Reaction to Everyday Use Essay

E actuallyday habituate is a short news report create verbally by Alice Walker about a family of three, florists chrysanthemum, the narrator, Maggie her youngest daughter, and Dee, her eldest daughter. Both daughters argon comp allowely different, Maggie is a simpler person and Dee is high maintenance. Dee has al miens the home she was brought up in and everything to do with her childhood. She al humanityners requiremented more than and Mama gave her the take up she could. One day, years after Dee has gone off to college, she returns to visit Mama and Maggies new home (the other had been burnt down feather when Dee was silence living with them), and she brings along a man, possibly her husband. When Dee returns she has changed her describe and has come hoping to conceive certain family heirlooms. Walker uses different literary tools to secernate this score in a delegacy that makes the audience recollect about what she is trying to tell the audience.Strategy The main li terary strategy Walker uses in the pen of Everyday Use are chaff and symbolism. Mama and Maggie economic care for the quilts discussed in the story, non as folk art, instead for what they are intended to be used for, a source of warmth. Mama would rather give Maggie the quilts and let her put these quilts to use plain though they may end up ruined because she knows that she is the one that will appreciate and love the quilts the most. Dee wants to in a sense save the quilts from the harm that she is sure that her sister, whom she seems to think is intelligently small will ruin only if she does not understand the true value and worth of these quilts.Dees sudden interest in her heritage and want to embrace different objects from her familys past is obviously seen by her pose as empty. In Mamas eyes the best course to keep the quilts and the love and care that comes with them in the family is to hand them over to Maggie, even if it means them possibly being damaged or worse ye t, destroyed. This is the irony in the story. Many would think that preserving the quilts is the only respectful sort of retention the spirit of their family alive, but instead Mama sees deeper than that, she sees in actuality the best way to keep the spirit of their family alive is to put them to use so that more memories deal be connected to them. Using them in daily livelihood is a way to keep the family bill and spirit alive, and to even join on onto it.Theme The consistent theme of Alice Walkers Everyday Use is appreciating the past, and ones family. This theme was one that I found I could identify with bullyly along with certain aspects of the story. The author skillfully tells us the story of two sisters, Dee, and Maggie, to prove her point. Dee comes home with a new contemporary identity tied to her African heritage, which she believes white men and women have tried and true to take away from her. She now embraces this African heritage and sees it as an great part o f her. She scornfully asks Mama (the narrator) to not address her by the name her spawn gave her, Dee, but to instead call her Wangero, assumed to be a name from her African herritageWhat happened to Dee? I wanted to know. Shes dead, Wangero (Dee) said. I couldnt bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me. Wangero (Dee) assumes and argues with her mother that she has been named after a white man or woman. Mama attempts to convert her that her name was not given to her by a white man or woman but that she was named after her grandmother. Dee resists what her mother has told her and insists that if she were to follow the track that it would go back to a white man or woman. Maggie, is bodacious of her past, she actually embraces it. She has always loved the quilts that her mother and aunt made from dress that her grandmother had pieced.This section of the story is the prime difference between the sisters is revealed Dee would analogous to use the quilts as pi eces of artwork for her own home because it is something that would be chic and argues with her mother that Maggie would be backward enough to put them to everyday use. Dee says this as if it were a bad thing to use the quilts as they were intended to be used but Mama believes that the everyday use, is the best way to value the past, to keep the spirit of the family going and not putting the items up for appearance as if they were in a museum or separating oneself from his or her family.This is something that I can identify with. When I was younger my great-grandmother had always crocheted Afghanis for each of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My cousins had when we were little looked down at these beautiful afghans and wanted instead store bought blankets. I wanted the afghan that my great grandmother had made me and used it often. When we were older, and she had passed away, my one cousin was going done a phase similar to Dees, she was suddenly very intere sted in our family history, and she now wanted the last afghan that my great grandmother made. She ended up being the one to receive the afghan because I did not feel like fighting over it. I did not want to receive it with a fight because I knew that it would brand the meaning for me but I always found it interesting how she changed her understanding once became, for lack of a better word, cool to embrace family history and to like handmade items.Active and Responsive Reading While course session Everyday Use one inference that I made was that the story was set in the early 1970s. I made this inference from the way mama, the narrator, described Dee in the present day. I thought that the dress, accessories, and hair name Dee was described to have seemed to match up to fashion from the early 1970s.Dee is a vain, hypocritical, and condescending individual, this was my impression from my commencement exercise schooling of the story and after reading it twice more, I found that m y impression of Dee did not change from my first reading. Mamma did the best she could for Dee as she grew up. Dee always despised the house they lived in and never saw the house that was built after the fire until she visited. Mamma and their church raised money so that Dee could get a higher(prenominal) education and go off to college.Dee uses her education as a way to look down on her mother and sister. She does not understand why they will not better themselves as she has. In this visit she begins request her mother for things that she had never wanted before and looked down at. She now wants these items not as reminders of her family but more as pieces of art. Two of these items were quilts made by Grandma Dee. In the past when offered these, she had told her mother that the quilts were too old-fashioned, out of dah. Now she thinks that they would make beautiful piecesAlice Walker writes this story I think for every family and every person in a family. In a world where people are consumed with art, fashion, and style, I think she is reminding us that at that place is more to some items than art, fashion, and style. Many times we think the only way to appreciate something is to frame it or put it up for display and not put it to everyday use in fear of ruining it but Walker uses this story to show us that there is more to appreciating something than clean displaying it. Sometimes to best appreciate a piece of ones heritage through an heirloom you should use it for its intended purpose.In conclusion Walker teaches us a lesson about family and keeping the spirit and story of our family alive by not merely displaying our heirlooms but putting them to use. She uses irony to help tell her story and support her theme. Walker chooses a story that people can tie in to and learn from.