ipl-logo

Rhetorical Analysis Of Alice Walker's Oppressed Hair

660 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Literary devices used in everyday use alice walker

Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African-American novelist and poet; she is also a known advocate for women’s rights. Walker gave a commencement speech on Founders’ Day at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her piece, titled “Oppressed Hair”, talks about growth and hitting a ceiling with every milestone that a person reaches. This piece appeals to college students or anyone that is fighting to accept or find their own identity. In her speech, Walker dismisses the value of her own work by claiming that it is “to entertain and amuse”, this dismissal allows the audience to interpret her words in a way that benefits them the most. Utilizing literary devices, such as pathos appeal and metaphors, Walker effectively inspires her audience …show more content…

Finally stating the fact that she’s going to be discussing “an issue even closer to home”, she's going to be talking about hair. This brings a surprise element to her speech; it is an absurd idea and not something that would usually sit well in a commencement speech. However, she goes on to say, “Though the discerning ear may hear my concern for some of these things in what I am about to say”, this allows for the audience to interpret Walker’s speech into a metaphor that tackles a larger controversial topic, rather than her just talking about hair. Walker goes on to explain that her journey with growth was always stopped by this unknown obstacle. She narrates how she realized that this hindrance was her hair, a minute detail that she never realized her fussing over it would hold her back. Walker portrays to her audience that even the smallest, neglectful detail can turn into a detrimental factor of an individual’s progression in life. Walker uses the metaphor of a “ceiling at the top of her mind” that stunted her growth as an individual. This image appeals to the audience because they can associate this so-called “ceiling” with any personal barrier that they had to overcome in order to achieve a goal. She later goes on to narrate how she discovered that the “ceiling” was lifted once she came into terms with accepting her natural hair. Walker highlights

Show More
Related

Lorde Ethos Pathos Logos

511 Words | 3 Pages

In September of 1979, Audre Lorde, poet, spoke about the impossibility of dismantling the patriarchy through oppressive means. The black feminist woman, Lorde, who has cancer at the point of this speech, uses ethos, pathos, and logos in order to guilt the audience into making a change of how black feminists are represented. Ethos is the building of the author's credibility in order to become more persuasive because people tend to believe people who they deem likable or respectable. “I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.”

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis Of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

571 Words | 3 Pages

The excerpt taken from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring leaves a lasting impression on the importance of the environment and how humans have killed hundreds of thousands birds and insects due to the usage of pesticides. She uses rhetorical strategies such as diction and tone to convey what she sees as the destruction of the ecosystem. The careless actions of human beings is shown throughout this passage by the use of diction and tone the author creates. Carson immediately criticizes humans, she refers to their use of pesticides as “a habit of killing”. The reader can sympathize with the animals that have been killed by the plentiful amounts of poison and instead feel something akin to disdain towards the actions of the farmers.

Read More

Summary Of Creating Change By Laverne Cox

570 Words | 3 Pages

In Laverne Cox’s powerful speech during ‘Creating Change 2014’ she talks about the violent injustices and police discrimination against the lives of trans women of color, throughout her speech she appeals to the viewer 's emotional connection to those in pain and the rationale want to stand up for what you believe in. She does this by using strong repetitive credible sources and hortative sentences. Within her speech Cox talks about all of the present attacks targeted towards trans women of color and when talking about them she brings in her own experience when she was younger and uses that to make her speech seem more credible about what she was saying. Cox states “ Some days I wake up and I’m that sixth grader who swallowed a bottle of pills because I did not want to be myself anymore because I did not know how to be anybody else.

Read More

What Does Dee Mean When She Takes Place

189 Words | 1 Pages

Dee, who is the older daughter of Mama, was never one to take pride or appreciated what she had as a child. For instance, Mama says “Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated that house so much” (2). Dee seemed to never be fully pleased.

Read More

Sojourner Truth And Lucille Clifton's Ain T I A Woman

998 Words | 4 Pages

Sojourner Truth and Lucille Clifton, a powerful public speaker and a powerful African-American poet, both use the power of words to promote change. The pieces given from Sojourner Truth famously advocated women's rights and denounced slavery. The fundamentals of Lucille Clifton's pieces relate openly to slavery, her family, strong women and her heritage. Both these women use the effectiveness of speaking and writing to try and expose the exposition of social injustice and the inequality between the genders. Truth's famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Read More

A Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Everyday Use' By Alice Walker

1052 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More

Everyday Use By Mama Johnson Character Analysis

2380 Words | 10 Pages

Character Analysis of the Women in “Everyday Use” In Alice Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use”, the author examines three female characters for the purpose of illustrating the different types of influences African American history had on women living during the twentieth century. The short story was published at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, which attempted to seek equality for minorities, including African American women (Bankston). While the movement did seek progressive change and advocated for important rights regarding equality, it also promoted social unrest and contributed to the division of American society that began after the unifying times of the 1950s. As a result, some African American women continued to be impacted

Read More

Literary Analysis Of Everyday Use By Alice Walker

987 Words | 4 Pages

“Everyday Use” by Alice Walker Literary genius is a term thrown around often in this day and time. Many might say that the literary world has been diluted. However, if there is one who deserves that title, it is Alice Walker. It is especially so for her piece, ‘Everyday Use’. The short story was first published in 1973 as part of the author’s short story compilation.

