3.5–Alice Walker, “Everyday Use”

Link to Full Text

https://harpers.org/archive/1973/04/everyday-use/

Reading Guide

Story Overview:

The short story “Everyday Use” is about a rural family who has a daughter (Dee/Wangero) who breaks away from her roots, with the goal of to improving her life, and goes to live in the city. College-educated Dee’s mother and her sister, Maggie, are portrayed as simple, hardworking and uneducated country folk. “I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down,” the mother says about herself. She makes a related point about Maggie: “Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly…She knows she is not bright.”

Dee is described as different from the two: “lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure…At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.” One of Dee’s central concerns is the African American civil rights movement; it underlies her return to her African roots and her name change (from Dee to Wangero). Perhaps the story’s prime plot points is Dee/Wangero’s interest in her mother’s quilts, ones she previously labeled as “old-fashioned, out of style.” The story ends with the mother seemingly unimpressed by the changes in her daughter. Uncharacteristically, she insists the quilts Dee wanted would go to Maggie ,who could keep the tradition of quilt-making alive.

Author Bio:

Alice Walker, born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, is an acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, published in 1982. This seminal work, which explores themes of racism, sexism, and resilience, was adapted into a successful film and musical, further cementing Walker’s influence in literature and culture.

Walker grew up in the segregated South and was deeply influenced by her experiences. She attended Spelman College and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing often reflects her commitment to social justice and the African American experience. In addition to her novels, Walker has published numerous collections of poetry and essays.

A prominent activist, Walker has been involved in various causes including civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental justice. Her work continues to inspire and challenge readers around the world, making her a significant figure in contemporary literature and activism.

Major Themes/Questions

1. Dee/Wangero: As we know, Dee/Wangero has moved away from the family home in order to attend college. Additionally, she has returned home, now educated, with a new name (Wangero, meant to highlight her African roots) and a new boyfriend, one whose name (Hakin-a-barber) also harkens back to African ancestry. In one of the story’s pivotal plot points, she now wants the esteemed quilt, but for the purpose of hanging that quilt on the wall.  With that in mind, is Dee/Wangero best read as superficial, interested in black history and racial politics as a matter more of appearance than substance? Also relevant here could be the mention of the Polaroid, an image that scholars have explained both captures a moment of reality and yet preserves, in some sense, only the surface image of that reality. What might we make of Dee’s choices regarding things to be displayed: are they mere decorations? Visible markers of a history/self-knowledge that she carries within her? A marker of her values, if not her interior self? In other words, what do we make of Dee’s displays in conjunction with her interior self/subjectivity?

2. Maggie: Maggie’s choices, obviously, are quite different than are her sister’s. Is this story as simple as validating Maggie and demonizing Dee/Wangero? In thinking about this, we should certainly look to the story’s end (so much there), as well as how Maggie has learned to quilt, and thus has followed in a line of matriarchal tradition. But, why would Walker take such care to make Maggie into a woman whose seems so disembodied? So uncomfortable a physical subject?

3. The mother. Oddly enough, not much scholarship on the mother. Notable that this is indeed her story, and thus any perceptions we get about her daughters are filtered through her eyes. Might that affect how we interpret the two women?

Also useful to think of the mother’s actions in the end, specifically how she gives the quilts to Maggie. In an article on “epiphanies” in this story, Ala Eddin Sadeq contends that the mother has come to a clear understanding (an “epiphany”) about Dee’s superficial behaviors and Maggie’s appreciation for her heritage. Sadeq also contends that the story ends with a stronger bond between Maggie and her mother.

Sadeq’s reading is strong, yet seems to leave some questions unanswered. For example, is Maggie’s final positioning in the text still one in which she is ostracized from (white, heteronormative) centers of power? How about Maggie’s final silence (versus Dee’s final speech). Is such silence disempowering, even if it might seem to be a silence born of resolve and contentment? On a related note, does a woman who cannot/will not talk (in this world we now live in) one who will be overlooked?

Also notable that (as far as I could see, she has very little interior dialogue and is referred to only though herfamilial role (“Mama’) or the  formal “Mrs. Johnson”). What to make of that naming strategy: is “Mama” just a vehicle for telling the stories of those around her? Is she defined only be her role as familial matriarch?  Might the “Mrs.” moniker further such strategies of definition? (remember that the name after Mrs., for a married woman, is generally the name of the spouse–not the person’s own blood-family).

