A Fictional Analysis of Alice Walkers Everyday Use - Essay Example

A Fictional Analysis of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is a short story that has to do with Dee, a young Black woman who makes a visit to the rural home she dreams she has outgrown and where her mother, Mrs. Johnson and Dee’s sister, Maggie, live. Dee tries unsuccessfully to divert to herself some fine old quilts meant for the dowry of her sister We shall now attempt to draw out diverse impressions about each character as depicted by Walker in the story and revealed by the setting, the dialogue, actions and gestures of the characters, their work, their past, the history and immediate cultural reality of the African American. “Images of animals and references to the animal industry pervade Walker’s justly famous short story, “Everyday Use”. Not only is each of the three characters, Mama, Maggie and Dee explicitly or implicitly associated with animals, but the story takes place in a ‘pasture’ down the road from which several ‘beef-cattle peoples’ live and work.” (Gruesser, 2003, 183). Maggie’s memory is linked to that of an elephant. Image patterns involving cows and dogs, foreshadow the climactic scene wherein Mama decides to give the quilts to Maggie rather than to Dee. Mama often delineates Maggie as a meek and somewhat frightened animal. The latter is one who accepts whatever fate has given her and tries to escape any situation that poses a potential threat. When her sister Dee finally arrives, Mama tells the reader that “Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. ‘Come back her’, I say. And she steps and tries to dig a well with her toe.” (Walker, 1973, 479) Maggie’s characteristic stance in such a situation is aptly summed up by Mama in the word “cowering”. Although the etymologies of the words ‘cow’ and ‘cower’ differ, it seems likely that Walker is hinting at the former by employing the latter.” (Gruesser, 2003, 183). Mama and Maggie’s connection is reinforced when Dee takes a Polaroid shot of Mama, Maggie and a cow that has wandered into the yard. Mama compares Maggie with certain animals in their milieu and this may seem insensitive to the reader. Maggie bears scars from a fire that destroyed the previous home of the Johnson family. Mama describes the shuffling manner in which Maggie walks as that of a lame animal, run over by a careless driver, sidling up to someone ignorant enough to be kind to him. Towards the end of the story, Maggie tells Mama that her sister can have the quilts since she can remember Grandma Dee without them. Mama looked at Maggie who had filled her lower lip with checkerberry snuff and this had given her a dopey, hangdog look. Mama realizes at that moment that “this thin, scarred, pathetic daughter of hers who knows how to quilt and serves as the family’s oral historian deserves the quilts more than her shapely, favored, educated daughter Dee, who wants the quilts only because they are fashionable.” (Gruesser, 2003, 183) Mama then does two things she has never done before – she hugs Maggie and says “No” to Dee. In the last paragraph, Maggie is no longer “scarred and her face lights up with a smile that is “real”. A little later, Mama asks Maggie for a “dip of snuff and each other’s company their former “dopey, hangdog look has disappeared. The critic, John Gruesser, states that “It is perfectly appropriate that animal imagery should figure in Everyday Use, a story with a rural setting, whose matriarch and narrator supports herself by raising livestock.” (Gruesser, 2003, 183) Most readers are of the view that the aim of Walker’s Everyday Use is to show Mama’s realization of one daughter’s superficiality and the other daughter’s deep-rooted understanding of “heritage”. Praising Maggie and her mother’s “simplicity” together with their loyalty to their particular family identity, brands the more worldly sister, Dee, as shallow, condescending, manipulative and overly-concerned with style. Of course, Dee is by nature insensitive and selfish; however, she offers a view of heritage as a way for Afro Americans to cope with an oppressive society. At the very start, the story is narrated by Mama. Since the perceptions pass through her mind, her views regarding her daughters are not to be swallowed hook, line and sinker. A number of readers are of the belief that Mama’s view of Maggie may be completely true – that Maggie is not as “passive” or “hangdog” as Walker makes her out to be. Mama speculates that “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes; she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of her hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her” (Walker, 1973, 47) In the next section, when Mama relates her TV fantasy, we discover that it is Mama herself who will be “nervous” until after Dee goes. The readers find out that Mama is ashamed of her own appearance, and desires Dee’s approval. In real life, Mama is “a large, big-boned woman with rough man-working hands.” (Walker, 1973, 48). In her television fantasy, she is quite the opposite. We are more prone to believe that Mama’s vision of her light-skinned, slender, witty self may not be in conformity with Dee’s wish but merely Mama’s perception of what she imagines De would want her to be (Farrell, 1998). There is evidence in the story that Mama’s expectations of Dee are not quite accurate. She herself says that Dee hated Maggie as much as she hated the previous home that burned down. As Mama and Maggie await Dee’s arrival, Mama turns her back on the house in an effort to appease Dee who looms large in her imagination (Farrell, 1998). Dee arrives with a camera which she never takes a shot without including the house. Mama’s expectations of Dee tell the reader about Mama herself. Mama seems to regard this daughter of hers with combination of awe, envy and fear. Mama grudgingly regards Dee as a fearless girl and a determined fighter. Dee could look white people in the eye and would never hesitate. Mama remembers Dee as self-centered, demanding and concerned with style, but she would do anything to improve her circumstances. When she needed a new dress, Dee would simply make-over an old green suit given to her mother, rather than passively accepting her lot (Farrell, 1998). Mama’s fearful nature is apparent in her reaction to knowledge. She remembers feeling “trapped and ignorant” as Dee reads to her and Maggie “without pity” The reason for this is that Mama never had much of an education. She completed only the second grade. This is to show that Mama has been trained in acquiescence. Donna Winchell (1992) writes that “Mrs. Johnson can take an objective look at who and what she is and find not disillusionment but an easy satisfaction. Simple pleasures – a dip of snuff, a cooling breeze across a clean swept yard, church songs, the soothing movements of milk cows – are enough” (82) However, the author doubts that the “simple pleasures” are not really enough for Mama. She seems somewhat unhappy and worried about it. She contemplates her life when Maggie marries John Thomas for then she will be free to sit and sing church songs to herself. When Dee finally arrives, Maggie and her mother’s fear of the unknown returns; but as Dee approaches, Mama stares at the brightly-colored African dress she is wearing and decides that she likes it. This illustrates Walker’s opinion that everything new need not be feared. Maggie, on the other hand, remains fearful despite the friendliness of Dee’s male companion who grins and greets Mama and Maggie warmly. However, when he tries to hug Maggie, she falls back and trembles. Later when he attempts to experiment a new handshake with her, she withdraws a limp hand from his (Farrell, 1998). “Maggies forbearance in the story contrasts with Dees boldness.” (Farrell, 1998, 181). When Dee proudly insists that Maggie would only ruin Grandma’s quilts by using them daily, and that hanging the quilts as part of the décor would be the only way to preserve them, a powerful feeling seized mama who snatches the quilts out of Dee’s hands and thrusts them onto Maggie’s lap. It is ironic that by acting against the wishes of Dee, Mama is behaving like Dee herself, for her refusal to back down and her willingness to stand up for herself. We shall next concentrate on Dee, the older sister. Some of the comparisons between the women and fauna in Walker’s story are conventional and purely descriptive. The voice of a pleading Dee is “as sweet as a bird” (32) and her hair stands erect “like the wool on a sheep.” (32) Her pigtails are compared to “small lizards disappearing behind her ears.” (28) This character has changed her given name, “Dee Johnson” to the seemingly more impressive name, “Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo”, creating difficulties for her mother who recognizes the inaptness of the old name, but cannot quite accept the new name. Mrs. Johnson (Mama) thinks she could trace the name Dee in her family as far back as “beyond the Civil War.” (54) but Wangero sees it as a bitter reminder that Afro Americans have been denied authentic names (Cowart, 1996, 171). Dee, now Wangero,“styles and dresses herself according to the dictates of a faddish Africanism and thereby demonstrates a cultural Catch-22: an American who attempts to become an African succeeds only in becoming a phony. In her name, her clothes, her hair, her sunglasses, her patronizing speech, and her black Muslim companion, Wangero proclaims a deplorable degree of alienation from her rural origins and family.” (Cowart, 1996, 171) Wangero left home to attend school in Augusta, where she immersed herself in the liberating culture she initially forced on her confused mother and sister and later brands as “oppressive”. With her black Muslim boyfriend, she has gone on to the idea of nationality at odds with everything that has defined the racial identity of Afro Americans. “Wangero despises her sister, her mother and the church that helped to educate her.” (Cowart, 1996, 172). She shows indifference to her pathetic sister, Maggie, whom she appears to ignore. This sister represents a large number of black women who suffer while a minority of lucky Wangeros escape the ghetto. Maggie represents the lower class left behind as a few Wangeros win their independence. She belongs to an underclass, scarred in the aggregate catastrophes which Walker symbolizes in the conflagration that razed the first Johnson house. Wangero did not set the fire, but she enjoyed the obliteration of the structure that stood for all that she sought to escape. She may have understood, though, that fire alone cannot abolish a ghetto. The burned house represents more than a failed attempt to eradicate poverty. “It subsumes a whole African American history of violence, from slavery through he ghetto – torching riots of 1964 to 1968 to the pervasive inner-city violence of subsequent decades. The fire, that is, is the African American past, a conflagration from which assorted survivors stumble forward covered, like Maggie with scars on the body or like Wangero with scars of the soul.” (Cowart, 1996, 172) Elaine Showalter (1986) observes, “In contemporary writing, the quilt stands for a vanished past experience to which we have a troubled and ambivalent cultural relationship.” (228). The quilts over which Wangero and her mother bicker, represent a heritage more personal than the intellectual daughter realizes. The quilts symbolizes the heritage Wangero has already abandoned. She no longer shares a name with those whose lives are transmuted by the quilts. Besides, Wangero, unlike Maggie, has never learned to quilt. The art of quilting will die out if women like Maggie neglect to keep it up. Barbara Christian (1985) maintains that a “heritage ... must continually be renewed rather than fixed in the past" (87). For Maggie and her mother, the idea of heritage is forever connected to the fact of a living tradition – one in which a present generation keeps in touch with its predecessors by practicing such homely skills as quilt-making and butter-churning, and then passing on the knowledge to the coming generation. The quilts are primarily for everyday use; they can be utilitarian and they constitute an appropriate dowry for Maggie who is soon to be married. The quilts, like this story by Alice Walker, are beautiful and worthy of preservation. She has a firm belief in the idea of a living tradition – a passing on of values. She contends that anything intended for “everyday use” must not end up framed on a wall, on a shelf, in a library or museum. Faith Pullin (1980) has this in regard to the quilts: "the mother is ... the true African here, since the concept of art for arts sake is foreign to Africa--all objects are for use” (185). The main protagonist, Dee, has taken over a very Western attitude towards art and its material value. “Walker, by the same token, seems to conceive of her own art as part of a dynamic process in which utility (domestic, political) meets and bonds with an aesthetic ideal.” (Cowart, 1996, 182). Her work is intended as much for immediate consumption – that is, reading by everyone interested in African American culture. Works Cited Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Cowart, David. "Heritage and deracination in Walkers "Everyday Use." (Alice Walker)." Studies in Short Fiction 33.n2 (Spring 1996): 171(14).  Diyanni, Robert, Literature Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 2004 Farrell, Susan. "Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walkers "Everyday Use".(Critical Essay)." Studies in Short Fiction 35.2 (Spring 1998): 179(9). Gruesser, John. "Walkers Everyday Use.(Critical Essay)." The Explicator 61.3 (Spring 2003): 183(3).  Pullin, Faith. "Landscapes of Reality: The Fiction of Contemporary Afro-American Women." Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945. Ed. A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes, 1980. 173-203. Showalter, Elaine. "Piecing and Writing." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 222-47. Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." In Love and Trouble. New York: Harcourt, 1973. 47-59. Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992. Read More