through wh
The artist who invites such im
peril and discomfort. In a New Y
wrote, "Picture me with my gr
too as it's a highly dangerous qu
sion, the more certain is one's c
more sure becomes one's ability
from "the things of God." O'Con
tion of the world in search for I
of evil, but rather sharpens it" (My
age remove the devil from the
sense of evil which sees the de
to name himself, and not simpl
to name himself with his specific p
117). In the name of Modern T
disembodied, and filed away on a
O'Connor dramatically recovers
characters as the Grandmother
presence of evil demands that t
they abandon labels and name
naming" in her fiction is often
O'Connor might define as "an ac
by the devil" (Mystery 118).
Walker Percy is implicitly sym
"theology of being" in several w
in The Message in the Bottle tha
the spirit of abstraction" (26) an
language and naming are profo
the mystery of naming Helen K
Alabama. There, he explains, the
running over Helen's hand and th
the behaviorist's stimulus-respo
of naming remains a mystery; n
man by breaking into the dayli
employ this mysterious gift in t
ently that invocation has yield
theorizing about.
Language in an age "informed by the spirit of abstr

words, language conceived in the spirit of modern
ancient beginnings, states Cleanth Brooks, gnosticism
ter was evil and creation "the work of a demon" (26
modern version of gnosticism abdicates responsibili
world and further holds that "man's salvation depe
efforts" (Brooks 264). The secret knowledge, the "g
that "salvation" comes entirely from the human m
Voegelin summarizes the agenda of gnosticism th
All gnostic movements are involved in the project of abolis
tion of being, with its origin in divine, transcendent bein
with a world-immanent order of being, the perfection of whi
of human action. (Brooks 266)
The language of gnostic power will therefore be cha

which divide the self in order to classify and classi
trol. Perceived as unmoored to transcendent bein
less and less the particular selves who were called b
and more and more members of a sociological set. Ac
Percy's diagnosis of this modern condition, "the spir
not address one single word to [man] as an indivi
address him only as he resembled other selves" (
names: in Ruby Turpin's vernacular, everyone is eit
niggers, land owners, or home-and-land owners.
Flannery O'Connor cautions that the novelist who
spirit of abstraction and gnosticism "will be concer
an accurate reproduction of the things that most im
man" {Mystery 41). And the consequence for "accurat
for when a relationship with transcendence is exclu
"words without signification, meaningless marks by
is distinguished from another" (Algeo 53). The fo
upon our conception of language seeks to explain na
stimulus-response relationship between word and
undertaking chimpanzees who construct sentences o
somehow harnessed as "proof." Walker Percy arg
a name cannot simply be dismissed as a "semantical
naming is essentially a gratuitous act of affirmatio
Naming is unique in natural history because for the first t
universe stands apart from the universe and affirms some
what it is. In this act, for the first time in the history of t
spoken. (155)
EMILY ARCHER 21
Naming in this sense reestablishe

language of gnosticism tends to
a participation in the divine act
O'Connor and Percy provide a dia
with those who hold that langu
system or a prison-house of r
metaphor) beyond which no Wor
become dissociated from the Wo
"in declaring ourselves namers o
is exists before our naming" (77)
words are no longer an excalibur
no longer the means for callin
Flannery O'Connor's alternativ
and naming begins not only with
participation in it, which she cal
(Mystery 41). This experience tu
into sacramental "accurate namin
"things that immediately concern
True movement toward God ca
to possess, control, and catalog
moral basis of fiction, "the acc
therefore, requires nothing less
dote to the spirit of abstraction
among the highest orders of ana
essential to making a story work
This would have to be an action or ge
unexpected: it would have to be one
character; it would have to suggest b
be a gesture that transcended any nea
or any pat moral categories a reader
somehow made contact with mystery
Like Percy, O'Connor resists sim

where it concerns a reality that
duced into an image or action,
naming-events in her fiction a
they transform the conventiona
naming as onomastic skill into n
exult in the Onoma. O'Connor'
beyond what Paul Ferguson would
is essentially allegoricar (90, my
characters - Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs.
ble the names of characters from Pilgrim's Progress, bu

