Everyday Use 2 Essay, Research Paper

POWER AS EXPRESSED THROUGH ALICE WALKER’S WORDS IN EVERYDAY USE

Alice Walker uses power throughout her stories in various forms. In her story, Everyday Use, the power of family, heritage, and culture are presented. The story is about a hardworking mother of two girls, Maggie and Dee. The mother does not have much in her simle life but she cherishes what is of importance in her life. A humble house and two daughters have brought this woman happiness. The story opens with Dee’s return home from college. Dee returns home as Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. She decided that she “couldn’t bear any longer, being named after the people who oppress” her. The mother feels that Dee changed her name without understanding hte reasoning behind it. Dee’s name was actually passed down from her great-grandmother, giving it true meaning.

Culture is prevalent throughout this entire story. Dee wants to take home a few items that will enhance her apartment by appearing to be culturally oriented. She decides her grandmother’s quilts provide a strong tie to her roots. The following passage details just how Dee wants to relate to her cultural roots.

“No, ” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. The are stitched around the borders by machine.”

“That’ll make them last better, ” I said.

“That’s not the point,” said Wangero.

“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas. She gasped like a bee.

“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

The mother cannot understand why Dee wants to displaay the quilts that are used on a daily basis. The quilts are shown appreciation by being put to good use. The mother feels they are worthy enough to be given to Maggie as a wedding present. Dee wants to take the quilts home for all the wrong reasons. Although the mother does nt have much she is in complete control of her life. She is not content with the changes Dee has made in her life but accepts them. The mother knows her family history and is proud of it. She identifies with her cultural background by respecting it enough to not put it on display.

This particular feature of Walker’s story focuses on the meaning of heritage in our personal lives. Understanding our heritage and culture grant us a form of power. This power can be used in both positive and negative ways. Passing down cultural traditions from generation to generation can have a positive influence in our lives. We are able to identify with our past ancestors, our family, but most importantly with ourselves. Heritage gives us a form of identity; power lies in the way we choose to use it.

Themes and Meanings

The central theme of the story concerns the way in which an individual understands his present life in relation to the traditions of his people and culture. Dee tells her mother and Maggie that they do not understand their “heritage,” because they plan to put “priceless” heirloom quilts to

“everyday use.” The story makes clear that Dee is equally confused about the nature of her inheritance both from her immediate family and from the larger black tradition.

The matter of Dee’s name provides a good example of this confusion. Evidently, Dee has chosen her new name (”Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo”) to express solidarity with her African ancestors and to reject the oppression implied by the taking on of American names by black slaves. To her mother, the name “Dee” is symbolic of family unity; after all, she can trace it back to the time of the Civil War. To the mother, these names are significant because they belong to particular beloved individuals. Dee’s confusion about the meaning of her heritage also emerges in her attitude toward the quilts and other household items. While she now rejects the names of her immediate ancestors, she eagerly values their old handmade goods, such as the hand-carved benches made for the table when the family could not afford to buy chairs. To Dee, artifacts such as the benches or the quilts are strictly aesthetic objects. It never occurs to her that they, too, are symbols of oppression: Her family made these things because they could not afford to buy them. Her admiration for them now seems to reflect a cultural trend toward valuing handmade objects, rather than any sincere interest in her “heritage.” After all, when she was offered a quilt before

she went away to college, she rejected it as “old-fashioned, out of style.”

Yet a careful reading of the story will show that Dee is not the only one confused about the heritage of the black woman in the rural South. Although the mother and Maggie are skeptical of Dee, they recognize the limitations of their own lives. The mother has only a second-grade education and admits that she cannot imagine looking a strange white man in the eye. Maggie

“knows she is not bright” and walks with a sidelong shuffle. Although their dispositions lead them to make the best of their lives, they admire Dee’s fierce pride even as they feel the force of her scorn. Taken as a whole, while the story clearly endorses the commonsense perspective of Dee’s mother over Dee’s affectations, it does not disdain Dee’s struggle to move beyond the limited world of her youth. Clearly, however, she has not yet arrived at a stage of self-understanding. Her mother and sister are ahead of her in that respect.

Style and Technique

The thematic richness of “Everyday Use” is made possible by the flexible, perceptive voice of the first-person narrator. It is the mother’s point of view which permits the reader’s understanding of both Dee and Maggie. Seen from a greater distance, both young women might seem stereotypical–one a smart but ruthless college girl, the other a sweet but ineffectual homebody.

The mother’s close scrutiny redeems Dee and Maggie, as characters, from banality.

For example, Maggie’s shyness is explained in terms of the terrible fire she survived: “Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them.” Ever since, “she has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle.” In Dee’s case, the reader learns that, as she was growing up the high demands she made of others tended to drive people away. She had few friends, and her one boyfriend “flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people” after Dee “turned all her faultfinding power on him.” Her drive for a better life has cost Dee dearly, and her mother’s commentary reveals that Dee, too, has scars, though they are less visible than Maggie’s.

In addition to the skillful use of point of view, “Everyday Use” is enriched by Alice Walker’s development of symbols. In particular, the contested quilts become symbolic of the story’s theme; in a sense, they represent the past of the women in the family. Worked on by two generations, they contain bits of fabric from even earlier eras, including a scrap of a Civil War

uniform worn by Great Grandpa Ezra. The debate over how the quilts should be treated–used or hung on the wall–summarizes the black woman’s dilemma about how to face the future. Can her life be seen as continuous with that of her ancestors? For Maggie, the answer is yes. Not only will she use the quilts, but also she will go on making more–she has learned the skill from

Grandma Dee. For Dee, at least for the present, the answer is no. She would frame the quilts and hang them on the wall, distancing them from her present life and aspirations; to put them to everyday use would be to admit her status as a member of her old-fashioned family.

.” So these quilts, which have become an heirloom, not only represent the family, but are an integral part of the family. Walker is saying that true art not only represents its culture, but is an inseparable part of that culture. The manner in which the quilts are treated shows Walker’s view of how art should be treated. Dee covets the quilts for their financial and aesthetic value. “But they’re priceless!” she exclaims, when she learns that her mother has already promised them to Maggie. Dee argues that Maggie is “backward enough to put them to everyday use.” Indeed, this is how Maggie views the quilts. She values them for what them mean to her as an individual. This becomes clear when she says, “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts,” implying that her connection with the quilts is personal and emotional rather than financial and aesthetic. She also knows that the quilts are an active process, kept alive through continuous renewal. As the narrator points out, “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

The two sisters’ values concerning the quilt represent the two main approaches to art appreciation in our society. Art can be valued for financial and aesthetic reasons, or it can be valued for personal and emotional reasons. When the narrator snatches the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, Walker is saying that the second set of values is the correct one. Art, in order to be kept alive, must be put to “Everyday Use” — literally in the case of the quilts, figuratively in the case of conventional art.

Alice Walker is using the quilts, and the fate of those quilts, to make the point that art can only have meaning if it remains connected to the culture it sprang from. Her story itself is a good example: Walker didn’t write it to be observed under a glass case, judged aesthetically, and sold to the highest bidder; she meant it to be questioned, to be explored, to be debated — in short, to be put to “Everyday Use.”