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Critical Analysis of “Everyday Use”
The establishment of heritage for the African Americans and the perception about the symbols of culture is the main theme by Alice Walker in the short story “Everyday Use.” During slavery times, African-Americans who mostly bore cold injustices of being slaves for white people devised a new method of communication within themselves using quilts. Basing her story in the context of African Americans after slavery, Walker uses symbolism and characterization to present her theme of heritage. The discussion on this short story will illustrate that Walker uses symbolism to reveal the unique cultural heritage valued by the African Americans in the eighteenth century.
Walker presents the significance of quilts to the American culture. After the end of slavery, the African American culture retained quilts to symbolize their history and. During slavery, the only way that the slaves could communicate amongst themselves was through quilts. Different designs represented different messages to be conveyed. For example, the log cabin design hung outside a house represented a house of refuge for those slaves that had escaped their masters and were fugitive (Walker 297). Quilts were also used as maps to help slaves escape at night using the stars as their guide, especially to the slaves who worked in the plantation farms.
Walker uses symbolism to show the heritage and cultural importance that African Americans placed on some items like the quilts. Symbolically to Maggie, the quilt represents a woman with her husband and her own home. Maggie thinks she deserves to have the quilts when she marries a man by the name John Thomas. Her mother had promised her and it seems only natural that a mother should offer quilts to her daughter when she gets married. She had made her mother promise to give her those quilts when she marries John Thomas (Walker 302). From this context, it is fair to state that culturally, women gave quilts as presents to their daughters upon marriage. That is the reason that Big Dee, Maggie’s grandmother had left the quilts to her mother.
Her mother symbolically places quilts as cultural items. She believes that they are used by her people for long periods and so, they should continue being used. Dee on the other hand, places great value on the quilts. In fact, she says they are priceless. She tries to make her mother and sister see the importance of those quilts but she fails miserably. To her, those quilts represent her heritage that she seems so proud of, of the African-American People (Walker 303). Maggie gave the quilts to her sister because she envied her sister to an extent that she thought that her sister was more privileged than her. She could not imagine denying her sister who seemed to have everything in her favor the quilts. She never had any self esteem that assured her that she deserved anything good in this world. She gave them easily as she knew she could quilt herself. Her grandmother had taught her how to quilt (Walker 298).
Another aspect that Walker uses in the short stories is characterization. She uses the name Wangero to present some significance to Dee. Dee believes the name represent’s her heritage and her freedom. She wanted to have a name that had a cultural meaning and that uniquely identifies her roots. She says she did not want to bear anymore being named ‘Dee’ after her oppressors (Walker 300). She believed that name belonged to a culture that was outside her own and that culture had oppressed her people. Her mother and sister on the other hand thought that was a strange name. They had never heard it before and her mother had even asked how it was pronounced.
Walker further uses characterization to present the aspects of break from original heritage and the construction of a new heritage. Dee’s personality is of an educated, sophisticated and outgoing individual who seems to have interacted with diverse cultures to appreciate her own. That is the reason she comes back to her home with an Arabic Man. Everything seems to be important to her. She borrows her mother the dasher and quilts that she hopes to keep as a heritage (Walker 302). When she says to Maggie that it is a new day for them, she means that an era was over and they were beginning a new life. So she hopes to keep those items as remembrances of her heritage and have a sense of identity (Walker 303).
The assessment of Dee about her sister and mother also offers some aspects of characterization. Dee’s assessment to her sister as backward shows how she broke away from original heritage. This illustrates how Dee has constructed a new heritage through education. On the other hand, Maggie was not educated enough nor learned enough. Her mother and sister seem to have a comfortable old habit of the racial segregations that was happening around them. In fact, they seemed to have resigned to oppression. That is why Dee suggests that Maggie should do something for herself since it was a new era.
The short story brings out the aspects of African American heritage through the use of a symbolism to present their culture in the context of slavery. The quilts were used on an everyday basis by the African-American and so were they, by their masters. The author uses characterization to bring out the everyday use of items that are of great value to the African American heritage. The author uses the symbols and characters to create an appreciation of the everyday use of certain important things that communicated the heritage of the African Americans.
Work Cited
Walker, Alice. ‘Everyday Use.’ New York: Longman 1973. Print