Alice Walker's & Everyday Use

About Walker

Walker's short story "Everyday Use" contains several important parallels to the author's own life. Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker grew up in an environment much like that described in the story. Her parents were both sharecroppers, her family lived in a rundown shack, and racial segregation was legally enforced, prompting the author to describe the times as America's own era of apartheid. Like Maggie Johnson, Walker was disfigured as a child.

Introduction

"Everyday Use" was published early in Alice Walker's writing career, appearing in her collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women in 1973. The work was enthusiastically reviewed upon publication, and "Everyday Use" has since been called by some critics the best of Walker's short stories. In letting a rural black woman with little education tell a story that affirms the value of her heritage, Walker articulates what has since become, as critic Barbara Christian notes, two central themes in her writing: "the importance of the quilt in her work ... [and] the creation of African American Southern women as subjects in their own right." When Mrs. Johnson snatches her ancestors' quilts from her daughter Dee, who wants to hang them on a wall, and gives them to Maggie, Walker illuminates her life-long celebration of rural Southern black womanhood. The motif of quilting has since become central to Walker's concerns, because it suggests the strength to be found in connecting with one's roots and one's past. As with many other stories by Walker, "Everyday Use" is narrated by the unrefined voice of a rural black woman, in the author's attempt to give a voice to a traditionally disenfranchised segment of the population.

Discussion

A research paper on Everyday Use by Alice Walker depicts the delicate transition that African-Americans encountered moving out of the era of slavery and oppression, and into a new era of choices and evaluation of what their history means to them. Dee, being a young woman just into the college scene, reflects ?Walker's idea of the eager, young black woman clutching on to her heritage through symbols of the past; namely through 2 quilts that were made by her grandmother. She wishes to hang them on the wall as an icon of days gone by. Walker's personal beliefs reflect that of Dee's mother. The quilt would serve better if it remained in "everyday use" by Dee's younger sister Maggie. While Dee longs to have a piece of her heritage, Walker makes the point that people are the real heritage and their memory should serve as the focal point of their culture.

Alice Walker's modern classic "Everyday Use" tells the story of a mother and her two daughters' conflicting ideas about their identities and ancestry. The mother narrates the story of the day one daughter, Dee, visits from college and clashes with the other daughter, Maggie, over the possession of some heirloom quilts.

The story begins with the narrator, a "big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands" awaiting the homecoming of her daughter Dee, an educated ...