Everyday Use
...wins hands down over her older sister, Dee, whom, from what seems the beginning, has been her family’s ultimate representation of the externally cosmopolitan, debased, and contemporarily delusional woman “getting-in-touch-with-her-inner-self-through-learning-about-her-heritage-in-a-white-and-‘americanized’-educational-institution.” And, whereas Maggie is the soft, gentle, and truly “educated” woman of their ancestors as shown through Alice Walker’s quilt motif utilized in her story, “Everyday Use.”
First, consider Dee, also known as “Wangero,” as she likes to call herself because she says she can no longer bear being named (and called) after the people who oppress her (Walker 29). This woman, the very same person that was borne of the same mother as Maggie, has a totally different outlook of and approach to life than her counterpart. As mama describes it, she is the type of person that “wanted nice things” and one whom, from sixteen, “had a style of her own: and knew what style was” (26). Additionally, that she is a woman of “flair,” “brightness,” and “intense colorfulness of style which veritably blocks the sun,” as Houston A. Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker speak of in their critical essay on Alice Walker’s use of the quilt in “Everyday Use” (“Patches: Quilts and Community”159). Her outlook seems to be for great aesthetics and grandeur provided by and through her artificial (non-functional) definition of art and heritage illustrated, for example, in her want to use the churn top whittled by her Uncle Buddy as a centerpiece for her alcove instead of as an actual churn top, and, her mother’s quilt to be hung rather than used (Walker 31; 33). In her obvious misunderstanding of the term “heritage,” she defines it as objects (the bench, quilt, etc.) rather than the people who preserve its traditions through participation in them—people, like her sister, who...
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