Furthermore, throughout the story Dee’s characters changes but her liking for objects stayed the same. She changed what objects she liked from having nice clothes to her family’s household objects. An example of Dee’s character changing from liking nice clothes to her family’s household objects is when she was asking her mother for her grandmother’s quilts. This is quite obvious when her mother said to talk the other quilt but she wanted the ones that her grandmother made with “pieces of [her] dresses [she] use to wear.
Have you ever not seen eye to eye with your mother? In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use”, we are shown how many of the choices we make and the things we value create our identity. This story focuses on two characters, mama and her daughter Dee (Wangero), who struggle to see the same way about their heritage. Dee wants the things made by her grandmother, to not admire it as an artifact, but rather to remake it. She wants to take them, and change them to match her lifestyle as it is today.
Speaker: Alice Walker writes in a first person point of view. The speaker is a single mother who “never had an education” (Walker 49). She is a minority, and accepts the lower status: “Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in in the eye?” (48). The mother refuses to challenge the people society deem as better than her.
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.
Alice Walker was a social activist, born in 1944. She is very popular for her novel “The Color Purple” that was published in 1982. Before that, she wrote “Everyday Use” in 1973. It is a short story about a family that branches out in their own way throughout the years. She shows us that the daughters were being directed into two different pathways.
In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” she writes about how people’s life experiences can affect the way they view the world. She uses the characters of a mother and two daughters, Maggie and Dee. The mother starts off thinking about how her children used to be, Dee would be ashamed to bring her friends to the house and distanced herself from her family. Maggie was shy and cared a lot about her family and heritage, she even burned herself saving some of her grandmother’s quilts while Dee watched from the yard safely. After the mother is done recollecting she sees her daughter Dee pull up in her car from college.
Dee doesn’t truly know what her culture represents, but instead she tries to use everything from college to apply to everyday life. Dee never appreciated her roots as a child, and she still don’t. Mama and Maggie used the churnand dasher daily with care, and all Dee wants to do with the churn and dasher is “think of something artistic to do with it” ( Walker 273.) She sees the churn as a project she can work on; on the other hand Mama and Maggie see it as a churn with a lot of meaning behind it. Maggie and Mama cherish the handmade quilts that were made by Grandma Dee.
When you look at it from Dee’s point of few she just seems to be pushing her family to expand their education and have a better life. Dee doesn’t want her family on a farm and raising cattle because that isn’t what she likes. She has an open mind about things and sees them as more than just what they are used for, hence the title, “Everyday Use.” Dee may seem like a rude, spoiled girl, but looking at it from her perspective, all she wants is for her family to live the way she does. Changing the point of view from Mama to Dee would make a major difference.
A lack of sense of self and empathy, Dee’s characterization represents a search for
Inheriting the Heritage The dictionary definition of heritage is: property that is or may be inherited. What happens when multiple people are in line to inherit the heritage? In the short story "Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, two sisters, Maggie and Dee, want to inherit their family heritage of quilts handmade by their grandma and other relatives. Mama has to make the decision on which of her two daughters gets to have the quilts and she made the correct decision to give Maggie the quilts rather than Dee.
Alice Walker wrote what Mama said about Dee or Wangero, “Dee wanted nice things.” Mama describes Dee as a lavish person who is only interested in herself and her fulfilling’s. Dee had changed her name to show that she is not accepting that a “white person” named her ancestors in way, so it can be passed down. Walker describes Mama as someone who is satisfied with what they have. “I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon,” Walker demonstrates how Mama is pleased with nature where her life takes place in.
Dee is a girl who lived with her mom and her sister Maggie, but she wasn’t like them at all, she was different than her sister and her mother. Mama was collecting money to take Dee to school in Augusta. Dee liked to be fashionable, she always wanted nice things. Dee changed allot in the story, she changed after she went to study in school.
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.
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.
And, womanism here represented through Mama, calls for a critical relatedness to the heritage. The narrative articulates the shallowness of Dee’s
