Everyday use criticism. Literary Criticism # 1: Everyday Use 2019-01-11
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Everyday Use
Dee was young when she left her home and refused the quilt. She was very selfish, uneducated, and very unappreciative of where she came from. The story is about two sisters who grew up in the same household but one sister is ashamed of her past life. It is a fact that favoring one child among many brings about sibling rivalry. These two stories show different cultures, generations and parenting methods. During the visit, while Dee is rummaging around the house, looking for stuff that she wants, she comes across two quilts that she is set on having.
It looks like what Dee has been doing while away in college was embracing her African heritage. Tradition cannot be boiled down to a decorative object; it is still living and breathing, in Mama and Maggie. The quilt is a symbol of the family heritage that can only be appreciated by certain people. Most African American families face the same struggle. Walker correspondingly compares inheritance to art, something which should be used daily and passed on to future generations.
She is practical and not very witty. Mama can see right and wrong in both children, and in both points of view. However, behind the placid portrait of home lie many painful memories. Dee, the oldest daughter, has rejected her heritage from the beginning. 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.
The representation of African —American culture, heritage, and struggles powerfully takes over the story. Maggie, on the other hand, knows no world but the one she came from. Weaving, shaping, sculpting, or quilting in order to create a kaleidoscopic and momentary array is tantamount to providing an improvisational response to chaos. The opposite is actually true. The stories are Daughter of Invention by Julia Alvarez, Everyday Use by Alice Walker and Two Kinds by Amy Tan.
A Literary Review of 'Everyday Use' by Alice Walker
Heritage in this story is understood as recognizing from where a person has originated. Then both Dee and Hakim-a-barber climb into their car and disappear in a cloud of dust as quickly as they arrived. As children grow up and go off into the world, they cross paths with new people and become caught up in the never-ending whirlwind of differing opinions and a new identity within themselves. Mama believes that family ties are indelible, even despite Dee's dismissal of her childhood and direct ancestry. Mama also recalls that Dee just stood there and watched the house burn with a condescending smile on her face. It is then Myop quickly grows up and suddenly becomes aware of the world in which she lives. Walker use s Dee as a representative of the new generation o f African American society who is more brave, outstanding and no longer afraid of the Whites.
C hildren with finer physical appearance tend to be more outstanding on the eyes of their parents than children who is deformed and in this story, Dee as the girl who has finer physical and Maggie as the girl with defects. The only deviation from her status quo comes in the form of her eldest daughter. The characterizations are Direct Characterization where the narrator tells the reader about the characters traits and Indirect Characterization in which the characters traits are shown by their actions or own words. Since then, many of the quilts have traveled all around the world, being hailed as art and history. 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. Family reunions can be times of great anticipation, excitement and happiness but for Dee, a young, beautiful, African American and our leading character, it was a reunion with underlying, unspoken tensions.
As the story progresses though, Dee does become more complex and is shown to be struggling with her own identity and heritage. We resented her spending time on those dumb inventions. 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. This same concept can be applied to the stories we read. .
The reader learns that Dee was the type of child that had received everything that she wanted, while Maggie was the complete opposite. Despite the family being poor, the mother works hard to provide for the both of her daughters. But with her acceptance of circumstance comes complacency. Clearly, Dee privileges language over silence, as she demonstrates in her determination to be educated andimportance she places on her name. She then attended Sarah Lawrence College where she received her B. Although loyal and affectionate, Mama does not reinforce her with any strong qualities. At first glance you would see this as the normal mother daughter spat of maybe the wild child versus the little.
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. Because of the influence from him, many African American learned to take pride about their heritage and also their ancestries. In her story Walker portrays the quilt as the use and misuse of the cultural heritage and people's. Dee does not have similar capacity because she does not appreciate manual labor nor believes in her heritage. So what does all this prove? Dee is seen more as a static character, whereas Maggie goes through changes, thus making her a dynamic character.
Throughout the story, it reveals an African-American family living in small home and struggling financially. Dee, with her knowledge and worldliness, is a threat to the simple world Mama and Maggie inhabit, and Dee seems determined to lord her knowledge over them. This was a time when African-Americans struggled to define their personal identities and values in their cultural terms. The crisis, which occurs later in the story, happens when Dee all of a sudden comes home a different person than she was when she left. The story begins with mamma and Maggie waiting on the front porch. Analysis does an adept job at blurring the difference between the stereotypes of rural black American women with the realities that make up their lives. Walker published this collection of stories in 1973, exactly a decade before she won the Pulitzer Prize for a little book you might've heard of called.
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