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The Transformation Of Maggie In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

312 Words2 Pages
In the short story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, Maggie changes drastically from the beginning to the end. Although she is not the main focus throughout the entire story, I consider Maggie a major in the story by her actions of evolving into a completely contrasting person. In the beginning of the story, Maggie portrays an array of jealousy towards Dee. Because of Dee being educated and full-of-life in comparison, Maggie feels as if she has always been placed on the back burner and is one step below Dee. In her early years, Maggie underwent the devastation of a fire. In a result of that, she acquired an inexperienced education and an awkward, introverted mentality. Maggie bacame a burn victim in consequence of the fire and had countless
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274 Words | 2 Pages

First off, Maggie is quiet and shy. She is ashamed about how she looks. The story stated,”She will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs …” Maggie doesn’t know how to be outspoken. She hides herself.

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343 Words | 2 Pages

Maggie in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” plays the role of being the nervous and ugly sister of the story, however she is the child with the good heart. Maggie was nervous ashamed of her scars “Maggie was nervous… she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs”. Living in a house with a pretty sister and being the ugly sister with scars could be the reason why she picked up on a timid personality, being ‘ashamed’ of her own skin shaping her in a way that she degraded herself from everybody else. Maggie was not this way before the fire, her mother stated, as it is quoted that she had adopted to a certain walk ever since the fire.

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664 Words | 3 Pages

Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo [Dee] is a fascinating character in “Everyday Use” written by Alice Walker. The story is over an African American mother and her two daughters. The story focuses on one daughter, Dee that is coming home to visit her family. She grew up wanting to become a different a person, and she hated how she lived when she was with her mom and sister. Dee is spoiled, tenacious, and ignorant in this short story.

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1052 Words | 5 Pages

Maggie is also oppressed by society and Dee, and, though to a further degree than her mother, her view of herself attacks her equality compared to the rest of the world. The subject is immediately introduced. The story begins with Maggie and her mother waiting for Dee. They waste their time in order to be available to Dee as soon as Dee

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457 Words | 2 Pages

In the short story, “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, their are two distinct characters who are very different from each other. These characters have many different motivations, personalities, and points of views with respect to preserving their heritage. The narrator, Mama, looks at them both with different views. Dee and Maggie are two completely different people. Dee has different motivations than Maggie.

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271 Words | 2 Pages

Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” illustrates Dee’s struggle for identity by placing her quest for a new identity against her family’s desire for maintaining culture and heritage. In the beginning, the narrator, who is the mother of Dee, mentions some details about Dee; how she “...wanted nice things… She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts… At sixteen, she had a style of her own: and (she) knew what style was.” Providing evidence to the thesis, she was obviously trying exceptionally hard to find for herself a sense of identity. She wanted items her family couldn’t afford, so she worked hard to gain these, and she found a sense of identity from them, but it also pushed her farther away from her family.

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494 Words | 2 Pages

The setting of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” reveals important aspects about the family in many ways. Without the enriched setting provided to the reader by Walker, this story would have had no foundation on which to be built. The first way Walker uses setting to let the reader get to know the family is through the detailed description provided to the reader about the family home in paragraph one. Walker describes the family’s front yard as being an “extended living room” (Walker 417)

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587 Words | 3 Pages

Everyday Use and Sula are coming of age stories. They both illustrate times in people’s lives when they have to decide to how they are going to live with their past and themselves. The short story "Everyday Use", Alice Walker emphasizes the aspect of individuality. The story focuses on the lives of two sisters, Maggie and Dee.

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2484 Words | 10 Pages

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was published during the time of industrialization when the United States almost completed the transform from an agriculture society to an industrialized nation in the late 1800s. A tremendous amount of people came to New York and contributed to the rapid growth of population in the urban New York. While these immigrants helped the United States to develop economically, the progress is accompanied by poverty. Maggie, the lovely protagonist, is representative of the lower class people who suffer from poverty. “City poverty, violence and prostitution” showed up in American slums, and the Bowery city Maggie lived in was “an assembly of criminals” (Mahma 16).

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983 Words | 4 Pages

The point of view in the story “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker plays a big part. Throughout the story, one of Mama’s daughters came to visit. The way Mama and Maggie see her is not in a very pleasant way. In fact, they are scared to tell her no when it comes to anything. From Mama’s perspective Dee seems like this rude, stuck up, spoiled child because she had the opportunity to go out and expand her education, while Mama and Maggie continued to live their lives on the farm.

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721 Words | 3 Pages

Maggie has a very bad relationship with her bigger sister Dee with jealousy and hatred. Mama always thinks that Maggie lives an unfair life but Maggie never said that. “Maggie asked me mama when Dee ever had friends” (Walker, 317, 14), this quote shows how Maggie is jalousie from Dee, actually dee has friends. When Maggie sees stuff she doesn’t like she hides it and doesn’t talk but when she knew that Dee wanted to take the quilt that mama promised to give her she dropped the plates and smashes the kitchen door very hard.

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1283 Words | 6 Pages

Mama is able to tell the reader where Maggie’s burn scars came from, and what she thinks caused the fire. She tells the reader about the house burning, and how differently the two girls reacted to the fire. “How long ago was it that the house burned? Ten, twelve years? 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.

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910 Words | 4 Pages

The short story, Everyday Use, is written by Alice Walker. This short story tells about the narrator, mama, and her daughter Maggie wait for a visit from Dee, mama’s older daughter. Throughout this short story, the reader can see the distraught relationship between mama and Dee. The reader can see how Dee is different than mama and Maggie; she thinks that she knows way more about her heritage than mama and Maggie, when she really does not. In the short story, Everyday Use, Walker uses imagery, symbolism, and point of view to show that heritage can only be understood when one is true to their roots.

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609 Words | 3 Pages

In conclusion,Alice Walker used two characters to carry out a deeper meaning of a short story. It showed similarities and differences to my family, and the family in “Everyday use”. Also it show how maggie and Dee are two very different characters. Maggie and Dee didn 't share a bond with each other throughout their,but I am glad my brothers and I

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1026 Words | 5 Pages

The comparison of characters is something an author allows us to do while reading a story, by telling us about the characters’ looks, their personalities, their lifestyles, and also the traits that may describe a character. “Everyday Use” written by Alice Walker, two characters named Maggie and Dee had a few things in common and many differences from each other. The characters Maggie and Dee, also known as “Wanergo,” are sisters who compete on who inherits the family heirlooms. The story is told from the mother’s (Mama’s) point of view.

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