everyday use essay introduction

A Summary and Analysis of Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Everyday Use’ is one of the most popular and widely studied short stories by Alice Walker. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1973 before being collected in Walker’s short-story collection In Love and Trouble .

Walker uses ‘Everyday Use’ to explore different attitudes towards Black American culture and heritage.

‘Everyday Use’: plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Mrs Johnson, a largeAfrican-American woman who has two daughters, Dee (the older of the two) and Maggie (the younger). Whereas Maggie, who is somewhat weak and lacking in confidence, shares many of her mother’s views, Dee is rather different.

Mrs Johnson tells us how she and the local church put together the funds to send Dee away to school to get an education. When Dee returned, she would read stories to her mother and sister. Mrs Johnson tells us she never had much of an education as her school was shut down, and although Maggie can read, her eyesight is poor and, according to her mother, is not especially clever.

Mrs Johnson also tells us how their previous house recently burned down: a house, she tells us, which Dee had never liked. Dee hasn’t yet visited her mother and sister in the new house, but she has said that when she does come she will not bring her friends with her, implying she is ashamed of where her family lives.

However, Mrs Johnson then describes Dee’s first visit to the new house. She turns up with her new partner, a short and stocky Muslim man, whom Mrs Johnson refers to as ‘Asalamalakim’, after the Muslim greeting the man speaks when he arrives (a corruption of ‘salaam aleikum’ or ‘ As-salamu alaykum ’). He later tells Mrs Johnson to call him Hakim-a-barber.

Dee then tells her mother that she is no longer known as Dee, but prefers to be called Wangero Lee-wanika Kemanjo, because she no longer wishes to bear a name derived from the white people who oppressed her and other African Americans. Her mother points out that Dee was named after her aunt, Dicie, but Dee is convinced that the name originally came from their white oppressors.

Dee/Wangero now starts to examine the objects in the house which belonged to her grandmother (who was also known as Dee), saying which ones she intends to take for herself. When Mrs Johnson tells her she is keeping the quilts for when Maggie marries John Thomas, Dee responds that her sister is so ‘backward’ she’d probably put the special quilts to ‘everyday use’, thus wearing them out to ‘rags’ in a few years.

Although Maggie resignedly lets her older sister have the quilts, when Dee moves to take them for herself, Mrs Johnson is suddenly inspired to snatch them back from her and hold Maggie close to herself, refusing to give them up to Dee and telling her to take one of the other quilts instead.

Dee leaves with Hakim-a-barber, telling her mother and Maggie that they don’t understand their own heritage. She also tells Maggie to try to make something of herself rather than remaining home with their mother. After they’ve left, Maggie and her mother sit outside until it’s time to go indoors and retire to bed.

‘Everyday Use’: analysis

The central crux of Alice Walker’s story is the difference between Dee and her mother in their perspectives and attitudes. Where Mrs Johnson, the mother of the family, sees everything in terms of the immediate family and home, Dee (or Wangero, as she renames herself) is more interested in escaping this immediate environment.

She does this first by leaving the family home and becoming romantically involved with a man of African Muslim descent. She also looks deeper into her African roots in order to understand ‘where she comes from’, as the phrase has it: not just in terms of the family’s direct lineage of daughter, mother, grandmother, and so on (Mrs Johnson’s way of looking at it, as exemplified by their discussion over the origins of Dee’s name), but in a wider, and deeper sense of African-American history and belonging.

This departure from her mother’s set of values is most neatly embodied by her change of name, rejecting the family name Dee in favour of the African name Wangero Lee-wanika Kemanjo. Names, in fact, are very important in this story: Maggie is obviously known by a European name, and ‘Johnson’, the family name borne by ‘Mama’, and thus by her daughters, doubly reinforces (John and son) the stamp of male European power on their lives and history.

Dee, too, is very much a family name: not just because it is the name the family use for the elder daughter, but because it is a name borne by numerous female members of the family going back for generations. But Dee/Wangero suspects it is ultimately, or originally, of European extraction, and wants to distance herself from this. Dee’s rejection of the immediate family’s small and somewhat parochial attitude is also embodied by the fact that she reportedly hated their old house which had recently burned down.

