names...


Watching this right now on TCM....is Tuggle a nickname?

Was Melanie raped?

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I think that Melanie was raped..although it seemed like at first she liked Dill and he blew her off...then when he came back at the end she wanted him to go away..?

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I agree that Melanie was raped. I think what happened was this. She did like Dill at first, but then she had spent almost the entire week convincing herself that she was in love with Franklin and that he might marry her. She was supposed to be meeting Franklin, but when she got there Dill was waiting. Possibly Franklin and Dill arranged this between them. Neither boy seemed to think of her as anything other than an opportunity.

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[deleted]

IIRC from the book, Tuggle is her last name--I think her first name also begins with a T?--Huh, just checked Wikipedia and it says her name is Tuggle Carpenter. Weird! No one would've been named that back then, she would've been Nancy or Carol.

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A lot of girls carried a family "surname" as a last name, especially in a family where there were no boys to carry on family names. This is especially true in the South, and among families of <coff> lineage where they feel more important than other people.

Women have been named all kinds of things - from Persephone to Ermentrude. It just means those parents had more vibrant imaginations than those that named their girls Mary, Joan or Sally.

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True (I certainly know that, as a Southern Wasp myself! Everyone has a family name in my family. I don't know that elitism has anything to do with it, it's a way of honoring your ancestors and history), but Paula Prentiss's Texas accent notwithstanding, her character is supposed to be a typical middle-class Midwesterner, as she says. I realize that throughout history women have had different kinds of names but my comment wasn't about "women through the years," it was about this woman in this standard, early '60s comedy where a period-appropriate lesson is meant to be imparted via each archetypal character. Typically in the '50s/early '60s, girls such as Tuggle who want to get married and have babies--i.e., do the "normal" thing--had "normal" names. Whereas Merritt, the rebel, *does* have a different name--she has the Waspy family name.

I'll have to reread the book, IIRC Tuggle is a much different character and perhaps it explains why she's named that. (And Merritt is VERY different in the book! She actually has s*x with TV, Ryder and Basil in the book and gets pr*gn*nt and doesn't know who the father is. And the whole gang ends up in a boat trying to help the Cuban Revolution just across the water. Good times.)

Url to the book:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,828607,00.html

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That's ridiculous. Unusual names would have been common in 1960, especially in the South. This film doesn't need to meet the "standards" that you proclaim. It's a book/movie about college kids.

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I've lived in the south all my life and I have never heard of what you talk about .. in other words .. bs .

"A man that wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough".



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