Alice Walker - Everyday Use

I though the short story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker was very hard to understand.  This story seemed to jump around quite a bit.  One of the themes in this short story was the troublesome power of education.  Mama struggled to send Dee to a good school.  Education seems to be more disruptive than beneficial to Dee’s relationship with her family.  Mama was deprived of an education.  As a child her school was closed and no one attempted to reopen it.  There were many things that set Mama on the road to a life of hard work such as racism, passive acceptance, and forces beyond her control.  Dee was very fortunate that Mama gave her the opportunity for advantages and improvements even though they have only served to create a wedge between Dee and the rest of the family.  Dee uses her intelligence to bully others.  With all her education and knowledge she is a threat to the simple world that Mama and Maggie live in.  She is determined to hold her knowledge over them.  Not only has education separated Dee from her family but it has also separated Dee from a true sense of self.  With high ideals and educational opportunity came a loss of sense of heritage, background, and identity, which only the family can provide.  Dee arrives at the family home as a strange, threatening ambassador of a new world, a world that has left Maggie and Mama behind.  Some characteristics of Dee’s world are civil rights, greater visibility, and zero tolerance for inequality.  Dee has no respect for anything but her world which leads her to separate herself from her roots.  Maggie doesn’t know any world except for the one that she comes from.  She is uneducated and can only read haltingly.  Maggie has held back her own self-fulfillment by doing what she is told and accepting the conditions of her sheltered life without any questions.  Through all this is revealed an ironic contradiction.  Dee’s greedy journey for knowledge has led her to separation from her family.  The lack of education has harmed and suppressed Maggie.  Education and the lack of it have been dangerous for the sisters.  The quilts in this short story focus on the bonds between women of different generations and their enduring legacy.  There is a strong connection between the generations.  Dee’s arrival and lack of understanding of her history shows that those bonds are very weak.  The connection between Aunt Dicie and Mama, the skilled seamstresses who made the quilts, is very different from the connection between Maggie and Dee, sisters who share just a word and have almost nothing in common.  Dee does not understand the legacy of her name that has been passed along through four generations.  She also does not understand the significance of the quilts.  The quilts contain pieces of clothes that were once worn or owned by at least a century’s worth of ancestors.  The quilts are pieces of living history.  They serve as a testament to the family’s history of pride and struggle.  Mama considers her personal history one of her few treasures.                            

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Everyday Use.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.