Family Threads and Everyday Use

             By contrasting family members in “Everyday Use”, Alice Walker illustrates the importance of understanding our present life in relation to the traditions of our own people and culture. While the story clearly endorses Mama’s functional and unsophisticated perspective on heritage over Dee’s misplaced reverence for material goods, it does not condemn Dee’s struggle to move beyond the limits of her impoverished youth. The conflict between Mama and Maggie, the younger sister, and Dee, the older sister, stems from the women’s poverty-stricken past and continues to stretch to the present day. As a child, Dee had always “wanted nice things.” (Walker, 2) She was unsatisfied with her family’s simple life and rural home in the deep south and yearned for an education and emigration from her limited life at home. Her excellent grades, the kindness of the local church and the diligence of her mother won her a scholarship to a better school in a different town. She would read to her crudely educated mother and sister “forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice.” (Walker, 2) Dee’s intense desire for an education and a better life isolated her from family and consequently, from her family’s heritage. Mama and Maggie, however, never left their family’s traditions. Mama is a hard-working, strong woman like her mother and grandmother before her, while Maggie lives her families past, cherishing the memories and remembering all the stories “like an elephant” (Walker, 6).
             Although Dee and Maggie are dissimilar to each other, they each possess specific personality traits of the author as well as the common background of growing up in the rural south, the setting for many of Walker’s stories. Through Dee and Maggie Johnson, Walker tries to reconcile the duality an
             ...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
Family Threads and Everyday Use. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 18:33, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/58278.html