‘Everyday Use’ was published in 1973, and Dee’s (or Wangero’s) search for her ancestral identity through African culture and language is something which was becoming more popular among African Americans in the wake of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Indeed, a productive dialogue could be had between Dee’s outlook in ‘Everyday Use’ and the arguments put forward by prominent Black American writers and activists of the 1970s such as Audre Lorde, who often wrote – in her poem ‘ A Woman Speaks ’, for example – about the ancestral African power that Black American women carry, a link to their deeper roots which should be acknowledged and cultivated.

However, Walker does some interesting things in ‘Everyday Use’ which prevent the story from being wholly celebratory off Dee’s (Wangero’s) new-found sense of self. First, she had Mrs Johnson or ‘Mama’ narrate the story, so we only see Dee from her mother’s very different perspective: we only view Dee, or Wangero, from the outside, as it were.

Second, Dee/Wangero does not conduct herself in ways which are altogether commendable: she snatches the best quilts, determined to wrest them from her mother and sister and disregarding Maggie’s strong filial links to her aunt and grandmother who taught her how to quilt. The quilt thus becomes a symbol for Maggie’s link with the previous matriarchs of the family, which Dee is attempting to sever her from.

But she is not doing this out of kindness for Maggie, despite her speech to her younger sister at the end of the story. Instead, she seems to be motivated by more selfish reasons, and asserts her naturally dominant personality and ability to control her sister in order to get her way. The very title of Walker’s story, ‘Everyday Use’, can be analysed as a sign of Dee’s dismissive and patronising attitude towards her sister and mother: to her, they don’t even know how to use a good quilt properly and her sister would just put it out for everyday use.

We can also analyse Walker’s story in terms of its use of the epiphany : a literary whereby a character in a story has a sudden moment of consciousness, or a realisation. In ‘Everyday Use’, this occurs when Mrs Johnson, seeing Maggie prepared to give up her special bridal present to her sister, gathers the courage to stand her ground and to say no to Dee. She is clearly in awe of what Dee/Wangero has become, so this moment of self-assertion – though it is also done for Maggie, too – is even more significant.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

Analysis of Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2021

Probably Alice Walker ’s most frequently anthologized story, “Everyday Use” first appeared in Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories by Black Women. Walker explores in this story a divisive issue for African Americans, one that has concerned a number of writers, Lorraine Hansberry, for instance, in her play Raisin in the Sun (1959). The issue is generational as well as cultural: In leaving home and embracing their African heritage, must adults turn their backs on their African-American background and their more traditional family members? The issue, while specifically African-American, can also be viewed as a universal one in terms of modern youth who fail to understand the values of their ancestry and of their immediate family. Walker also raises the question of naming, a complicated one for African Americans, whose ancestors were named by slaveholders.

The first-person narrator of the story is Mrs. Johnson, mother of two daughters, Maggie and Dicie, nicknamed Dee. Addressing the readers as “you,” she draws us directly into the story while she and Maggie await a visit from Dee. With deft strokes, Walker has Mrs. Johnson reveal essential information about herself and her daughters. She realistically describes herself as a big-boned, slow-tongued woman with no education and a talent for hard work and outdoor chores. When their house burned down some 12 years previous, Maggie was severely burned. Comparing Maggie to a wounded animal, her mother explains that she thinks of herself as unattractive and slow-witted, yet she is good-natured too, and preparing to marry John Thomas, an honest local man. Dee, on the other hand, attractive, educated, and self-confident, has left her home (of which she was ashamed) to forge a new and successful life.

Alice Walker/Thoughtco

When she appears, garbed in African attire, along with her long-haired friend, Asalamalakim, Dee informs her family that her new name is Wangero Leewanika Kemanio . When she explains that she can no longer bear to use the name given to her by the whites who oppressed her, her mother tries to explain that she was named for her aunt, and that the name Dicie harkens back to pre–CIVIL WAR days. Dee’s failure to honor her own family history continues in her gentrified appropriation of her mother’s butter dish and churn, both of which have a history, but both of which Dee views as quaint artifacts that she can display in her home. When Dee asks for her grandmother’s quilts, however, Mrs. Johnson speaks up: Although Maggie is willing to let Dee have them because, with her goodness and fine memory, she needs no quilts to help her remember Grandma Dee, her mother announces firmly that she intends them as a wedding gift for Maggie. Mrs. Johnson approvingly tells Dee that Maggie will put them to “everyday use” rather than hanging them on a wall.

Dee leaves in a huff, telling Maggie she ought to make something of herself. With her departure, peace returns to the house, and Mrs. Johnson and Maggie sit comfortably together, enjoying each other’s company. Although readers can sympathize with Dee’s desire to improve her own situation and to feel pride in her African heritage, Walker also makes clear that in rejecting the African-American part of that heritage, she loses a great deal. Her mother and sister, despite the lack of the success that Dee enjoys, understand the significance of family. One hopes that the next child will not feel the need to choose one side or the other but will confidently embrace both.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” In Major Writers of Short Fiction: Stories and Commentary, edited by Ann Charters. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1993, 1,282–1,299.

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Introduction & Overview of Everyday Use

Everyday Use

By alice walker, everyday use summary and analysis of everyday use.

The story begins with Mama waiting in the yard for her eldest daughter Dee to return. Mama’s yard is an extension of her living room: the dirt ground flows into the small shack without separation. We are told little about Mama's husband; he is simply out of the picture and all of Mama's accomplishments, including the raising of her children, seem to be done by her own hand. Walker does not state the geographic setting outright, but we can surmise that Mama’s small farm is located somewhere in rural Georgia.

Mama discusses her younger daughter Maggie . Maggie nervously anticipates her big sister Dee. Maggie is apprehensive about the emotional stress and anxiety that will come with Dee's arrival. Mama daydreams about being on the Johnny Carson Show and reuniting with Dee in front of a sea of white faces.

Mama breaks out of her reverie to explain the realities of her life. Unlike the slim and lighter-skinned fantasy of herself on the Johnny Carson Show, Mama has darker skin and is big boned, wearing overalls rather than feminine clothing. She points out that her fat keeps her warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Mama does the work of two men on her farm. She can kill a bull calf and have the meat hung up to chill by nightfall.

Maggie lurks in the shadows not wanting to be fully visible. Mama describes her as a lame dog. Mama recalls the fire that burned their first house down. Maggie still bears the scars of that fateful night. Mama also recalls that Dee just stood there and watched the house burn with a condescending smile on her face. To Dee, the old house defined them as poor black farmers, the descendants of sharecroppers. Mama remembers how Dee willed herself to be different from her rural neighbors with her book smarts and by having a style all her own. Dee wanted nice things and was intent on getting them. If she couldn't afford to buy fancy clothes, she would make them. She seldom heard the word "no".

Dee finally arrives wearing a colorful, chic African dress. Maggie tries to bolt for the house but Mama stops her. Dee has changed her name to the more “African” sounding "Wangero". Mama attempts to explain that her given name Dee holds deep family meaning but "Wangero" insists that, at one time, it must surely have been a slave name forced on them by white owners. Mama recalls that she and her church made great sacrifices to send Dee to school in Augusta, where she learned about her historical roots. Dee greets them with an emphatic "Wa-su-zo-Tean-o", a Ugandan greeting. She introduces her partner Hakim-a-barber , whom Mama calls "Asalamalakim" after his Muslim greeting. Mama is weary of Dee’s brief entrance back into her life.

Dee has come back to lay claim to some old blankets that she has a newfound “historic” appreciation for: she thinks they would make trendy décor for her apartment. To Dee, the quilts represent the historical significance of an oppressed people. The problem is that Mama has a much more practical use for the quilts; Mama intends to give them to Dee’s much less sophisticated, and less garish, younger sister Maggie. Unlike Dee, Maggie is destined to get married within the community and live out her life in a setting much like Mama’s.