tion ironically, not allegorically in the classic sense.
gests that O'Connor uses names ato foreshadow and
but the discussion that follows tends to reduce n
v). Others more accurately have viewed O'Connor
part of her concern with "the limits and possibilitie
respect due them" (O'Connor in Grimshaw 14). Dris
for example, note the felicitous change of "Hazel Wic
to "Hazel Motes" in Wise Blood, since "motes" more
"the biblical beams and motes obstructing true visio
the relationship between blindness and truth is
Undoubtedly Flannery O'Connor's onomastic strat
tant aspects of her fictional technique. But her con
meaningful, unarbitrary character naming shoul
as an "anagogical signal" (Davies 428), a clue that nam
"make contact with mystery." Therefore, besides be
of her technical virtuosity, those fictional moment
name themselves and each other "accurately" are po
of O'Connor's "habit of art." Exemplary of the anago
naming events stand opposed to the kind of language
the world in a filing system which can be grasped, h
It is now to her fiction and to those events that we turn.
In 1959, Flannery O'Connor announced in a note to the second edi-
tion of Wise Blood that the "book was written in zest" by an author "con-
genitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations" ( Wise
5). Telling the truth is undoubtedly one of those preoccupations and
it is around Hazel Motes' tenacity to his own version of truth - "no
truth behind all truths" - that the devils of false names jeer and mock
and attempt to deceive (Wise 165). Through a character like Hazel
Motes, Flannery O'Connor "helps give life to the meaning of the word
theology by reminding us that men are always trying to get clear in their
minds the logos, or truth, concerning God," as Ted Spivey suggests,
"even when they are denying His existence" (28).
Hazel Motes' obsession with his own anti-Gospel deposits him in
the midst of toothless whores, mock evangelists, and would-be disciples
who pursue their salvation in gorilla suits. During one of his last at-
tempts to preach this truth to the motley "congregation" outside the
Odeon theater, Haze encounters "an anti-John the Baptist" with a pig-
latinized con-name, Onnie Jay Holy (Montgomery 420). The narrator
prepares us for Onnie Jay's falseness and shifting identity through Haze's
eyes: "He looked like an ex-preacher turned cowboy, or an ex-cowboy
EMILY ARCHER 23
turned mortician. He was not h

was an honest look that fitted into
148). This devil is being made
have it, for the specific occasion
his real name, Hoover Shoats,
also he changes the name of Haze
Christ" to the "Holy Church of C
at the name change provokes Sho
and toward being itself: "It don't
you add to the name if you do
(Wise 157). For Hoover Shoats,
manipulate for each occasion, a
the name can be discarded. More
stood or consumed. "You don't ha
stand and approve of," the con-m
"If you don't understand it, it a
No jokers in the deck, friends
Hoover Shoats' evil words becom
tion to add another "Christ" to the name of Hazel's church culminates
in literally adding another Hazel Motes. Shoats "innerduces" an exact
replica of Motes to the crowd outside the Odeon theater, complete with
rat-colored automobile, glare-blue suit, and white hat. The addition
of words and the "accurate reproduction" of True Prophets have only
one meaning of any consequence for Hoover Shoats: "fifteen dollars
and thirty-five cents clear" (Wise 201). Yet for Hazel Motes, the wheez-
ing impersonator Solace Layfield is no mere replica and the conse-
quences of meeting this mockery of his own calling become a matter
of life-in-death. When he finally kills Solace Layfield, the way is pre-
pared for Hazel Motes to name himself aright as "not clean" and to
go "backwards to Bethlehem" (Wise 224, 219).
Unlike Onnie Jay Holy, Manley Pointer, the con-mam of O'Connor's
"Good Country People," never reveals his real name: "And you needn't
think you'll catch me because Pointer ain't really my name. I use a
different name at every house I call at and don't stay nowhere long"
(Stories 291). O'Connor leaves the naming of this story's con-man up
to the reader, with an implied warning not to become a Mrs. Hopewell,
not to label him vaguely as "good country people." If you do, the story
implies allegorically, he will enter your house and seduce your "joy."
Posed as a poor Bible salesman, Manley Pointer lives up to his false
name by penetrating the verbal facades created at the Hopewell house,
seducing Mrs. HopewelTs daughter Joy with her own nihilistic language.
Life at the Hopewell house is dominated by con

mulaic consistency" (Oreovicz 223) between Mrs.
eralizer, and Mrs. Freeman, the literalist:
"Everybody is different," Mrs. Hopewell said.
"Yes, most people is," Mrs. Freeman said.
"It takes all kinds to make the world."
"I always said it did myself." (Stories 273)
Mrs. Hopewell's cliches and categories are "linguistic hedges [which]

nourish perceptual hedges, classify so that they can oversimplify"
(Oreovicz 223). A pigeon-holer of the worst sort, Mrs. Hopewell is
endlessly frustrated by the inability to classify her crippled, lumbering
blond daughter by such apprehendable titles as "nurse," "school teacher,"
or even "chemical engineer," names she could "understand and approve
of," to use Hoover Shoats' words. "The girl had taken the Ph.D. in
philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. . . . You
could not say, 'My daughter is a philosopher.' That was something that
had ended with the Greeks and Romans" (Stories 276).
At age twenty-one the girl with the wooden leg has her name changed
from "Joy" to "Hulga" and Mrs. Hopewell was certain that her daughter
"had hit upon the ugliest name in any language," one that made her
think of "the broad blank hull of a battleship" (Stories 274). For Hulga,
it was more than a change of a name. It declared her master and maker
of her self:
She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs
was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater
one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. (Stories 275)
In Joy-Hulga's economy, names are not words, but ideas, because words
are mere illusions (Oreovicz 226). "Fm one of those people who see
through to nothing," she tells Manley Pointer (Stories 287). And the
"nothing" she sees through to is simply Joy-Hulga, a self-exalted being
who has taken God's own name, I AM:
Mrs. Hopewell would say, "If you can't come pleasantly, I don't want you at
all," to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust
slightly forward, would reply, "If you want me, here I am - LIKE I AM." (Stories
274)
On one level, Joy-Hulga is refusing to change her glum face and

ugly remarks. On another, she is also declaring a certain intellectual
height and superiority of being: she is "LIKE I AM." Joy-Hulga's in-
tellect is her God and she depends upon it for her salvation. Further,
EMILY ARCHER 25
she believes she is everything he

testifies when it becomes the se
To her own mother she had said - wit
up in the middle of a meal with her
"Woman! do you ever look inside? Do
are not? God!" (Stories 276)
The perfect modern gnostic, Joy

her effort "has been to retain th
tion but remove every trace of
It takes a con-man, a Manley Po
has conned or mis-named herself
to discover her identity, but Man
her wooden leg joins on" to kn
key to her being. Hulga's real na
sock and brown flat shoe," some
along with a hollow Bible, a flas
and a pack of obscene cards. O
her leg, the reader knows wha
she names him: "Aren't you," she
try people?" {Stories 290). She
along. Before he flees with her
as "Hulga," "using the name as if
291). Neither do we. Joy-Hulga h
ments of being, out of words wh
She has named herself into a gno
gomery 77), where signifiers are
dissociated from the Word. It is not until a Bible salesman with
a pseudo-name looks past her spectacles into her eyes that her true
name begins to be revealed.
In other O'Connor stories, "accurate namings" are accompanied by
acts of violence. Like the breaking of a taboo, when the real name is
spoken a terrible beauty is born. The "frightening mystery at the core
of reality" shatters the visible, definable world to clear the way for a
revelation of pure being. These revelations rarely bear down upon
characters who exhibit any sense of the numinous, but rather upon
"the traditionalist who lives on the surface of life" (Spivey 22). They
are grandmothers with white cotton gloves and church-going women
with black patent-leather pumps.
Until she learns to name accurately, the Grandmother of "A Good
Man is Hard to Find" seems to be another Hopewell. She would like
to "hope well" of the thin, bespectacled man who is d

two by two into the malignant pine forest. The Gr
labels onto the Misfit, hoping that one of them wi
and determine a different course of action: " 'I just
man,' she said desperately. *You're not a bit commo
But the labels are insincere and manipulative. In fa
what she wants desperately to believe about herself
blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know yo
people!" (Stories 131-32). Then the presence of ev
close to her own," challenges the Grandmother to n
curately: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one
dren!" (Stories 132). This is an anagogical gesture "b
and totally unexpected." Flannery O'Connor says
her story:
The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an
instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for
the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots
deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this
point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture. (Mystery 111-12)
In naming him "accurately," the Grandmother has also named herself.

She is the "Grand Mother" of offspring whom the devil has temporarily
claimed for his territory, and if this condition is true, she must admit
to the destructive principle in her own soul. She is not just a nice lady
with good blood. She has an accurate name, one that firmly establishes
her portion of responsibility for the evil in the world. The consequence
of this anagogical naming for the Grandmother is being "shot three
times through the chest" (Stories 132). For the Misfit, the consequence
is uncertain, but Flannery O'Connor would "prefer to think that, how-
ever unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-
seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and
will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he
was meant to become" (Mystery 113).
One of O'Connor's last and best short stories, "Revelation," also
derives much of its anagogical power from violent acts of naming. When
the Grandmother utters the "accurate" name, she dies for it. When Mrs.
Turpin hears her own evil named by an acne-faced lunatic, the truth
of that unexpected name means death to all she had previously known
and possessed of the world. Until that moment, she controls the social
architecture of her world with linguistic fences and carefully lettered
"No Trespassing" signs.
EMILY ARCHER 27
Mrs. Turpin is a master of nam

waiting room is the perfect place
of everyone's condition and station
tirely on the basis of what she ca
are especially good indicators of w
into Mrs. Turpin's great chain o
Mrs. Turpin had on her good black pat
on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. Th
the white- trashy mother had on what
straw with gold braid threaded through
expected her to have on. (Stories 491)
The way they sit, the shoes they w

into Mrs. Turpin's inventory of hu
at night naming the classes of p
On the bottom of the heap were most c
have been if she had been one, but most
just away from - were the white- trash; t
and above them the home-and-land own
Above she and Claud were people with a
and much more land. (Stories 491)
Mrs. Turpin could comfort hersel

interminably as long as she did no
dentist in town who had two red
a farm with registered white-face
power of the chain of being woul
there was nothing left to do but m
would dream they were all cramm
den off to be put in a gas oven"
Mrs. Turpin's own image of hers
she is not: "If it's one thing I am,
grateful. When I think who all I c
just feel like shouting, 'Thank you
way it is!' " (Stories 499). This vac
tion to be filled with something co
to the fat, rude girl whose glare
Mrs. Turpin's direction, until at la
over the left eye with, ironically
book and then makes a howling lu
moil that ensues, O'Connor pre
gesture much like that in "A Go
Grandmother, whose "head cleared" long enough to

one of her own, "Mrs. Turpin's head cleared, just lon
a revelation from the most unlikely, but compellin
She leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fie
There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her
intense and personal way, beyond time and place and con
got to say to me?" she asked hoarsely and held her breath,
revelation. The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with M
back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog," she whi
From that moment, Mrs. Turpin's carefully constru

out of possessive tags, labels, and classes, begins to
no longer finds it possible to name herself by what
not,' she said tearfully, 'a wart hog. From hell.' But
force" (Stories 502). This message is not finally fro
is from Jesus himself, the one who could have mad
or a nigger. It comes straight from the heart of a
longer croon to. "Who do you think you are?" she fi
When Moses asked that question, God replied, "I
Turpin asks it, the intrusive mystery puts the "bot
the woman's ladder of being. And the revelation begi
pew, but in a pig parlor where her own hogs sud
pant with a secret life" (Stories 508).
At its climax, Mrs. Turpin's revelation is a mag
tion of all her linguistic armory, and an inversion
that had allowed her to name herself "Ruby Tur
hard-working, church-going woman":
She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upwa
through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls we
heaven. There were whole companies of white- trash, clean
in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and b
and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. A
end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she rec
those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little o
the God-given wit to use it right. . . . Yet she could see by
altered faces that even their virtues were being burned aw
Her labels have become meaningless, the means for i

position worthless. White- trash are clean, niggers
ple of her own kind bring up the end. They are
wards toward the Omega point where names create
social position. "To be fully ourselves," says Teilh
is in ... the direction of convergence with all the re
EMILY ARCHER 29
advance - toward the 'other' " (2