Read More

Alice Walker Everyday Use Essay

546 Words | 3 Pages

Be it the quiet Maggie or prideful Dee of “Everyday Use”, one can see traces of Alice Walker in them and where they diverge into their own characters. To begin with, like Dee, Walker too changed her name, but the only difference lies in the reason that Walker did it in honor of her great-grandmother and grandmother, becoming “Alice Tallulah-Kate Walker” in 1941 (Walker xvi). On the other hand, Dee changed it to incorporate her heritage, which ends up being facetious and insult to the African culture seeing as “Wangero is not a Kikuyu name, but Wanjiru is” (Hoel 37). To add on, Dee’s middle name is a mixture of names “representing the whole East African region. Or more likely, she is confused and has only superficial knowledge of Africa and all it stands for” (Hoel 37).

Read More

The Theme Of Oppression In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

1049 Words | 5 Pages

In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker portrays the life of three African American women living during the early 1970’s when the Black National Movement emerged. Walker tells us this story through the eyes of, Mama, a woman living in rural Georgia with her youngest daughter, Maggie. The women endure countless restraints that keep them from pursuing a different, and possibly more successful life. When Dee, Mama’s oldest daughter, drops in for a visit, we are given an insight to her flashy lifestyle and her desire to flaunt the heritage that she cast away at an early age. Maggie and her mother share a sisterhood that Dee will never understand.

Read More

Alice Walker Identity

1936 Words | 8 Pages

Everyone defines and identifies themselves in different ways. Whether it’s by our names, our religion, or our sexuality, we all have something different that make us unique and that we identify ourselves as. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,” an African American woman tells the story of her daughter Dee’s long awaited visit. Upon her arrival the mother and her other daughter, Maggie, discover some drastic changes in Dee: she has changed her name to Wangero, she has also arrived with a mysterious man who calls himself Asalamalakim, and has adopted an African style of dress; all of this in an effort to depict what she sees as her heritage. During the course of her visit, Dee tries to take several items important to her family’s heritage.

Read More

Irony In Alice Walker's Everyday Use

617 Words | 3 Pages

In her short story “Everyday Use”, Alice Walker incorporates various types of irony in order to effectively convey the purpose of her writing. Irony can have a range of meanings that involve some sort of discrepancy (Arp 359). According to Perrine’s Literature, Structure, Sounds & Sense, “the contrast in [dramatic irony] is between what a character says or does and what the reader knows to be true” (Arp 360). The other type of irony the Walker uses is irony of the situation, where “the discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment” (Arp 360). This story is told from the point of view of Mama and focuses on the visit of her eldest daughter, Dee, and her desire to get to know her heritage.

Read More

Cultural Heritage In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

243 Words | 1 Pages

In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker shows her strong feelings about cultural heritage. Walker’s upbringing causes her to have a great deal of appreciation for her culture and heritage, so she knows that her past is very important. In “Everyday Use,” she expresses how she feels about the preserving and valuing of the African American culture and heritage. She uses three different characters, a mother and two daughters, to show the importance of African American culture and heritage and the impact of upholding it. The three characters are Mama, Maggie and Dee, who goes by the name Wangero.

Read More

African-American Culture In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

922 Words | 4 Pages

In her short story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker takes up what is a recurrent theme in her work: the representation of the harmony as well as the conflicts and struggles within African-American culture. “Everyday Use” focuses on an encounter between members of the rural Johnson family. This encounter––which takes place when Dee (the only member of the family to receive a formal education) and her male companion return to visit Dee’s mother and younger sister Maggie––is essentially an encounter between two different interpretations of, or approaches to, African-American culture. Walker employs characterization and symbolism to highlight the difference between these interpretations and ultimately to uphold one of them, showing that culture and heritage are parts of daily life.

Read More

Alice Walker Setting

789 Words | 4 Pages

Alice Walker is a twentieth-century American literature writer. Walker uses much of her own knowledge in her writings. Walker also likes to write about the relationships between the north and the south, and between individuals and individual communities. One of her most famous short stories is “Everyday Use.” In “Everyday Use,” Walker uses setting, symbolism, and characterization to introduce a theme of how education, or the lack thereof, has the power to divide families.

Read More

More about Rhetorical Analysis Of Alice Walker's Oppressed Hair

Related Topics

Open Document