Most people would likely agree that preserving one’s cultural heritage is a meaningful and worthy pursuit. However, people also tend to disagree on what is the best way to proceed with it. Maintaining African American cultural legacy features prominently as a theme in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.” The author uses the first-person perspective and names to create a sense of distance between the conflicting characters and ultimately highlight which approach to preserving one’s heritage is better.
The feature that defines “Everyday Use” as a literary piece is, first and foremost, the first-person perspective the author chooses to use. The audience sees the events of the short story through Mama’s eyes, an aging African American woman who is both the protagonist and the narrator. This perspective impacts how the reader sees the other two principal characters of the story, namely, Mama’s daughters – Dee and Maggie. When Maggie first enters the story, Mama compares her to “a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car,” using a simile designed to invoke empathy and compassion (Walker 1). Yet when thinking about Dee, the older and better-educated daughter, Mama remembers how she disturbed her and Maggie with “knowledge [they] didn’t necessarily need to know” (Walker 2). A seemingly positive trait – being knowledgeable and willing to share this knowledge with family members – becomes something negative in Mama’s eyes due to being associated with Dee. Thus, the author employs the first-person perspective to emphasize the protagonist’s perception of her two daughters and paint an unflattering picture of Dee while eliciting sympathy for Maggie.
Apart from the perspective, Walker also uses names to create distance between Mama and Dee. When the older daughter arrives, she quickly announces that her name is not Dee anymore, but Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, as she does not want to be named after her oppressors (Walker 3). In truth, Mama named Dee not after some abstract oppressor, but after a long line of her relative going all the way “beyond the Civil War” (Walker 2). By refusing to use her old name, given to her after her ancestors, Dee quite literally renounces her heritage. Notably enough, in the very next sentence, Mama is already thinking about Dee as Wangero (Walker 3). The distance between Dee and her mother is already significant enough so that Mama would accept the new symbolical act of separation immediately, and the author’s choice of names stresses this fact.
The story culminates in a conflict between Mama and Dee regarding the fate of the hand-sewn quilts that have been in the family from the times of the Civil War. Dee wants to take them to the city and put on a display in a museum to preserve them. Mama, on the other hand, decides to stand up to her daughter and insists that Maggie should have the quilts, as she was promised. The thought that Maggie could be “backward enough to put them to everyday use” and wear them down mortifies Dee (Walker 5). To this, Mama replies: “She can always make some more… Maggie knows how to quilt” (Walker 6). While Dee thinks about preserving her African American heritage by displaying in a museum, as an artifact of a dead civilization, Maggie lives in this heritage and not merely preserves, but reproduces it.
As one can see, “Everyday Use” employs different devices to make a statement on preserving African American cultural legacies. The first-person perspective enlists the audience to the narrator’s side, and the latter is clearly predisposed to her younger daughter Maggie over the older Dee. The use of names also contributes to creating a distance between Dee and Mama and portraying the former as the one who disregards her legacy. As a result, when the story reaches its culmination, the reader is already prepared to side with Mama and Maggie against Dee and agree that the best way of preserving cultural heritage is not sealing it away in a museum but putting it to the titular everyday use.
Work Cited
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” Aiken County Public School District, 2020. Web.