Alice Walker's Everyday Use

Ko-Seung-Duck, a renowned Korean lawyer and a candidate for education minister in the previous election, was defeated utterly by some unknown candidate. The primary reason for his defeat was that his daughter confessed that Ko lacked empathy, and did not communicate with his children. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday use”, we can also note such conflicts between family members. The narrator, a mother of two, is a tough women who can “kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man” (5). Dee, her second daughter (24), is egocentric character who didn’t have “hesitation as her nature” (12). The two have completely different ways of viewing Grandmother Dee’s quilt which represents the heritage from the past, and we can notice how such discrepancies beget conflicts and affects how the narrator forms her decision throughout the story.

In fact, she plans to use the churn as a “centerpiece for the alcove table.” (54) Although not expressed in a direct manner, the mother deprecates Dee’s behavior by recalling the moments where it had been used as an “everyday use”. Nevertheless, she accedes to Dee’s request. Next Dee asks for the quilt. That was something that the narrator had reserved for Maggie, and she told Dee that fact, indicating that it simply wouldn’t be fair to yield that piece of quilt to Dee. After hearing that, Dee “gasped like a bee stung her”(65),and she shouted out words of anger towards Maggie. However in this case, mother seriously doubts on giving away the quilts to Dee. She remembers that Dee had refused her previous offer on taking the quilts, arguing that the quilts were “old fashioned and out of style”(70). She didn’t conformed to Dee as she did in the previous case, and the tension between two women