Everyday Use is one of black women writer Alice Walkers most popular short stories. The story opens in first-person point of view, and its language is popular, humor and vivid. The plot is not complicated, it mainly about a conflict aroused by two quilts within the black mother, the well-educated first daughter Dee and the cowardly little daughter Maggie. This story deeply reflects, in setting of 1960s African-American Civil Rights Movement, the mother and the two daughters the attitudes toward their national culture traditions and American black womens living state. It reveals the authors aim to opposite to whites racial segregation and discrimination and her attention and exploration to black womens spirit and consciousness. This paper analyzes the three black womens spirit worlds and their symbolic significance in terms of Feminine Consciousness, in order to protrude the literature theme of the novel.
As a practitioner of black female literature writing, Alice Walker explores, in her unique eye, the black womens social relationship, living state and spiritual pursuit. In this novel, the author portrays three black women, the mother and the two daughters. The mother in the novel, who is strong, capable, hardworking, undereducated, poor but optimistic, is a typical black woman and represents the common American black people. As the novel describes, the black mother of two girls is a large, big-bone woman with rough, man-working hands(Walker, 2011,para. 5). In the winter she wears flannel night gowns to bed and overalls during hot in zero weather (Walker, 2011, para. 5). She can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man (Walker, 2011, para. 5). Her fat keeps her hot in zero weather. She can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; she can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog This segment of self-state description to the mother is figurative and vivid, in which way to emphasize the toil the mother stands while she was bringing her two daughters up by herself. She has no extraordinary ability, the living and working skills she has learned are inherited from ancestor. Yet, these skills make her train a sturdy physique and independent and indomitable personality. In the front of culture, she outguesses the culture movement, understands truly the meaning of culture and heritage, and makes a right choice for the ownership of the heritage at last. The mothers emotion to Dee is complex. She is proud of Dees success, personal capabilities and good appearance, but dislikes Dees selfish and egoism. In spite of this, the mother still well prepared for her daughters coming one day in advance. Just like Maggie, the mother is also looking forward the coming of culture nationalism movement will bring a glimmer of ameliorate and hope. When they meet, the mother appeases to her daughter as much as possible: when Dee abandons the name her family gave her, the mother constrains the disappointment in her heart to try to remember her new name and accept her weird boyfriend; to give her some necessary that her little daughter likes. These show the mothers leniency and love to daughter. In the whole process, what the mother values are the harmonious family relationship and the preservation of the nations traditional culture. From the deep sense, as a black woman, the mother shows the approval to the black nation and the deep love for blacks culture and life. Therefore, the author takes this great black mother as the representative to the delivery of the black peoples culture and as the extreme capture of the blacks cultural tradition. Walker wants to carry forward the black peoples traditional culture, through this great black mother, and makes it exist forever.
Maggie represents the deliverer of blacks traditional culture. In the novel, Walker uses Maggie to stands for the ignored and disregarded inheritor of black peoples traditional culture. As the second child in the family, Maggie has no the good gene and luck that Dee has. She is ugly and clumsy, cowardly and self-based and inner-warded. In the novel, the mother gives more detailed description about Maggies appearance: have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground(Walker, 2011, para. 5). Under the Whites Slavery, African-American suffered severely both in spirit and in physical. In front of whites, black women are very tame and dutiful. They dare not to see whites squarely, and also dare not to claim their reasonable and proper demands. Maggie was growing up by the side of her mother. In the daily life, she learned how to use the manual utensils delivered by ancestors. Like her mother, she understands her family history, knows the origin of everything in her family, and the more praiseworthy is she has learned how to sew quilts from her mother and her aunt.
Dee represents the kind of person who overturns the blacks traditional culture. Dee is a rebel in the black women, especially in the attitude to treat blacks traditional culture; the author describes very clear the apparels Dee wears when she came home: A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out (Walker, 2011, para. 20). It can be said that Dee is the typical representative of black women who has accepted whites culture and has been educated by white culture, but, as a black women in new era, she has been away from black culture root while she is realizing independence. The mother also mentions in the novel, she liked good things when she was little. When their old house became ash in the fire, she did not feel sad at all and even exulted over it. She hated to that old house badly. In terms of there, we can see Dees mind-set has already changed. The female ego she sought has deviated from the traditional orientation. In Everyday Use, all the three female characters have the apparent social features, and they reflect the blacks, especially the black womens living style at that time. Through them, the author refracts the black womens creativity and spiritual pursuit, and eulogizes their sense of duty to the maintenance and deliverance of the black traditional culture. At the same time, Walker conveys a salient viewpoint that the deliverance of cultural heritages is neither through the change of their names, nor through the change of raiment and hairstyle. In fact, she emphasizes on the inner inevitability of cultural heritage, and denies the superficial understanding to it, whereas, behind the cultural heritage, the author reveals the black womens different modes of self-realization.
Reference
Walker, A. (2011). Everyday use. In D.L. Pike and A.M. Acosta's (Eds.) Literature: A world of writing stories, poems, plays, and essays [VitalSource digital version] (p. 278). Boston, MA: Pearson Learning Solutions.
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