Hakim-a-barber attempts to kiss Maggie but she recoils in horror. They sit down to eat but, while Dee treats the meal as an exotic buffet, Hakim-a-barber announces that he can't eat an unclean animal like pork. Both feign interest in visiting with Mama and Maggie as they rifle through Mama’s house looking for “quaint” collectables. Dee makes a dozen or so patronizing insults, veiled as casual “chit-chat”, directed at Mama and Maggie. She insists that Maggie will use the quilts she desires for everyday use. Maggie attempts to show her displeasure with her sister by dropping a plate in the shadows but she finally succumbs to Dee's forcefulness. In her meek voice, Maggie squeaks that Dee can have the quilts.

Mama, however, has had enough of this emotional bludgeoning, and tells Wangero to take two other quilts not intended for Maggie and leave. Dee tells Maggie to make something of herself and ironically tells Mama that she doesn't understand her own heritage. Then both Dee and Hakim-a-barber climb into their car and disappear in a cloud of dust as quickly as they arrived.

Alice Walker does an adept job at blurring the difference between the stereotypes of rural black American women with the realities that make up their lives. To the casual viewer, Mama’s old homestead looks dilapidated: a stereotype of the humble lives of poor black subsistence farmers of the Old South. Mama’s yard is nevertheless clean and she finds her abode comfortable and relaxing. Although Mama’s eldest daughter Dee and her “friend” Hakim-a-barber will look down on the way she lives, her reality is her own and she is proud of what she has accomplished. Telling the story in first person allows the reader to get inside Mama's perspective without judgment. As Mama explains her situation in a matter-of-fact tone, Walker is able to paint the picture of the setting in a neutral way.

The reader is introduced to the tension between Mama and her eldest daughter Dee early in the story. Mama fantasizes about the kind of reunion she might have with Dee on television. She thinks of Johnny Carson and a sea of white people waiting to be warmed by the reunion of a poor black woman and her long lost daughter who has “made it” in the world. There are the requisite tears and sighs from the audience. Mama stands sheepishly to one side while Dee takes control of the situation. Mama marvels at how Dee can manipulate the white audience, twisting her own history into a narrative they want to hear. Here we see Mama imagining her daughter’s fantasy, not her own. It is crucial that in this fantasy, Mama imagines herself as lighter - in skin tone, body weight and wit. She knows that she does not fit the ideal that Dee so desperately aspires to. Mama understands that Dee despises her circumstances, and Mama wishes she could be what her daughter wants. However, she understands that this cannot be, and she is who she is.

In real life, Mama is not "camera-ready"; she is large and big boned. She wears flannel nightgowns to bed and old thick overalls during most days. There is a quiet sincerity about Mama that earns her the reader’s respect early in her narrative. She is loving, forgiving, and frank. She has no illusions about either of her daughters. Her memories of Dee growing up help give us perspective on the self-absorbed patronizing young woman who will soon blow through her house. Mama refuses to draw attention to herself: she personifies an ethos born out of humbleness and practicality. Indeed, she never even tells us her name; her identity is comprised of a hard life of experience and her position as head of her matriarchal family.

Unlike Dee, Maggie will be the one to inherit that position from Mama. While Dee is intelligent and assertive, Maggie is “slow” and withdrawn; while Dee preens over her attractive appearance and lighter skin, Maggie darts away from her own reflection, so self-conscious of her plainness and scars. Mama describes Maggie as a wounded animal who must live her life forever subjugated to forces greater than her own will. Throughout the story, Maggie is described in less than flattering terms. Although loyal and affectionate, Mama does not reinforce her with any strong qualities. It is even more disconcerting that Mama believes Maggie incapable of acquiring any strong qualities. Mama’s half-compliments about Dee’s natural beauty, “lighter skin”, and clever wit is juxtaposed with her comments about good looks, money, and quickness passing Maggie by. Mama has long been content with her lot in life and projects this same sense of fatalism onto young Maggie. According to Mama, the best Maggie can hope for is to “marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face).” Much like Dee, Mama’s limitations help shape her strengths. But with her acceptance of circumstance comes complacency. Maggie is, however, still young and Mama fails to accept that her life has possibilities. While Mama has carved out a life for herself, she gives us the sense that Maggie will fail at becoming an individual; she will disappear into a life of farm work, caring for children, and becoming an extension of her husband.

Even as a young girl, Dee searched for what she perceived as “better”. She wanted nice things and stylish clothes. Dee was self-possessed, clever and critical. Her mind craved education. For Dee, education was a way to transcend her experiences and forecast a brighter future for herself in the dawn of the Civil Rights era. Education was not something Mama had access to; the school closed in second grade and no one ever asked why. She says, in 1927, “colored asked fewer questions than they do now.” (92) Her generation was more complacent with their lot in life, not for lack of pride or hope, but because of the oppressive mechanism of racism that made a life like Dee's impossible for Mama. Dee, however, did not take no for an answer. Her immaturity and selfishness were tools used to escape a life she did not want.

However, Dee is incredibly judgmental and naive about Mama and Maggie's lives. She insists that Mama and Maggie "choose" to live where they do. While they may accept their fate, Maggie and Mama did not choose the life they were born into. Though Dee has access to changing times, not everyone born in the poor, rural black South is able to craft a new life and identity out of sheer will - and the financial help from Mama and her church. In return for her family's generosity, Dee patronized them with stories of other people’s lives and more “civilized” ways. Dee used her education as a weapon to wield against her own family.

Dee has reinvented herself as Wangero, and wears a bright African dress that Mama dislikes at first. Dee says that she refuses to go by the name given to her by white oppressors. Mama attempts to educate “Wangero” on the family lineage of her name. Dee rebukes her immediate genealogy, claiming that all their names come from white slave owners at one point in history. This is indeed true, yet Dee's adoption of Wangero and her Ghanaian greeting read as a superficial attempt to bury a past she despises.

The irony of Dee rebuking her own heritage in exchange for imagined pre-slavery identity is what shapes the rest of the story. She photographs her family home as an archaeologist would for National Geographic. Dee makes sure she gets a picture of Mama, the old house, and Maggie cowering in the corner. Both Mama and Maggie are objectified and exploited in these photos, like actors in costume at some living tourist museum. Dee envisions herself a journalist with a keen insight into her own life, but this insight is sanitized rather than enlightened by education as well as her personal hypocrisy.

Dee's shift in attitude is more fully revealed during dinner. Hakim-a-barber refuses to eat collards and pork, calling them “unclean”. Dee gets into her food like a tourist who has just discovered her new favorite ethnic meal. Dee gets excited about the benches, butter churn and various other objects, which she considers important artifacts, around the house. Dee finds them quaint and worthy showpieces for her apartment. Dee suddenly becomes fixated on some quilts that were put together by Grandma Dee, Big Dee, and Mama - despite earlier rejecting them as disgustingly quaint signifiers of her rural youth. She wants them now because she thinks they represent the historical significance of an oppressed people. Her education has taught her the value of the quilts, but only as items of the past, stripped of their familial context.

Mama tells Dee that she can have a set of newer quilts but Dee objects. Mama insists that the quilts will go to Maggie who will use them after she gets married. Wangero becomes incensed that her much less sophisticated sister will put the quilts to “everyday use”. Finally we see that even Mama has a breaking point. Much like her daydream about the Johnny Carson Show, whatever hopes that Mama might have had of re-connecting with her daughter become the stuff of fantasy. Mama can no longer endure Dee's shaming. In Mama's first real act of dissent, Mama tells Dee to take one or two of the other blankets if she wishes and walks out of the house. Walker concludes her characterization of Dee with a final insult veiled as advice: she tells Mama that, “you just don’t…understand your heritage.” (96) This passive aggressive mockery is extended to Maggie as well when Dee tells her to “make something of herself.” Of course, Mama understands her heritage is more than symbols or artifacts, but of the context of family that created them. Tradition cannot be boiled down to a decorative object; it is still living and breathing, in Mama and Maggie.

