Critical analysis of everyday use by Alice Walker

Everyday Use by a. Walker Order

Alice Walker

There have and are well-known authors that literature students are introduced to and discussed because of the intensity, reasons, persona, and literary devices that the authors add to works they publish. Using writing techniques, like Alice Walker has done in "Everyday Use" she originally wrote in 1973, she sets the scene from a place in her time when she was living life and facing the facts and realities of prejudice people in America that were directly mean to her for being an African-American. However, when Walker went to these extremes for her readers, she became one of many of the bestselling novelists in which some of her work turned in to motion pictures like her major fiction The Color Purple A Native to Georgia, Walker, as an African-American her main themes to the stories she chose to write about had a lot to do with the reflection of living in America as a black woman who wanted to be treated like her white native neighbors and have equal rights like the whites had over blacks at one time. Her creative writing skills were from gender issues, children's stories, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, abuse to women through mutilation, and racial stories from her own persona that she has in writing what she does. However, before her hit the story Everyday Use in 1973, begins with the storyline that starts out with Mama, an African-American women living during the 1950s and 1960s when segregation was highly common and tolerated, who is standing out in the yard awaiting for her daughter, Dee to come to her house to visit even though she knows that her other daughter, Maggie is anxious about Dee's arrival and insecure about the scars, burns, and other cruel marks that made Dee's life seem easier than her sister's that still had a pretty simple life that Maggie really envied. However, Mama was constantly dreaming of Dee and Maggie getting along when Dee arrived in hopes for her to stay, however, Mama knows during hard times in society and within her home along with how the poverty and unequal human rights were a main stress within her household and the fragile bonds between Mama and her daughters could easily keep Mama unhappy and stressed.

It is obvious that with Walker's own personal background it is closely related to the story within the literature, and it is obvious that Alice has her own issues with segregation, family problems, being different as a child, having troubling siblings, and Walker's persona is evident in the plots that lead up to the climax. While Walker talks in third person she does an exceptional well job of imagining how a mother would act during this time in history, and why the Mama character would have different fantasies about her daughter Dee coming home and embracing her because she remembers a time over 10 years ago when their house burned to the ground and she struggled getting Maggie safe, and that is why Maggie still had evident severe burns because back then there was no removing scars just watching them fade and get smaller.

The plots that occur in this story is appropriate for the era of time that this supposed story was supposed to have happened in, and nowadays there is more ways to help low income households and single parents, like Mama, that can help in addition to her community to find a way to come up with enough funding to see to it that Dee made it to a school in Augusta. Yet, Mama is furious with her daughter, Dee, her looks, her different ethnic looking boyfriend, and appalled by what she is wearing when they finally arrive. In those days a mother felt that what her daughter did outside the home, how she dressed, her attitude, and everything else was expected that the child act as they are setting an example for how they were raised so they won't be thought less of. Over the past half century, couples who have had children have became less worried about where their children and their safety and what are they doing and if they are behaving as each generation becomes teenagers and more on their own, yet Mama tries to control Maggie and Dee's attitudes toward one another, and she is proper like women were back then by not saying things that were on their mind that hurt their children.

During this time in history, there was very little or only secretive interracial dating, yet Dee arrives with a more than willing attitude to show off her new boyfriend, yet like most parents in those days, they did not tolerate nor would they allow their children to date outside of their race. Especially within the white families who would forbid their child to be around "colored people" let along ever date someone who is a different skin color. Back then, it was very rare that anyone was ever around other people besides their color unless it had to do something with working for a living and having to communicate to get the work done. Walker also mentions that Dee changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo to show her hate toward the people who have demoralized her in her lifetime of being segregated in America, which this also goes to support the timeframe that the setting was supposed to have taken place in.

Yet, the irony arises when Mama wonders why Dee would go to such an extent to not be associated with white people that hate on black people because actually, she named Dee after a family member, but Dee asks her mama to call her by her new name as Mama. This situation is delivering a message to how Mama's own daughter is acting just like the white people who show their hate toward black people, regardless of what color can tend to act like if they do not like people of a different color in a society where different color then meant you were not equal if you were not white. Today, interracial dating is still criticized by it is by far from abnormal, and when Dee and her boyfriend arrive, Mama thinks he is Muslim from the name he has which there were some who lived close by, however, Hakim-a-barber recognizes who he is as being made out in the story to not accept the person he was before he met Dee because even though they are of different heritage they should be accepted and respected. Mama's attitude is more of a calmer reaction than many mothers in her time would have reacted if their child arrived with a boyfriend with a different skin color. Yet, times have changed, and most people if they do not accept they just overlook and do not say anything anymore because it is so very common in today's society.