Each person is raised within a culture, a set of traditions handed down by those before us. As individuals, we view and experience common heritage in subtly differing ways. Within smaller communities and families, deeply felt traditions serve to enrich this common heritage. "Everyday Use" explores how, in her eagerness to claim her heritage, a woman may deny herself the experience of ancestral traditions. The central theme of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" concerns the way in which an individual understands her present life in relation to the traditions of her people's past culture.
             "Everyday Use" opens as the narrator and her youngest daughter, Maggie, await a visit from the older daughter, Dee, and a man who may be her husband-her mother is not sure whether they are actually married. Dee, who was always scornful of her family's way of life, has gone to college and now seems almost as distant as a film star. Indeed, her mother imagines being reunited with her on a television show such as "This Is Your Life," where the celebrity guest is confronted with her humble origins. Maggie, who is not bright and who bears severe burn scars from a house fire many years before, is even more intimidated by her glamorous sibling.
             When Dee arrives, she tells her mother and Maggie that they do not understand their own "heritage," because they plan to put "priceless" heirloom quilts to "everyday use." This is especially ironic that Dee wants these quilts now for their artistic value since the narrator had offered them to Dee earlier when she had left to head off to college. She had declared then that, "they were old-fashioned, out of style."(330) The story makes apparent that Dee is likewise confused about the nature of her heritage both from her immediate family and from the larger black tradition.
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