Heritage and Identity in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"
This essay analyzes Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," focusing on how the first-person narrator's perspective illuminates the contrasting attitudes of sisters Dee and Maggie toward their cultural heritage. The paper examines Walker's use of symbolism—particularly the handmade quilts—to argue that genuine cultural identity is expressed through daily lived practice rather than aesthetic display or surface-level appropriation. Through a comparison of the two sisters as characters, the essay demonstrates how Walker ultimately affirms Maggie's quiet, rooted connection to her heritage over Dee's fashionable but hollow reclamation of it.
- Introduction: Narrator's voice and Walker's use of symbolism
- Comparison of Characters: Dee and Maggie as opposing cultural archetypes
- The Quilt and What It Represents: Dispute over quilts and what they symbolize
- Conclusion: Maggie's lived heritage versus Dee's appropriation
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay builds its argument around a concrete symbol — the quilts — and uses that symbol consistently to anchor its claim about cultural heritage versus superficial appropriation.
- Character comparison is handled economically: each sister is defined by contrasting traits that directly serve the central thesis rather than diverging into plot summary.
- The paper connects narrative technique (the mother's first-person perspective) to thematic meaning, showing an awareness of how form and content interact in Walker's story.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates symbol-to-theme analysis: it identifies a central object (the quilts), traces its narrative significance (the dispute between Dee and Maggie), and extracts a broader thematic claim (authentic heritage is lived daily, not displayed). This move — from specific textual detail to generalizable meaning — is a foundational skill in literary analysis.
Structure breakdown
The essay follows a clear four-part structure. The introduction establishes Walker's narrative technique and the central thematic question. The character comparison section contrasts Dee and Maggie as opposing embodiments of cultural identity. The quilt section applies that contrast to the story's climactic object and event. The conclusion restates and deepens the thesis, closing with a memorable formulation about heritage as everyday practice rather than acquired artifact.
Introduction
The thematic richness of Everyday Use is made possible by the perceptive and flexible voice of its first-person narrator. It is the mother's viewpoint that permits the reader to understand both Dee and Maggie. Seen from a distance, both young women can appear stereotypical — one a smart but rather ruthless college girl, the other a sweet but ineffectual homebody. The close scrutiny afforded by the mother's perspective, however, redeems both Dee and Maggie as characters from triteness.
In addition to this skillful use of point of view, Everyday Use is enriched by Alice Walker's development of symbols. Through careful description and the positioning of characters within their setting, Walker confronts the question of what constitutes the true value of one's culture and heritage. In the conflict between Dee and her mother, Walker demonstrates that culture and heritage are not represented by external appearances or the possession of objects, but by one's attitude and way of life.
Comparison of Characters
In Everyday Use, Walker personifies different sides of culture and heritage in the characters of Dee and Maggie. Dee represents a complex, materialistic, and modern way of life in which heritage and culture are valued only for their aesthetics and trendiness. She was always contemptuous of her family's way of life and grew increasingly distant from her family after leaving for college. She even changed her name from "Dee" to "Wangero," a gesture that reveals her attitude toward her roots — reflecting a flashy, artificial pretense put on to project a false sophistication.
Maggie, by contrast, is not a bright or clever person, and she has always been intimidated by her glamorous sibling. She bears severe burn scars from a house fire many years earlier. The actions and speech of each character further define their roles in the story. Dee is portrayed as parasitic, greedy, aggressive, and self-serving, to the point of total disregard for her family. Maggie, on the other hand, does not fly into any rage or tantrum. She is patient and tolerant, absorbing Dee's actions and words without retaliation.
Conclusion
The reason Maggie deserved the quilt is that despite all of Dee's education and worldliness, she neither knows nor truly values her real culture and heritage. It is through the preferential giving of the quilt that Walker illustrates her central point: the cultural change Dee pursues is not achieved by changing one's name, speaking a foreign tongue, wearing bright dresses, or adopting a different hairstyle. One's culture and heritage is not an article to be adopted for trend's sake, used as conveniently as one would wear a piece of clothing.
Because Maggie always cherished and practiced the cultural heritage of her family and home, she deserved the quilt more than Dee did. As Walker suggests through the story's resolution, cultural identity is not something suddenly picked up like an antique found in a shop. People who truly possess their culture and heritage use it every day in their lives — just as Maggie did.
Works Cited
Walker, Alice. Everyday Use.
Walker, Alice. Everyday Use (Women Writers). Volume edited and introduced by Barbara T. Christian. Rutgers University Press.
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