4. Symbolism of Quilts/Quilting: As remarked on in Whitsitt’s article, the quilt is a powerful symbol. It’s place in African American symbols and tradition might be usefully placed alongside its cultural resonance in GLBTQ+ history, specifically the AIDS quilt. In both cases, the quilt seems to collect fragments of a life, and from those fragments to stitch together a whole that can be displayed for public consumption. Thus we get issues of history (personal history becoming a public artifact), both collecting and breaking apart that history, and the loaded question of fragments. T.S. Eliot famously said, near the end of The Waste Land, that “these fragments I have shored against my ruin.” In other words, the piecing together of fragments is, for Eliot, an act of survival. All of these points are usefully thought of in the context of Walker’s story: is the quilt a testament to survival? To history? Public or private? Both? Does it matter than history must be displayed here? Or might the quilt be just a piece of decoration (as Dee seems at times to think). If so, what does in mean that history and lives have become mere accoutrements?

5. Tradition and (vs.?) Modernity: Dee could be separated from Maggie and Mama is her relationship to history and tradition. While it is possible to claim that Dee’s desire to embrace a new name and new identity contrasts with Mama and Maggie’s traditional ways, some things about Dee’ complicate that reading. There is her association with Hakim-a-barber and thus, by extension the Black Panthers. Might Hakin-a-barber/The Panthers also be seeking (or have sought, in historical terms), another kind of relationship to tradition–specifically conection with the African tradition from which people of color were forcibly separated?  Also relevant here is Dee’s new name: if the name is a return to Dee’s African heritage, then how do we situate that relationship to history and tradition? Is the non-American name equally (or more) true to the essence of who Dee is? This multi-layered question/theme highlights the tension between maintaining inherited traditional values and adapting to modern influences.

Note:

For context, might be useful to listen to/watch Alice Alker’s poem on “keeping broken things.”  While Walker makes no clear reference to “Everyday Use,” her meditations on keeping things from the past, and how such things connect to the formation of a person’s history, memories, and even identity, can usefully connect with the story.

Critical Context

Much has been written on Walker, with scholarship ranging from philosophical looks at matrilineal heritage  to socio-cultural analyses of assimilation, African-American history, and quilts/quilting Below are selected articles that should be useful.

Sadeq, Ala Eddin. “Epiphanic Awakenings in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and Alice Walker’s Everyday Use.”  Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, June 2016, pp. 157-160.  DOI: 10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.3p.157

Article Abstract

This paper explores how two short stories from very different backgrounds conclude in a significant epiphany for the characters. Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” are studied to see how the husband in Carver’s work is blinder than his visually-impaired overnight guest, and the college-educated Dee in Walker’s story is more ignorant than her uneducated Mama and sister with learning difficulties. In the husband’s case in “Cathedral,” once he is forced to interact with someone unfamiliar he has an eye-opening experience and is led to the realization of how blind he has been. Walker’s Mama also has her own epiphany at the climax of the short story and her demeanor changes, becoming more assertive than before.

Whitsitt, Sam. ” ‘In Spite of It All’: A Reading of Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.”  African American Review, vol. 34, no. 3, Oct. 2000, pp. 443-459.

Article Abstract:

Whitsitt discusses Alice Walker’s use of quilting as a metaphor for storytelling in Alice Walker’s popular short story “Everyday Use.”

Excerpt from First Paragraph: Paralleling the success of Walker’s story has been that of another cultural artefact, the quilt, which since the Sixties has undergone a rather spectacular revaluation, moving from the position it held as a symbol of gossipy women’s sewing circles to becoming, by the Seventies, the central metaphor of American cultural identity” (Showalter 215). […] As Barbara Christen writes in the first paragraph of her introduction, it is in “Everyday Use” (1973) and “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” (1974) that Walker first articulates the metaphor of quilting to represent the creative legacy that African Americans have inherited from their maternal ancestors” (3). While Walker was not the first to write about the quilt in the Afro-American experience, and she certainly has been one of the most influential writers in rearticulating the value of the quilt and in contributing to its success in the collective imagination at large.

Farrell, Susan. “Fight vs. Flight:  A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Alker’s ‘Everyday Use.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 25, issue 2, 1998, pp. 179-186.

Article Abstract:

Farrell argues that while the character Dee in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” is certainly insensitive and selfish to a certain degree, she nevertheless offers a view of heritage and a strategy for contemporary African Americans to cope with an oppressive society that is, in some ways, more valid than that offered by the characters Mama and Maggie.

Klimiuk, Magdalena. “Conundrums of Assimilation: Rethinking the World Presented in Phillip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith’ and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.'”  Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 4-25.

Article Abstract: