ALICE WALKER'S “EVERDAY USE” AND “CHARACTER”

Alice Walker's “Everyday Use” and “Character”

Alice Walker's “Everyday Use” and “Character”

Everyday Use is novel about cultural expectation, parent-daughter relation and outcomes of deviancy from culture. It has been written by Alice Walker. She was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia in the rural Deep South to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Walker. She was the youngest of their eight children. Walker grew up in a period of American racial segregation and her family struggled constantly with poverty. Her early brilliance with words and performance was noted by her community and through the help of friends, neighbors, teachers, and state scholarships. She is best known for her novel The Color Purple, for which she was the first black woman to win the highest honor in American literature.

Mama is actually the narrator of the story and her character portrays loving and a strong mother who is burdened and sometimes threatened by her daughters namely Dee. She is stern, gentle and her character depicts the unconditional love by a mother. She is very critical in her assessment for both of her children. Mama resents the sophistication, superiority and education that Dee has got. She remains a practical woman even after her brief daydreaming. She rejects the traditional idea for the role description according to gender. She builds a masculine persona and works to raise her daughters. She feels immense proud of her hard nature and ability to milk cows and butcher animals. On the contrary, she lacks a broader picture of life and she is intimidated by Dee. She fails to understand Dee's character which took both of them apart. She considers her developing character as against the family and cultural norms.

In the novel, Dee has portrayed herself as a cause of awe, agitation, jealousy in her family. As an individual, she continuously hunts for firm sense of self-freedom and her unique meaning of life. Mama and Maggie were highly affected by her judgmental nature. She delineates herself as an individualistic personality who doesn't care how her family thinks about herself. She is unflappable, confident, arrogant and insensitive and her Mama doesn't like it. She violently rejects her heritage but she perceives as if she is reclaiming it.

This story intends to provide the thinking of the two generations. One person gives a lot of importance to her heritage and other one have a different philosophy.

Generation gap and the cultural gap are showed over here that's why both have contradictory perception about the same topic. In Everyday Use by Walker, tradition is important to Mama and Dee but both take them from a different angle. For Dee, heritage is something that doesn't have every day usage and history corrupts the heritage. She thinks that heritage evolves through various stages. On the contrary, her Mama takes it in a different meaning that traditions are founded by ways of thinking, objects that are inherited. For her, culture remains almost constant throughout the phases of ...