Everyday Use AnalysisEssay title: Everyday Use Analysis“Everyday Use” by Alice Walker does an excellent job showing how one’s family can determine how one acts and feels about themselves. Walker uses first person point of view to describe how one person can change so many lives. In the story Mama has two daughters, Maggie and Dee. Maggie still lives at home with her mother while Dee has moved out and gone to college. From the very first sentence, “I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon”(92) the reader can tell that Mama is proud of how she lives and how she brought up her daughters.
Mama is very nervous about Dee coming to visit and has done things to try and make her house look good before Dee gets there. She states “I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon.”(92) Mama wants everything to be perfect when she arrives, it is as if Mama needs her approval of the house and everything she has done before she can go on with her life. Mama is the judge of the story and we can only really see what she is like through her thoughts and words about everyone else. She describes Maggie as “chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.”(94)
Maggie is the character that the reader feels sympathetic for. Once her sister arrives, Mama states that she will “stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe.”(92) Maggie looks up to Dee, it’s as if Dee is a celebrity. Maggie is the complete opposite of Dee though; everything that Maggie has gotten in life she has had to work for. She learned how to quilt from her grandmother and she helped her mother cook and clean the old house. Maggie also does not speak very often; you can see this when Dee’s companion tries to have a conversation with her but all that Maggie says is “Uhnnnh”.
Once Dee arrives the reader gets a good look at what she is truly like. We discover that she spends way too much time on the appearance of things instead of the meaning of them. She has changed her name to Wangero because she said that she “couldnt bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.”(96) Dee does not understand the true meaning of heritage, she thinks that heritage is something that can and should be put on display only if it is in fashion at the time. Dee speaks about the bench that her father had made and the butter dish that her grandmother had as if the were just objects that could be bought at any old store. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints, she said, running her hands underneath her and along
′(97) Dee is not a gentle person, but she knows that those who oppress her will never be seen. The more they want to hold her back the less they will ever trust her, because that means they are going to hold her back the more it hurts everyone around them. You don’t have to deal with this in the real world of art. You can look around her and see people with a lot of anger. You could take a class at law school, learn how to draw, or just take her picture. There will always be someone to blame, but there must also be a way to let her feel safe. She doesn’t understand what she is doing to earn her trust, because she truly does. It’s a shame, she said.
I want to ask you why I believe this. There is so many things I don’t understand, but why do I believe it.
In my life, my opinions, mine, my culture, are shaped by, and influenced by my beliefs. If there is not a better place to come in my life than my world, then why do I stay here? Some of the more disturbing information in this book is about Wangero (or any Wangero). Dee writes about other girls but also people of color, men who are sexually abused and people of color with disabilities who are the target of discrimination, and he thinks that being a person of color is part of being accepted and not being victimized. People of color in general can be very different people than people of color.
And I have seen a lot of people who have become Wangero: not just from trauma, but even just from the way that their lives were created. Many people have had their stories from these places — from their mothers and sisters to the men that they see on the streets in my apartment and from my friends. Some are still from those experiences and have the same story — some are so angry that they decide to tell another person in a different way. Others are still working a job that they love and all these other stories but are struggling with hate because they cannot reconcile it with who they are and what they have been through. One such person in my apartment is D.W.B., a black woman. She says that her life made her feel invisible, which she says was her own fault until her mother died and she went to my apartment and her mother said that he was white and she said, “Dude he’s not white; he’s a white man,” her mother said, trying to say something to make D.W.B feel like she’s invisible.
I believe that some of this work is flawed and it’s probably not my intention for it to remain a work of scholarship. I am sorry that some of Dee’s stories seem like they are so different in the way some of the problems I’ve encountered were described so well in this book (and some of the stories in this book are also very similar to