Everyday Use

In Alice Walker's Everyday Use, we discover Mama and her two daughters, Maggie, who still lives at home, and Dee, a cosmopolitan young lady who lives away from her family. The story opens with Mama's announcement that she and Maggie are waiting on the return of Dee for a visit. We know that Dee has been favored by her mother and Dee seems to Maggie to live in a world that has never denied her desires. As the story opens, the narrator, Mama, tells us: "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon," (Walker, p. 1173).

Like the return of a princess, Mama and the "hangdog" and "slow" Maggie await Dee's return. However, we are told that "Maggie will be nervous until her sister goes," (Walker, p. 1173). She will be nervous because she has always been devalued in comparison to Dee by her mother and, once she returns, by Dee herself. While Mama is complicit in Dee's being favored, when Dee demands the quilts made by Mama's mother that are for Maggie's wedding gift, Mama finally puts her foot down and favors Maggie at Dee's expense. This is because Mama realizes that despite Dee's qualities, she has more in common with Maggie and they share a greater mother and daughter bond and connection to their heritage than Dee ever will.

We see that Mama makes many distinctions between her daughters Maggie and Dee that favor Dee. Maggie has dark-skin but "Dee is lighter" and has "nicer hair and a fuller fig

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r Grandma Dee without the quilts," (Walker, p. 1179). In this we see the bond of sisterhood between Mama and Maggie and we see Maggie's recognition that the quilts are more than just a fine piece of craftsmanship; they are symbolic of her heritage and cultural history. Even though she is slow, scarred, skinny, and awkward, Maggie can quilt like her namesake Grandma Dee. It is Mama, who has long perceived Dee as superior to Maggie, who must come to the recognition of this power and connection in Maggie. As Gruesser (p. 183) writes of this moment of awareness that hits Mama when she denies Dee and embraces Maggie: "It is at this moment in the story that Mama has her epiphany, realizing that her thin, scarred, pathetic daughter, who knows how to quilt and serves as her family's oral historian, deserves the quilts more than her shapely, favored, educated daughter, Dee, who only wants the quilts because they are now fashionable." The greatest symbol in Everyday Use that is related to Mama's epiphany that Maggie is more bonded to her heritage and her than Dee is, of course, the quilts. Quilted by "Grandma," the quilts are an oral history, a voice of a people who were historically marginalized and silenced by a racist white culture

Category: Literature -