point by an absolute existence,
ticular spirit and indivisible bein
not merely their resemblance to
The name spoken out of sheer af
re-create and restore.
O'Connor's fiction hosts many other anagogical acts of naming that
bear mention and invite study. O. E. Parker, the protagonist of "Parker's
Back," hides his incompleteness for years behind the initials "O. E."
until he meets the gaze of a tattooed Christ who demands he name
himself in truth. When Parker finally completes the name, whispering
"Obadiah Elihue" through a keyhole, "he felt the light pouring through
him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors,
a garden of trees and birds and beasts" (Stories 528). And when in The
Violent Bear It Away Francis Marion Tarwater finally submits to being
called, not on his own terms, but by the Word which would burn him
clean by flesh and blood and bread, the prophecy that names him was
"as silent as seeds opening one at a time in his blood" (Violent 267).
Through these sacramental namings, the Word made flesh has returned
to the world its full dimensions, to things and persons their uniqueness
and value, while at the same time raising them up to participation in
a higher reality (Asals 72).
"Accurate naming" is born not of the will of man and the desire for
gnostic power, but through the mysterious communion with an un-
limited being who has a name. This relationship enables one to "see
straight," to recognize evil and name it concretely, while realizing that
"good is something under construction" (Mystery 226). That is why good
men are hard to find. O'Connor complains to "A," especially "in a world
where everybody has his compartment, puts you in yours, shuts the
door and departs" (Letters 92).
Georgia State University
WORKS CITED
Algeo, John. On Defining the Proper Name. Gainesville: U of Florida P

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens
P, 1982.
Batts, Martin. "Flannery O'Connor's Art of Naming." Diss. U of Dal
Brooks, Cleanth. "Walker Percy and Modern Gnosticism." The Art of W
Strategems for Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton R

UP, 1979.
Davies, Horton. "Anagogical Signals in Flannery O'Connor'
(1980): 428-38.
Driskell, Leon V. and Joan T. Brittain. The Eternal Crossroad
O'Connor. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1971.
Ferguson, Paul. "By Their Names You Shall Know Them:
Onomastic Strategies." Literary Onomastic Studies 1 (1980):
Gilson, Etienne. The Spirit of Thomism. New York: P. J. K
Grimshaw, James A. Jr. uLe Mot Juste: Hazel Motes' Name." No
Literature 3 (1979), No. 2, Item 14.
Montgomery, Marion. Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home
wood Sugden, 1981.
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert
Farrar, 1962.
Random House, 1979.
ican Library, 1983.
Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. "Seduced by Language: Th

in American Fiction 7, No. 2: 221-28.
Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle. Ne
Spivey, Ted R. "Flannery O'Connor: Georgia's
College School of Arts and Sciences Research
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon o

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The University of Notre Dame

"Stalking Joy": Flannery O'Connor's Accurate Naming

When the Georgia Writers' Association honored Flannery

Flannery O'Connor's humored irritation over these misnam

R&L 18.2 (Summer 1986)

tionship between the few assertions about naming in

We have to look in much of the ficti

In her own fiction, acts of nam

Language in an age "informed by the spirit of abstr

The language of gnostic power will therefore be cha

Naming in this sense reestablishe

Like Percy, O'Connor resists sim

ble the names of characters from Pilgrim's Progress, bu

turned mortician. He was not h

Life at the Hopewell house is dominated by con

Mrs. Hopewell's cliches and categories are "linguistic hedges [which]

On one level, Joy-Hulga is refusing to change her glum face and

she believes she is everything he

The perfect modern gnostic, Joy

to "hope well" of the thin, bespectacled man who is d

In naming him "accurately," the Grandmother has also named herself.

Mrs. Turpin is a master of nam

The way they sit, the shoes they w

Mrs. Turpin could comfort hersel

Grandmother, whose "head cleared" long enough to

From that moment, Mrs. Turpin's carefully constru

Her labels have become meaningless, the means for i

advance - toward the 'other' " (2

Georgia State University

Algeo, John. On Defining the Proper Name. Gainesville: U of Florida P

Strategems for Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton R

Random House, 1979.

ican Library, 1983.

Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. "Seduced by Language: Th

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