Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

More documents

Recommendations

Info

20 Chapter One Henriette tires of the argument and so pretends to read. The father gets so mad that he starts to dump Henriette out the window, but fortunately a nurse intercedes, and then someone in the hall shouts that Havana cigars are being passed out in the waiting room and Mr. Clark dashes off. Before he gets back, a woman comes in to get the information for the birth certificate and Henriette grabs the form and gets the last word in the argument by writing “Ratchet! Ratchet! in the space for the first and middle names,” and that, she concludes, is “how you became Ratchet Ratchet Clark.” Then as almost a P.S. she adds, “Oh, and by the way, you’re going to Maine tonight” to stay with Aunt Tilly and Aunt Penpen (8). Ratchet, who didn’t even know she had any relatives, is being sent on the train to spend the summer with two women who are “great-second cousins once removed,” but for convenience are called Aunt Tilly and Aunt Penpen. Ratchet’s mother explains that she herself had spent summers with Tilly and Penpen and she is sending Ratchet there because she’s now old enough “to get some away-from-home experience”; plus it is the only place she can think of that won’t cost money (9). In a little names joke that Horvath may have been making only for herself, Tilly and Penpen’s family name is Menuto, which sounds like Spanish menudo, soup made from tripe. Henriette and Ratchet are already at the train station when Henriette describes the twin sisters as having been already old when she spent summers with them. By now she imagines they are “casket-ready.” Then she adds that “Penpen was kind of fat and happy-happy all the time, and Tilly looked like a sphincter” (10). “Like a what?” Ratchet asks, but the conductor is hurrying her up the steps of the train so fast that there’s no answer. Ratchet’s ticket says Dairy, but her mother has told her that the aunts live past Dink or maybe it’s past Delta. When Ratchet is picked up at the train station and climbs into the aunts’ ancient Daimler, “all these ‘D’ names blurred in her mind” (12). It hardly matters because after a tortuous trip through the dark woods they arrive at a house named Glen Rosa that isn’t close to any town, which, as they explain to Ratchet, may turn out to be a problem because if they die (and they’ve always planned to die together), there won’t be anyone to help Ratchet. Ratchet, Penpen, and Tilly have a couple of weeks to get acquainted before the fourth character, Harper, appears in the book. During these weeks, Ratchet observes that Penpen is the stronger of the two women
Names for Fun 21 and that Tilly drinks way too much. She learns how Tilly’s “brief but oddly satisfying marriage” had been inspired by a lumberjack’s daughter named Lilla, but who everyone called Lilla Vanilla because her skin was so milky white. Actually, Lilla bleached her skin “with buttermilk all summer, so that she always had a slightly sour smell” (46), which made Tilly think no one would want to come close to her, but actually “she was so well wanted that she was pregnant, or as we used to call it, in a pickle” (47). Her father set out to arrange a marriage and since “Lilla didn’t know which of her many suitors was the father,” she chose the banker’s son because he seemed to have the most potential. Because of the pregnancy, everything had to be speeded up, but still the wedding “was the biggest thing to hit Dink since a logger rolled his truck” (50). The grandness of it inspired Tilly to get engaged to Burl, a lumberjack who “was not too bright” (77). At the wedding ceremony, Tilly changes her mind about marrying Burl, giving as her excuse the ridiculous vow of love that he and his fellow lumberjacks have composed for the wedding. While Tilly becomes a runaway bride, Burl is convinced that they are actually married. He tries to gain back his respectability by joining the Catholic Church, even though he has to go clear to Delta to find a priest. And later, when he actually marries Thelma, a bartender at the local tavern who still resents Tilly, he is convinced that their children are “born in sin.” As Tilly explains to Ratchet, the children would never have known that they were “illegitimate” if Thelma didn’t keep pointing it out to them and calling them Technical Sin One, Technical Sin Two, and Technical Sin Three (78). With Harper’s arrival, Horvath presents a third example of a mother being less than wise about the naming of children. Harper arrives on the front porch of Glen Rosa with an obviously pregnant Miss Madison. The pregnant woman has mistaken Glen Rosa for the St. Cyr’s Orphanage, which is more than ten miles up the road. She explains that Harper’s mother took off when Harper was just a baby and so she has been stuck with raising Harper, but now that she is going to have a child of her own, she’s heading up to Canada. It was a French Canadian who got her pregnant, and she’s going to look for his mother, who seemed like a nice person. This is why she finds it necessary to bring Harper to St. Cyr’s, where she’s heard they will accept anyone—even a big girl like Harper.
Page 1: Names and Naming in Young Adult Lit
Page 4 and 5: viii Contents Chapter 6 Names to R
Page 6 and 7: x Introduction Leslie Dunkling, in
Page 8 and 9: xii Introduction Sweetness (Walter
Page 10 and 11: xiv Introduction and because they
Page 12 and 13: xvi Introduction and to the Englis
Page 14 and 15: 2 Chapter One Names Expressing Hos
Page 16 and 17: 4 Chapter One Boyle, and Gloria Gi
Page 18 and 19: 6 Chapter One smile inwardly when
Page 20 and 21: 8 Chapter One senior in the small
Page 22 and 23: 10 Chapter One Gary Paulsen’s Ho
Page 24 and 25: 12 Chapter One Louis Sachar’s Ho
Page 26 and 27: 14 Chapter One cabin. She opens he
Page 28 and 29: 16 Chapter One so the story ends h
Page 30 and 31: 18 Chapter One These shoes, these
Page 34: 22 Chapter One The long and the sh

Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?