The immediate conclusion the reader has about Dee might generally be negative. This conclusion, however, is largely born out of Dee's immaturity towards both her heritage and her own family. There is a subtext to Dee that Walker subtly weaves throughout the story. Dee would have had to overcome many obstacles to get to the point of her loud and garish arrival to Mama's house. Being intelligent was not enough for a black girl from rural Georgia to excel in an institutionalized white university. She would also have had to be tenacious and driven. Ironically it is the parts of Dee’s personality that we might find objectionable that has enabled her deeper understanding of herself, however misguided. Even Mama gives Dee the benefit of the doubt at first. Mama does not protest about Dee's name change, and insists she will call her daughter by whatever name she chooses for herself. While Mama has no time for pretense, she does offer a more balanced and complex insight into the struggle represented by the girls' behavior. Mama can see right and wrong in both children, and in both points of view. But she does put her foot down when Dee tries to take Maggie's quilts away. In Maggie's marriage, she will keep the traditions passed down from her aunts and grandmother alive. Giving Dee the quilts would kill what Dee believes is already dead. But Maggie can continue traditions into the future by putting these humble objects to everyday use.

In the end, Wangero severs her connection with her real heritage for an imagined stylized heritage; in her drive to create a "new day" for Black Americans, she has also dismissed the very people that have shaped it.

Everyday Use Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Everyday Use is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Everyday Use by Alice Walker

From the text:

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down.

In paragraphs 61-72, how does the conversation between Dee and Mama about the quilts develop the theme?

I'm sorry, please provide the text in question.

I saw my brother sneaking out of my room, his (1) movements slow and silent. When he saw me the poor kid was flinching, practically (2) under my gaze. "I was just looking at your CDs," he told me. At least he admitted he had been (3) _. annoyed, I decided

Is this related to the book Everyday use? What are you asking here?

Study Guide for Everyday Use

Everyday Use study guide contains a biography of Alice Walker, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Everyday Use
• Everyday Use Summary
• Character List

Essays for Everyday Use

Everyday Use essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Everyday Use.

• Identity Confusion in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"
• The Black Empowerment Movement within Bambara's "The Lesson" and Walker's "Everyday Use"
• Pride and Heritage in “Everyday Use”
• "Everyday Use" from an Antipatriarchal Perspective
• A Comparison of Dee and Mathilde

Wikipedia Entries for Everyday Use

• Introduction
• Publication details

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Essays on Everyday Use

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Interpreting African-american Heritage in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

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"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker: Summary

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Comparison of Characters from Everyday Use and The Necklace

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Alice Walker

Short story

Dee, Mama, Maggie, Hakim-a-barber

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Everyday Use

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Heritage and the Everyday

Heritage, and its relationship to daily life, is the central question that Walker explores in “Everyday Use.” Through the eyes of Mama , and through the contrasting characters of Dee and Maggie , Walker offers two varying views of what family history, the past, and “heritage” really mean.

In Dee’s view, heritage is a kind of dead past, distanced from the present through nostalgia and aestheticization (which means reducing something to a symbol or piece…

Through Dee , “Everyday Use” explores how education affects the lives of people who come from uneducated communities, considering the benefits of an education as well as the tradeoffs.

Alice Walker clearly believes that education can be, in certain ways, helpful to individuals. For one, education can empower people financially and therefore materially. Dee’s education rewards her with the “nice things” she has desired since she was a child: gold earrings, a camera, sunglasses. The…

Objects, Symbolism, and Writing

As Mama narrates “Everyday Use,” she uses a multitude of objects and material goods to tell her story. Through Mama and her attention to objects, Walker investigates the meaning of materiality in fiction and explores the various ways they can be used for storytelling.

