Brett Martin
Dr. Jane Rago
ENGL 2100
15 June 2014
Nomen Est Omen? The Roman expression nomen est omen roughly translates to “name is destiny.” This idea seems to suggest that people lack free will, and that we are subject to the label bestowed upon us at birth. Research has shown that names do indeed affect the way the world responds to people; our names impact the way we are socialized, in other words. Expectations for a guy named Bubba or a woman named Shaquita are different than they are for people with the names Winston and Hillary. In other words people make assumptions about others base on their names. In Alice Hoffman’s novel Local Girls, the narrator plays with this idea of the interplay of destiny, socialization, and free will, symbolized by the names she gives the central characters. The character whose name is the most apparently burdening is Gretel. A name that is unusual in 20th century United States society, this name is imbued with fairy-tale associations. In the famous German fairy-tale “Hansel and Gretel”, Gretel and her brother are abandoned by their parents, specifically an abusive stepmother, in the forest. In Local Girls, Gretel and her brother Jason are abused by their stepmother, who yells at them repeatedly, even calling Gretel a “little bitch” (49). In the fairy tale, the stepmother leaves the children in the woods because the resources at home are too sparse. Similarly, Gretel and Jason’s stepmother, Thea, tries to push her stepchildren out of the house:
Thea was talking about what a great place we were going to for dinner, and how they liked people to dress nicely, which of course was a dig at me, not that I cared about her sense of style. Then she started in on her real agenda – how the house she and my father had recently bought might look big, but it was really just right for two people. I guess she wanted to squelch any ideas we might have about moving in with them, although frankly we would have preferred to nest with spiders” (47-48).
The house itself is the main resource that the family has, and Gretel and Jason are pushed out by their stepmother. Thea may want to monopolize the fathers resources, which Gretal and Jason may encroach upon. She may also be wary of sharing her husband with the children. The parallels between the two Gretel’s stories are many.
In the fairy tale, after being abandoned by their parents, Hansel and Gretel come upon a candy house in the forest, and are lured inside by the saccharine home, as any child would be. Once inside, Hansel and Gretel find an ugly witch who wants to eat them. In Local Girls, Gretel’s “candy house” was a man she met named Sonny Garnet, who looked to be an attractive, older man, but in actuality, he turned out to be a drug dealing loser. Her aunt Margot warned her “didn’t you learn anything from your mother and me?”(106). Gretel did not listen to her aunt’s advice and instead was lured in by the sweet taste of love. Her brother Jason had his own house of candy: heroin. Like most others, his first few uses probably produced an enjoyable high, but he ended up with an ugly addiction that shattered his life and promise:
The peace which usually settled over his soul when he got high did not come to him. Instead, he was filled to the brim with something slithery; it’s if black toads and newly hatched snakes had been trapped beneath his skin and now they all struggle to break free in a horrible clawing fashion that took his breath away and left him sprawled upon the asphalt (134).
The moment that Jason overdosed is when he met the witch within the candy house and unlike his counterpart Hansel he was thrown into the stove.
The fairy-tale ends with Gretel conquering the witch and freeing her brother. In Hoffman’s novel, however, Gretel is not as triumphant as her fairy-tale namesake. In the end, Gretel comes out on top to an extent, but yet she doesn’t entirely kill the witch, thus saving her brother. She lose the battle with her brothers from “witch,” heroin. The character of Jason, though, was given not the name Hansel by the author, but the name of a famous hero from Greek mythology. In the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, the titular character has to find the golden fleece in order to inherit the throne in Thessaly. In Local Girls, Hoffman’s Jason also holds such promise. He has gained entrance to Harvard, arguably the biggest gatekeeper to power in American society. Hoffman’s Jason, unlike the Jason of the Greek myth, fails on his quest for the golden fleece. He falls prey to the siren call of heroin, and throws it all away. This could possibly have been caused by his parents’ divorce. He did not have a good relationship with his father or any other male figure. Jason could have suffered from mental issues or maybe he was just rebelling for once in his life instead of being the science geek as he was portrayed. Unable to overcome these obstacles he was could not live up to the expectations his names held. The other central character in Hoffman’s novel with a name that connotes a certain fate is Jill. The name Jill evokes the popular nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill:”
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
In Local Girls, the character Jill is ascending a metaphorical hill. She has everything going for her:
In Franconia, there wasn’t a female between the ages of 12 and 18 who wouldn’t have been willing to change places with Jill for an hour a day. We were all jealous of her, and for good reason (78).
Jill’s “Jack” is a character Hoffman calls “Eddie.” At first, he is upwardly mobile alongside Jill. However, they both take a tumble together. He impregnates her, causing her to drop out of high school. Jill had taken another tumble, too, having been molested by Mr. Castle:
Twice last month, Mr. Castle tried some really disgusting things with Jill when he drove her home. Once, he’d insisted she kiss him goodnight, and the other time, he did something Jill was too embarrassed to tell me about, even though she knew every single detail of my life (p. 21).
However, like the other two central characters, Jill breaks free of her nomenclature. In the children’s nursery rhyme, Jill ends up back at the bottom of the hill. However, in Local Girls, Jill is the character who ends up with an enviable life:
The real reason Jill and Gretel haven’t seen each other in the past two years has nothing to do with Eddie, at least not in that way. It’s jealousy. That’s the problem; it’s coveting something you’d never actually want in real life, but still desire in your dreams, the silliest dreams, the ones you simply can’t shake, even now, when you’re not a kid anymore and you should know better than to traffic in envy (p. 188). On the surface, Hoffman’s novel seems to be an exploration of the harsher sides of the realities of life. Exploring the implications of the names that Hoffman ascribes her central characters, however, reveals a more positive, even idealistic message. This message is that despite the circumstances of our births, human beings, in the end, have control over their fate, for better or for worse. In the cases of Gretel and Jill, they are able to overcome less fortunate circumstances, both those that they are encumbered with at birth and those they encounter in their social worlds. In the case of Jason, on the other hand, the character was born with everything: smarts, looks, charm. He is even looked on favorably by the social world in that he is given entrance to the most elite institution in the country, an education that would seal his fate as among the top of society. However, through his own actions, he meets his demise. Fate alone was not enough to ensure a bright future for Jason.