A Rose by Any Other Name

Con­sid­er names, names of char­ac­ters. Alice in Won­der­land. Ham­let. Huck­le­ber­ry Finn. Do we accept (and know) these names because the lit­er­ary works are famous? Or do we know the names because they could be none oth­er? Would The Tragedy of Ted, Prince of Den­mark, work just as well?

Years ago, when work­ing as a librar­i­an at the NYPL’s The­atre Col­lec­tion at Lin­coln Cen­ter, I would come upon man­u­scripts of famous plays in ear­ly drafts. Thus Oscar Wilde’s great play, The Impor­tance of Being Earnest, was titled Lady Lanc­ing. And Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf? had char­ac­ter names very dif­fer­ent than in the final ver­sion. It made a big difference.

Choos­ing the right name for a char­ac­ter is com­plex. If you choose a name from some­one you know, say, your weird uncle Fred, will that “Fred­ness,” so to speak, infect your char­ac­ter in a way you don’t intend?

(Did you know that ono­mas­tics is the term for the study of the his­to­ry and ori­gin of prop­er names, espe­cial­ly per­son­al names?)

When I wrote Blue Heron I used the name of a girl who was the daugh­ter of a sin­gle-par­ent friend, a girl who read my books. When I told my friend what the sto­ry was, about a girl from a sin­gle par­ent home, my friend asked me to change the name of the char­ac­ter. I did. But in doing so, my feel­ings about the book also changed.

When choos­ing a char­ac­ter name, one must con­sid­er gen­der, cul­ture, his­tor­i­cal moment, and what it might sug­gest about the char­ac­ter. Also, you must con­sid­er vari­ety. And con­text. You would not name char­ac­ters Jack and Jill, unless you wished to sug­gest a ref­er­ence to the famous poem.

I chose Crispin because it is a medieval name and it is easy to say. I knew the name from the “St. Crispin Speech” as it is called, from Shake­speare’s Hen­ry V (Act IV Scene iii ).

On my own ref­er­ence shelf, I own a num­ber of books of names. One is titled His­tor­i­cal Names, pro­vid­ing names pop­u­lar dur­ing par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal peri­ods. Thus I have a book of Irish names, Ital­ian names, used for books that per­tain to that place and culture.

I don’t recall if I ever con­sid­ered anoth­er name for Char­lotte for The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle. I do recall doing research and learn­ing that Doyle was a com­mon name in 19th cen­tu­ry Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island, as was the name Charlotte.

When I wrote Pop­py, the mice in the sto­ry, a sto­ry set in a for­est, all char­ac­ters have names of flow­ers. But there are so many names of flow­ers that I could match names to char­ac­ter per­son­al­i­ties. Thus, Pop­py’s pompous, over-bear­ing father is called Lungwort.

As for Ereth the por­cu­pine, if I tell you that Ereth­i­zon­ti­dae, is the por­cu­pine’s sci­en­tif­ic name, you see how that worked out.

When I wrote Rag­weed—the first in the Pop­py series—which is set in a city, the edi­tor Elise Howard sug­gest­ed I switch to names with an urban res­o­nance. I there­fore choose car parts, thus Clutch, and my favorite, the drum­mer in Clutch’s band, Lug Nut.

And, think­ing of Pop­py, I am remind­ed that was not the orig­i­nal name for my lead char­ac­ter. When I wrote the book she was called Pip. As it hap­pened, I was read­ing the (almost) final draft of the book to a class at the Moses Brown School in Prov­i­dence. At some point a boy came up to me and said, “Is this how you got the name for your book?” He showed me a Cana­di­an book titled Pip, the Sto­ry of a Mouse.

I went home and changed the name to Poppy.

A rose by any oth­er name would smell as sweet.