Mama In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

Dee is a girl who lived with her mom and her sister Maggie, but she wasn’t like them at all, she was different than her sister and her mother. Mama was collecting money to take Dee to school in Augusta. Dee liked to be fashionable, she always wanted nice things.

The Characters of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” reveals how Differing personalities can create fissures in family ties, their personal choices shaping each other and the feelings they have about one another.

Audrey Petty uses “Late Night Chitlins with Momma” to express her own close bond with her mother and how it shaped her identity; this is expressed through the narrative style, the diction and syntax, the use of food as a metaphor, and the short story’s structure.

Writers and poets often spread deep meaning in ordinary things: bowl can represent our parents’ heritage, food can represent our relationships with people and chocolate bar can be a symbol of childhood or green tea can be a symbol of love. Those simple things can be really meaningful, but mostly all authors understood the meaning of those objects and the value of the moments that they had lived only after several years. To take things for granted is a human nature, isn’t it?

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.

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. She loves them for the way they look. Mama, on the other hand, views the things from her mother as artifacts. She loves the items more than how they look. She admires the quilts because of their everyday use. Transformations take place between these characters. Dee’s transformation is more external than it is internal. She shows her transformation in the way she speaks, the clothes she wears, and her judgement. Mama’s transformation is more internal. She begins to see Dee’s real thoughts, and she stands up against her. When she takes the quilts away from Dee, she doesn’t only stand up for herself, but Maggie, as

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.

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. On the other hand, if the point of view was switched to Dee, the way the reader views her, has a possibility of changing.

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. As the story progresses,

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.

Alice Walker’s Everyday Use (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Literature Sound and Structure 11th ed [Boston: Wadsworth, 2012] 166-173) is a short story told by the mother of two daughters, Mama. The story tells the tale of the return of Mama’s oldest daughter, Dee, and the problems that Dee’s return causes for Mama and her youngest daughter, Maggie. This short story includes humor and irony, displays detailed characterization, and portrays a very effective point of view. These three literary elements contribute to this story by giving insight into the past and the true personalities of the characters, and the way the characters have changed over time.

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 prettiest daughter had a life outside of where her mother was located. The less attractive daughter stayed with her mother and that was probably the best choice for her. “Everyday Use” allows readers to see the conflicts on how culture can be twisted and viewed differently by generations through the theme, characters and symbols.

Alice walker in Everyday Use demonstrates the understanding of African American heritage. Understanding your heritage is important because you should always look back on where you came from. Where you came from is such a big part of who you are and is something know one can take away from you. When you understand your heritage, you get to pass it on to others. Walker does this by using characterization, symbolism, and theme.

A relationship between a mother and a daughter is very difficult to maintain. In the story of "Everyday Use", Mama tells her story of her two different daughters. She explains the dissimilarity of Dee, the oldest daughter who is in college and Maggie, the daughter who remains at home. She tells the story of her two daughters while waiting for Dee 's arrival from college. She describes how different they are and in their storytelling, you can tell their differences. Dee has broken away from her family and has adopted a life on her own, even having a partner by the name of Hakeem-a-barber and changing her name from Dee to Wangero, even though she was named after her Aunt Dee. Dee forgot about her culture and wants the family quilt for the having it as part of the trend. Maggie

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. The oldest daughter, Dee, is an educated young women who redefines her identity and beliefs of her heritage. On the contrary, the youngest daughter, Maggie, leads a traditional lifestyle in the South with her mother and remains faithful to her idea of heritage. The author of the short story, Alice Walker, shares several parallels between her own life and this story. Kathleen Wilson, award winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship