She Unnames Them Answer Key

Understanding She Unnames Them by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's poem "She Unnames Them" first appeared in her 1976 collection Selected Poems 1966–1976. It reworks the Genesis creation narrative from a feminist perspective, following Eve as she strips animals of the names Adam gave them, only for the creatures to reclaim autonomy through self-renaming. The poem is frequently assigned in high school and undergraduate literature courses, so students end up searching for an answer key fairly often. Here's what you need to actually understand the text and answer the common study questions. I'll walk through it the way I've explained it to students over the years, including the parts that usually trip people up. The poem follows a deceptively simple arc. Eve decides the names given by Adam are inadequate. She strips the animals of those names one by one. The animals respond not with obedience but with resistance — they rename themselves and ultimately leave her. Adam is left behind, unnamed and irrelevant by the end. The structure mirrors the biblical creation story but inverts the power dynamic entirely.

What students often miss is that the poem isn't just a straightforward gender-flip exercise. Atwood is doing something more specific with the concept of naming itself. In the Biblical account, naming is an act of dominion. To name something is to claim authority over it. Eve's act of unnaming doesn't just remove labels — it dismantles a system of control. The poem suggests that language is never neutral, and that the very act of categorization carries political weight.

Key Themes and What They Actually Mean

There are three central themes that show up on almost every exam or assignment, and here is how to handle them without writing something vague and ungradable. The politics of naming. This is the biggest one. Every name in the poem carries an assumption of ownership. When Adam names the animals, he positions himself as their master. Eve un-naming them is not simply playful — it is a deliberate removal of that authority. A common wrong answer I see is students saying "Eve shows she is kinder than Adam." That is too reductive. The poem is not about kindness. It is about who gets to define reality. Naming is epistemic violence when done unilaterally, and un-naming is liberation only because it opens the door for the animals to name themselves. Feminist re-reading of myth. Atwood is working squarely within a tradition of feminist myth revision that includes authors like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The poem draws on the Genesis story, but also on broader creation myths where naming and power are intertwined. Students should recognize that Atwood is not just writing "Eve but opposite" — she is critiquing the entire mythological framework that has historically justified patriarchal authority through linguistic control.

Animal agency and post-humanism. The animals in the poem are not passive recipients of Eve's mercy. They actively choose new names and choose to leave. This is significant because it complicates any simple reading of the poem as just human liberation. The animals gain something too — or at least, they assert their own will. A nuanced reading acknowledges that Atwood is not centering humans at the expense of animals here. The poem's ending, where the narrator notes that even humans are eventually unnamed, extends this logic beyond gender to question all systems of categorization.

Literary Devices You Should Reference

If your assignment asks you to discuss form or technique, these are the ones that matter: Free verse with a steady rhythmic pulse. Atwood avoids strict meter but maintains a consistent line length and a deliberate cadence that gives the poem a mythic quality without being constrained by traditional form. This formal choice mirrors the thematic content — the poem breaks away from established structure (like Eve breaks away from the Biblical narrative) while still maintaining coherence. Irony and inversion. The entire poem operates through systematic reversal of the Genesis account. Adam, who named all creatures in the Biblical version, becomes nameless. Eve, the secondary figure, becomes the active agent. The animals, who were subject to human authority, become independent. Students should be able to identify specific inversions in the text rather than just stating generally that the poem "reverses roles."

Symbolism of the nameless state. The unnamed condition functions on multiple levels. For the animals, it represents freedom from human categorization. For Eve, it represents the exhaustion of a system that has nothing left to say. For Adam at the end, it represents the consequence of a worldview built on domination — when the dominated refuse to play their part, the dominator loses identity too. The final line, where even humans are unnamed, is the poem's most important statement and is frequently under-analyzed.

Common Study Questions and How to Approach Them

Here are the questions that come up most often, and what a solid answer actually looks like. Why does Eve decide to unname the animals? Adequate answers focus on her recognition that the names are arbitrary and oppressive. Strong answers connect this to the poem's broader meditation on language and power, noting that Eve does not simply replace Adam's names with her own — she removes the naming act itself, creating space for the animals' self-determination.

What is the significance of the animals renaming themselves? This is the crux of the poem. The animals' self-renaming is an act of sovereignty. They reject the categories imposed on them and assert their own identities. Note the specific names they choose — they are not random. They reflect the animals' own relationship to their environment and existence, not human concerns. The lion calls itself "the lion" rather than accepting any human-imposed title, for example. How does the poem end and what does that mean?

The poem ends with Eve and Adam both left unnamed, and the narrator observing that this naming process extends to humans as well. The ending is deliberately open-ended and slightly unsettling. It suggests that liberation is not a clean resolution — removing old systems of control does not automatically create a better one. The animals leave, but the humans are left in a void. This ambiguity is intentional and important. Any answer key that claims the poem ends with a simple "happily ever after" reading is missing the point entirely.

A Practical Problem I've Seen Repeatedly

I've graded enough student papers on this poem to recognize a specific pattern of misunderstanding. Students consistently conflate Eve's act of un-naming with simple rebellion or anger. They read it as if she is doing it out of frustration with Adam, which makes the poem about a domestic disagreement rather than a systemic critique of how power operates through language. The workaround for this is to pay close attention to the poem's opening lines and the tone Atwood establishes. Eve is not described as angry. She is described as bored, or more precisely, as having reached a point where the existing system no longer provides any meaningful satisfaction. The unnaming is not a tantrum — it is a methodical, almost clinical dismantling. The poem's calm, matter-of-fact tone is doing important work here. Atwood wants the reader to understand that this is not an emotional outburst but a reasoned decision by someone who has seen through the mechanics of control.

Counter-Intuitive Points That Separate Average Answers From Good Ones

First: the poem is not primarily about women versus men. It is about anyone who has been subjected to categorization by someone else's authority. The gender reading is valid and necessary, but limiting the poem to a gender binary analysis misses its broader philosophical claim about language, power, and identity. The unnamed humans at the end extend the poem's critique beyond gender to all hierarchical systems of classification. Second: Eve does not "win" in any conventional sense. The animals leave. Adam is rendered irrelevant. She is left alone in a world where the systems of meaning she helped dismantle no longer function. The poem does not offer a triumphant feminist resolution. It offers something more honest — liberation is messy, and removing oppressive structures creates vacuum that must be filled with something new, which may not be better.

Limits and Where This Poem Resists Simple Interpretation

Any answer key that presents a single correct interpretation of this poem is fundamentally flawed. Atwood's work resists that kind of treatment. The poem's ambiguity is deliberate. The ending refuses closure. The animals' motivations are never fully explained — we do not know whether they left because they were truly freed or because they found Eve's presence uncomfortable after the unnaming. The poem invites multiple readings and thrives on that openness. If you are using this material for a class, note that some instructors expect a strictly feminist reading while others want you to engage with the post-structuralist implications of the poem's treatment of language. These are not always compatible expectations. The safest approach is to acknowledge both dimensions and let the text support whichever reading your assignment requires. A reasonable alternative resource if you need more detailed line-by-line analysis is the Norton Anthology of Poetry's edition of Atwood's work, which includes scholarly notes on the poem's intertextual relationship with Genesis and its place within Atwood's broader feminist project. Student-focused guides tend to oversimplify. Academic commentary is more useful but sometimes overcomplicates what is already a text that trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty.