“Everyday Use”: Understanding heritage

When reading, ”Everyday Use” and other stories by Walker such as, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, you really get the opinion of how Walker perceives the so called, “everyday” activities of the women in her stories. While Dee believes that she is becoming closer to her ancestors by changing her name, she is actually rejecting the name of the people that are directly related to her. She believes that an African-American woman’s everyday work should be viewed and respected as a valued art form, yet it must be kept close to the heart and to the family that it came from. Not kept at a distance as the character Dee would have done.

Alice Walker tells us with this story that we need to keep our family ties close to us. These blankets are used all of the time, they have been consistently used since she made them. I believe that these are the kinds of ideals that Walker is trying to get across in this story through the character of Maggie. My mothers’ recipe for piecrust is a well-known thanksgiving tradition. They mostly consist of family recipes. Dee does not want the others because they were partially stitched by machine. The point-of-view of Maggie and her mother in this story are very similar, more similar to each other than to Dee. Each daughter has two very different ideas on how these quilts should be treated. Then Maggie says that Dee can have the quilts because she can remember her grandmother without them.

But she also believes that you need to have a close relationship to your family’s history and not separate yourself from it the way that the character Dee does.