Analysis of The Short Story “The Everyday Use”
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Analysis of the short story “The Everyday Use” by Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s short story, “The Everyday Use,” tells Dee, her mum, and her younger sister Maggie. They live together with a conventional and straightforward life. A contradiction emerges as Dee tries to demand two old quilts her mother had previously promised Maggie. Their definition of cult and tradition is a conflict. This concise description conveys the truth momentarily and the subject discussed in the short story to the public. This story’s core focus is how various people perceive their culture in contrast to their present lives.
Walker considers the writing as her tool to propagate her term and to deal with her own family and children’s interactions. Her writing illustrates the complicated relations of the ordinary by posing them in the sense of uncertainty and change; it shows the harsh-lying mask of African American women’s lives, as she explains.
The story’s start is primarily about Mrs. Johnson, Dee’s mom, and the story’s narrator. Walker’s vocabulary refers to a particular relationship between herself and her physical environment. It is like the expanded lounge. Walker suggests that the narrator acknowledge who she is and where she stands in her community’s background in the novel. She is not just a courtyard; she says “in the yard which Maggie and I made clean and wavy.” (Walker, 1994, p.88) The plot comes to a satisfactory conclusion.
These women looked for independent identity, inspired by the feminist activism of the time. In my view, Walker would like to express that tradition and patrimony are no shifts of names or new hair, not embracing them for the sake of a fashion but being learned from generation to generation. The quilts, the traditional symbol for heritage, demonstrate this idea of tradition.
References
Walker, A. (1994). Everyday use. Rutgers University Press.