Blood Feuds
In the stories Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty and Everyday Use by Alice Walker, one can see the theme of sibling rivalry. Sibling rivalry is a type of competition between children. The children compete for the attention and approval of their family members and peers, against one another through their various accomplishments, both of which are very prominent in the stories. Even after growing up, sibling rivalry still exists. While sibling rivalry can sometimes be healthy for a relationship, it can also harm relationships.
In Why I Live at the P.O. the sibling rivalry is between sister and Stella-Rondo. Sister tells the story from her point of view where one can see the sister is jealous and resents her sister Stella-Rondo. In Sisters family, lying and misinterpreting the truth on purpose are a daily part of their conversations. They do this for no reason so much that it seems to have become a habit for the family. This is especially true for Sister and Stella-Rondos relationship. Throughout the story one can see examples of how Stella-Rondo twists Sisters words and turns the family against her, giving Sister reason to resent her.
For example, when Stella-Rondo shows up back home unexpectedly, instead of being happy about the arrival of her sister, she immediately remembered how Stella-Rondo supposedly broke up her and Mr. Whitaker, a photographer, by creating a lie about Sister. While Sister seems to be at odds with her whole family throughout the story, she especially holds a grudge against sister for stealing away Mr. Whitaker. Sister does not believe Stella-Rondo when she says that her 2 year old daughter, Shirley-T, is adopted. When Sister makes a comment about how Shirley-T looks just like a cross between Mr. Whitaker and Papa-Daddy (Welty, 43), Stella-Rondo gets angry at sister for mentioning her daughter after asking her not to, so she creates a lie telling Papa-Daddy that Sister says she does not understand why he will not cut his beard. For Papa-Daddy, this is an insult. So by telling him this, Papa-Daddy turns against Sister when in actuality Sister said nothing of the like.
This shows how Stella-Rondo and Mama exaggerate Sisters words or claim that she has made a mean spirited observation when she really had not done or said anything wrong.
However, even with all the constant feuding in the family between the sisters, the family connection in the story becomes evident when Sister actually moves away after the family has turned against her. Even living on her own in the post office, Sister keeps track of what her family is saying about her by listening to the town folk talk about it when they come into the post office.
The same things cannot be said for Mamas family in the story Everyday Use. In this story, Mama is waiting for Dee to come back home, and while Dee is married just like Stella-Rondo, Dee is not separating from her husband when she comes home. Instead, she is coming home to visit and to let her husband and family meet for the first time.
Dee is commanding and overbearing, while Maggie, her sister, is meak and shy. While Dee went to school and received an education, Maggie stayed at home with her mother, too self-conscious about her burn scars to compete against her sister academically.
She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didnt necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. (Walker, 457)
In this quote, Mama is talking about when Dee returned home and was full of a lot more knowledge than her and Maggie. Instead of Mama being extremely proud of Dee and all of her intellectual accomplishments, Mama feels intimidated by Dee. Mama feels as though Dees knowledge will threaten the safety of their home like the fire destroyed their first home. Dee uses her highly educated background to make her family feel lower than her. Dee basically uses her intelligence to belittle the rest of her family members. This makes Mama start to resent the fact that she neglected her own schooling. While thinking about her neglected schooling, she starts to gain more endurance and physical strength. Here, education is portrayed as something that could bring destruction to individuals. With education, one is exposed to so many different worlds that will never be explored. If one does not have an education, then the exposure to all of the possibilities in the world are not even in the picture. Maggie had to live with the pain of not knowing for herself about the world, and her sister Dees excessive knowledge of the things that she will never fully understand.
Although Sisters family is connected to each other in a twisted way through their lies, Dee is separated from her family through her education. While Dee was at school getting an education, Maggie was home learning about her family background and gaining skills that only a family can teach one another. In this way, Maggie has something that not even Dee can hold over her. This is proven when Dee asks Mama for the old quilts that Grandma made (Walker, 460). When Mama points out that she was saving those for Maggie when she was to get married, Maggie says that Dee can have them (Walker, 460).
Maggies reasoning for this is that she will always have the memory of making the quilts with Grandma, while Dee will just have the quilt. By Maggie knowing of her true family heritage, while Dee just tries to create an image of her family heritage by dressing, talking, and decorating all the right way, Maggie can compete against her sister in that way even though Dee claims that Maggie cannot appreciate them because she doesnt understand her heritage (Walker, 460). Maggie would rather have the memories of how something came to be other than just the article itself. She feels as though she does not need to know about the heritage of her family. As long as she gets to experience things with them while they are still around is what matters to Maggie. That is her way of learning about her family heritage. By sitting and talking with her family, Maggie most likely has a better understanding of her familys heritage.
While Dee gives herself a new name as a way to give herself a connection to her past, she makes her identity unstable. She is attempting to transform herself and embrace what she considers to be her true heritage, while Maggie and Mama stay stagnant and actually know of their heritage and understand the true meaning of it. Mama and Maggie understand that the quilts represent their heritage, but the bond that is formed in the making of the quilts, which both of them have, is just as equally important.
Sibling rivalries come in all different forms. In almost every family with more than one child in the household, some sort of jealousy or resentment eventually comes up. It may not be in the most extreme form, but normally, siblings have some sort of competition going on between them. Middle children may be more likely to be jealous of the oldest and youngest child. Sometimes they feel as though they have to fight more for the attention of their parents. The youngest child can tend to have the most resentment coming their way. The other children feel as though the parents may love the baby of the family more because they were the last child to be born in the family. The oldest child tends to have a lot of jealousy towards the youngest. They can sometimes feel as though their parents love them a little less because the new baby came along. They have their time when they are the only child and they feel as though they can never get that feeling back. That feeling of being their parents pride and joy, and having all of the attention being on them. All in all, sibling rivalries can be healthy for siblings to experience or it can be the thing that tears a family apart.
Gioia, Dana, X. J. Kennedy. Everyday Use Alice Walker. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. 2010
Gioia, Dana, X. J. Kennedy. Why I Live at the PO EudoraWelty. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. 2010
sibling rivalry. Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. http://merriam-webster.com (20 November 2011)
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