In the first place, material goods work in “Everyday Use” to stand in for and help describe characters’ identities. For example, Mama marks Dee ’s difference from the rest of her…

Racism, Resistance, and Sacrifice

Race structures the social and economic conditions of characters’ daily lives in “Everyday Use.” From the first few paragraphs, Walker makes it clear that the oppression of African-Americans is built into the society of the Deep South, where Mama and Maggie live. This injustice manifests itself in a multitude of ways, ranging from Mama’s inability to look “a strange white man in the eye” to her mentions of racialized violence, like the time when “the…

“Everyday Use” Story by Alice Walker Essay

Introduction, mother of the story and her reliability, assumptions about daughters and dee’s perspective, personal development ideas and mama’s decision, walker’s idea of heritage, purpose and theme of the story.

Everyday Use by Alice Walker is a story about the concept of heritage and different perspectives individuals may have about it. In particular, Everyday Use revolves around the dynamics of one family whose members experience a powerful cultural gap that sets the elder daughter, Dee, apart from her mother and sister Maggie. While both perspectives can be seen as valuable is certain ways, the author makes a clear emphasis on the view of heritage as a direct relation with family and respect for its members and history.

The mother character in Everyday Use is described in detail. She is “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands”; she is very hard working, physically strong and enduring, and capable of performing harsh manual labor. She has two daughters both of whom she loves, but feels close with only one of them. Also, she seems very aware strengths and weaknesses of both young girls. As a result, she can be considered a reliable narrator as she describes both of her daughters honestly and without skipping over any of the unpleasant bit of their backgrounds such as the fire that Dee set as a child because she hated the house in which they lived and how this fire crippled Maggie for the rest of her life.

Reflecting on her daughters, the mother describes Dee as determined, persistent, brave, educated knowledgeable about style, wanting “nice things”, and having trouble making friends or building relationships (Walker 381). As for Maggie, the mother compares her to “a dog run over by some careless person” and mentions that she walks like a lame animal – “chin on chest, eyes of ground, feet in shuffle” Walker 380). Maggie was not as bright as her sister, had little education, and was ashamed of her burn marks and scars she had from the fire set my Dee.

However, from the perspective of Dee, the story would sound differently. Dee would not describe herself as careless and selfish; instead, she would introduce herself as the only smart and educated person in the family, who has tried to educate her simple-minded relatives but never succeeded and so had to move away and continue her growth.

The mother’s idea of self-development was different from Dee’s. She believed that Dee forced the knowledge on her family members that they “didn’t necessarily need to know” (Walker 381). She saw that the person into whom Dee had turned –Wangero – was a shallow admirer of history and African-American background who valued things such as the house, hand-made bench, churn, and quilts over people to whom they belonged and who had worked hard to craft these objects. The most obvious indicator of her ignorance towards her own family was the change of name as she wanted to be closer to the romanticized African culture rather than her living mother and sister. Seeing that Maggie was more appreciative of her family, its work, people, and goods they had produced, she decided to give to Maggie the hand-made quilts Wangero wanted to use as decorations at home. Thinking critically about the mother’s decision, it is possible to notice that she respected her roots, remembered her forefathers, and cherished the memories about them. The mother saw that Maggie had the same feelings and made her the rightful owner of her family’s heritage.

Walker’s idea of heritage matches that of the mother. The purpose of her story is to demonstrate how differently people can perceive the connection with their background and respect for history. The major theme depicted in Everyday Use is love for one’s family that manifests through the presentation of memories about family members supported by the things they had crafter and not the other way around.

Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” Reading Literature and Writing Argument . 6th ed., edited by Missy James, Alan P. Merickel, Greg Lloyd, and Jenny Perkins, Pearson, 2016, pp. 379-386.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, October 15). "Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker. https://ivypanda.com/essays/everyday-use-story-by-alice-walker/

""Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker." IvyPanda , 15 Oct. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/everyday-use-story-by-alice-walker/.

IvyPanda . (2020) '"Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker'. 15 October.

IvyPanda . 2020. ""Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker." October 15, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/everyday-use-story-by-alice-walker/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker." October 15, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/everyday-use-story-by-alice-walker/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Everyday Use" Story by Alice Walker." October 15, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/everyday-use-story-by-alice-walker/.

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