Function of \"Everyday Use\" Form

¶ … Function of "Everyday Use"

Form follows function is a tried and true aphorism in architecture as well as literature. Just as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is built to showcase the natural beauty of water (it's literally built over a waterfall), a successful short story must be wrought in a way that emphasizes the soul of the story. Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" is a story about many things, family, identity, race, and culture, but at the end of the day the story's purpose is to have an affect on the reader.

And so, to maximize this affect, Walker's story is told anachronistically, revealing plangent details of the characters' lives and experiences that appeal to the reader's empathetic sensibilities before the main action takes place. That is to say, if the story had started off on page 51, and simply recounted the quilt episode absent the details in the back-story, the reader would not be affected in the same way, instead, the reader would feel as though he/she had just watched paint dry.

Walker wants the reader to be engaged with the hard, provincial upbringing of the story's main characters. She wants the reader to know that life has not been easy for the protagonist or her daughters. But Walker also wants to create separation, the protagonist and Maggie on one side and Dee on the other. Although, life has been hard for all of them, Dee has had a different approach, perhaps even a break in life that Maggie has certainly not had. The mother explains, "She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her" (Walker 47). Right here the reader recognizes the otherness Dee possesses. Whereas Maggie, like her mother, is provincial, Dee is worldly or cultured. Dee is described as having style, whereas the mother is self-described as "large, big boned with rough, man-working hands" (Walker 47).

Then there's this description of Maggie that is quite heartrending, compared to the image the reader has developed of Dee, "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? This is the way my Maggie walks" (Walker 49). There's obviously a lot going on in this metaphor, for starters the reader gets a sense of how impoverished the family really is. They are so poor that they can't even afford a car (although this might have to do with the economics of the time period). And, of course, the main reason why I cited this passage, the images used to give Maggie some "roundness" as a fictional character, the fact that she is compared to a lame animal, an injured dog. The reader finds out that she was burned badly in a fire. The point that Walker is driving home is, Maggie and Dee come from the same place, but are, indeed, two different people.

The question one may ask then is why couldn't Walker have told the story in a linear fashion with different, but equally vivid details? Why did she have to construct it in a non-linear way? There is no clear-cut answer(s) to these types of questions, stories sometimes just happen they way they do. And maybe those are the wrong questions to be asking in the first place. After all, and to continue with the established thesis, the story "works" they way it is structured. The non-linear form follows the affect-driven function. The wistful mother telling the reader about her days slaughtering pigs, her dreams of meeting and connecting with her daughter on a talk show, her practical perspective (provincial prospective) of family heirlooms, her plain and honest prose, all play on the heartstrings of the reader. Sometimes taking a story for what it is and not trying to imagine what it could be is an important lesson. It's always fun to speculate, but it's also about accepting something for what is or accepting someone for who they are.