NAMES

Names take a powerful role in this novel. Lucy understands that her name symbolizes important characteristics of her own identity. Her last name, Potter, shows an influence of colonialism that she figures is from an English slaveholder. Lucy cannot stand how her mother ignores her dreams and expects only her brothers to attend college and for Lucy to simply become a nurse. Her middle name, Josephine, hints at this low expectation her mother has for her. It comes from a rich uncle of Lucy’s that died broke and lived in a tomb. Her first name, Lucy, has the worst meaning, deriving directly from the devil himself, Lucifer.

I chose to include an image of Lucifer because I really like the reference to Paradise Lost by Milton. The triumph of good over evil is very clear, but the way Lucifer is seen as sympathetic in his quest to be free from God’s control relates to Lucy’s struggle of rejecting morals. God’s morals are good, clearly, and do not need to be challenged. Setting one’s own path comes from human experiences. Lucy obviously despises most cultural norms out of the pride that people see in Lucifer. It is not clear either that Lucy strives to find new norms for herself as she searches for her new identity.

“I understood that I was inventing myself… I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know” (134).

Lucy constantly contradicts herself throughout the entire novel. She wants to be free and love her new self but, to her, that would only mean she is not free at all. Eventually drastic freedom must let itself become real, life commitments. Lucy is hesitant at this idea. The way Lucy perceives her past as being “[a] person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in" is completely untrue (137). Her past is what causes her to undergo such a difficult transition. After she frees herself from her past attachments, she now longs for “[loving] someone so much [she] would die from it” (164).