It has been said, Family is not an important thing, It is everything. This is seen in the historical fiction novel, The Watsons Go To Birmingham, 1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis when Kenny learns about the importance of appreciating his family. During the road trip, Kenny gets to spend time with his loved ones and learn more about them, though he doesn’t always know it. The author uses symbolism to convey the message, Appreciate your family.
“Where is it Written” by Adam Schwartz, is a story about a difficult relationship between Sam and his mother Sandra. First, Sam wanted his father to have full custody of him because he wanted to spend more time with him. Then, Sam remembers the conflicts he had with his mother. Finally, he realizes that his mother is not a bad person. Coming of age is in important theme in which an adolescent becomes mentally mature.
These three essential functions are argued for their importance by nonfiction author Elizabeth Stone in her book How Our Family Stories Shape Us, and both authors argue for how legacies affect the decisions of the person, significant or not and the how these legacies remain despite the long family history. Gladwell emphasizes what people’s family can do regarding how successful they will be, while Stone emphasizes the decisions made throughout one’s life, without focusing on the result. Both authors highlight how people do not attribute the personalities people possess to their family, but to their individualism, when then cause is from the opposite. Stone’s argument is about how each family’s life experiences told in stories that are passed down from each generation are significant in the family’s norms and mores, characteristic traits, and coping strategies. These functions lead to the core of the person, the first of the three functions is the standards of the family, their norms and morals since our family act as our first culture, teaching people what their family values and their opinions on certain situations like marriage and illness, mental or physical (384).
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.
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.
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.
My Family correlation to “Everyday Use” No filter, no beating around the bush, sensing shade. All of the things that describe my mama. Which is a similarity to the story. In the story “Everyday Use” written by Alice Walker, Mama comes off as very blunt. If you knew my family you could see exactly how they relate.
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)
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.
How does a person value heritage and what type of impact does it hold on a family with a substantial history? Taking a glimpse beneath the surface of family relationships and views on traditional heritage, author Alice Walker showcases a true grasp on letting readers see into the compassionate lives of three strong female leads. With her short story “Everyday Use” each character relatable and described in such detail, the reader can truly sympathize and understand the impact heritage brings to a family. Walker’s compelling short story “Everyday Use” explores how complicated family dynamics can impact the attitude towards heritage through the three female leads. Family can occupy strong roots dating back generations with steadfast traditions that appreciate true meaning and personal endearment to family members.
The love of a family is life’s greatest blessing. In life, there is a universal desire for oneness among people—we want to belong. It is why we collaborate, support common causes, cheer for sports teams, feel nationalism; it’s why we build villages, towns, and cities. Families are where we connect ourselves in relationships to past, current, and future generations. For many, family is not only a blessing, but our greatest accomplishment.
Everyday Use: What Will Your Ancestors Treasure? In the short story “Everyday Use” Alice Walker takes the reader through a world that was in the midst of a radical change. A time when new affluence was coming to a generation of African Americans. Walker’s generation knew nothing but hardships, and they had to make due with whatever they happened to have around.
Defining Heritage In the short story, “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker defines and explores the concept of heritage in the African- American culture. The story was first published in nineteen seventy three as part of the short story collection, In Love and Trouble. “Everyday Use” tells the story of a mother and her two daughters who have conflicting ideas with their heritage and culture.
A simple powerful story of a rural family that contains a returned changed daughter leaves a family in surprise. “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker demonstrates that the theme of the story that consists different views of heritage by using literary elements like characterization, imagery, and settings. Each literary element holds a strong value to define the meaning of heritage from different perspectives of the characters. Alice Walker demonstrates it by Mama, Maggie, and Dee by how they each value their heritage by the things that they have left from their ancestors. To start of with, characterization is the highlights and explanation of the details of a character (“Definition and Examples of Literary Terms Characterization”).
“Everyday Use” is one of the most popular stories by Alice Walker. The issue that this story raises is very pertinent from ‘womanist’ perspective. The term, in its broader sense, designates a culture specific form of woman-referred policy and theory. ‘womanism’ may be defined as a strand within ‘black feminism’. As against womansim, feminist movement of the day was predominately white-centric.
