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Life Lessons in "Everyday Use" and "The Story of an Hour"
Man never seems to learn everything he wants because it seems with every generation, the same lessons need to be learned all over again. Experience is the best teacher, as we all know, but it is interesting to see how some things have changed over the years while others have not. Modernity allows people to have more freedom, as we see with Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use." Dee benefits from the advancement of society in that she can leave home and attend college. However, just as man seems to make forward strides, some things never change. One of those things is the fact that man has never harnessed the ability to see things as they really are. This inability causes many heartaches because many times, we see only what we want to see. Kate Chopin's story, "The Story of an hour" demonstrates how this happens. These stories demonstrate the frailty of our humanity. The fact that she moves away and attends college signifies that she is living in modern times. Dee is outgoing, lovely and taking advantage of the new world in which she lives. Because she is attending college, we want to think the she is the smartest of the bunch. However, she does things that make her seem more snobbish than anything. For example, she changes her name to "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo" (1425) in protest to "being named after the people who oppress me" (1425). Here we see Dee is educated but she skews that education by doing weird things that do not actually help her in any way. She is only drawing unusual attention to herself by giving herself a new name and this does not improve her life in any way. When she is angry and decides to leave, her selfishness emerges because she wants what she cannot…
Work Cited
Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." The Norton Anthology od Short Fiction. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1981.
While she away, she changes her name to "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo" (1425) because she will not endure "being named after the people who oppress me" (1425). She is concerned with herself and she seems to only come home to take things back with her, including things like a butter dish and dasher. When she decides she wants the quilts, she sees no reason why she should not have them,
Cultural Impacts in Everyday Use The objective of this study is to examine the work of Alice Walker entitled "Everyday Use" and the how culture impacts values and material objects and the manner in which culture in reality impacts people and their lifestyle. The work of Alice Walker entitled "Everyday Use" examines the connotations of culture on material objects. The story involves a woman named Dee who is disgusted with what she
After reading the short story, “Everyday Use”, one can get the impression that educational backgrounds can affect the way an individual will grow up. The narrator’s education did not go far because in second grade, because her school closed. Therefore, she grew up working instead of learning to be able to take care of herself and her children. On the other hand, her daughter, Dee, grew up with education and went
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
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