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Literary analysis of Everyday use
Heritage in alice walker's everyday use
Heritage in alice walker's everyday use
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Everyday Use Literary Analysis “Maggie will be nervous until her sister goes. ”(Pg.50 line7) This is quote from the story Everyday Use by Alice Walker. The story revolves around a girl called Dee, her mom and sister Maggie. They have different opinions on different subjects especially relating to heritage.
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.
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.
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.
The short story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is a story told from a Momma’s point of view. The momma is outside waiting for one of her daughters to come home and her other daughter still lives with her. Momma is like all mothers in this poem they have very high expectations about their children coming home. This short story shows how a mother’s love is unconditional and how families can deal with certain problems. The love in this story from the momma is so powerful it shows the reader what a mother’s love is like.
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.
This appreciation also leads to Dee changing not only her lifestyle, but several other things such as her apparel and name; which is described as “stereotypically African.” However, Dee’s new-found appreciation does seem, like Hakims, to be more of a fad. In Diane Ross’s article, “Everyday Use,” she states, “To Dee, artifacts such as the benches or the quilts are strictly aesthetic objects. It never occurs to her that they, too, are symbols of oppression: Her family made these things because they could not afford to buy them” (Ross 1-2).
In attempts to reconnect with her African roots, Dee has changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. Dee has also taken an interest in embracing her African heritage and has dressed in traditional African clothes to visit her mother. Her mother knows that Dee’s intentions are not genuine. Worrying more about taking pictures of her mother and collecting items that represent the African culture to take back home, Dee neglects to spend time with her family. Her mother notices that Dee, “Lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me.
In the short stories we have read there have been numerous themes. The impact of tradition, the value of heritage, the importance of family, the divide between social classes, and the presence of love are all ideas that can be found in the stories we have read. Short stories have managed to encapture the importance and true meaning of life in just a few sentences by imposing on the readers themes we can all relate to. A common theme presented in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” is the power of knowledge and education. In “Everyday Use,” two sister Dee and Maggie have different views on how they should preserve and honor their heritage.
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.
Johnson, a mother of two youthful girls (Dee and Maggie). The story rounds in her own daughters conflicting perceptions and perspectives about their heritage comprehension, rehearsing, and acknowledgement. Dee in the story represents the urban black women who moved to a place where many country`s culture centered and she shows ultimate superficiality with better education, magnificent physical appearance, and different way of accepting and respecting her family heritage as a strategy of modern African Americans to survive an oppressive society burdens (Mullins 40). The other sister Maggie, displays inferiority and self-low esteem but amazingly recognizing, remembering, respecting and acceptance of family heritage very well as another way to encounter the depressive society (Whitsitt 449). Walker used portrayal, imagery, and nonexistent clarifications to light up the distinction concerning the understandings, illustration and in the end to reward one of the best confirming boldly knowledge of culture and respecting of heritage is the most successful door to defeat all the countered challenge in that specific historical
She didn’t like her sister Maggie she also doesn’t like her mom allot and she didn’t like their house. From the main changes Dee made was changing her name. “No mama, she says not Dee, wangero Leewanik kemanjo “(Walker, 318, 25). She also brought her friend with her his name is Hakim-a-barber.
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.
In the short story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker shows the conflicts and struggles with people of the African-American culture in America. The author focuses on the members of the Johnson family, who are the main characters. In the family there are 2 daughters and a mother. The first daughter is named Maggie, who had been injured in a house fire has been living with her mom. Her older sister is Dee, who grew up with natural beauty wanted to have a better life than her mother and sister.
And, womanism here represented through Mama, calls for a critical relatedness to the heritage. The narrative articulates the shallowness of Dee’s
