Heritage and Identity in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"
This paper examines Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" as a meditation on African-American heritage, cultural identity, and the tension between preserving and commodifying one's past. Drawing on Walker's biography and her broader body of work, the analysis traces how symbols such as quilts and a butter churn represent living folk traditions. The paper contrasts the perspectives of Dee (Wangero) and her family to argue that Walker is not condemning the Black Power movement but rather urging African-Americans to acknowledge their full heritage — including its painful dimensions — rather than selectively appropriating it for aesthetic or ideological purposes.
- Alice Walker: Biography and Authorial Voice: Walker's life shapes her literary themes
- Overview of 'Everyday Use' and Its Themes: Story's plot and central conflict explained
- Quilts as Symbols of African-American Heritage: Quilts connect generations and ancestral memory
- Wangero's Name Change and the Rejection of Family History: Renaming denies traceable African-American lineage
- Commodification of Heritage and the Black Power Movement: Walker critiques selective, superficial cultural pride
- Living Tradition versus Aesthetic Appropriation: Folk art must be lived, not merely displayed
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds literary analysis in biographical context, showing how Walker's personal history informs the themes of her fiction.
- It uses specific textual evidence — direct quotations from the story — to support each interpretive claim rather than relying on assertion alone.
- It draws on multiple secondary sources (Cowart, Christian, White) to situate the analysis within existing scholarship and add critical authority.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates symbol-based close reading: it identifies recurring objects (quilts, the butter churn) and traces their symbolic function across the text, connecting material detail to larger thematic claims about heritage, memory, and cultural ownership. This technique allows the writer to move seamlessly between the particular (a specific passage) and the general (the story's argument about African-American identity).
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a biographical introduction that establishes Walker's personal investment in her themes. It then summarizes the story's central conflict before devoting the bulk of its analysis to specific symbols — the quilts, the butter churn, and the name change — each used to interrogate Wangero's relationship to her heritage. The paper closes by distinguishing Walker's critique of selective appropriation from any blanket condemnation of the Black Power movement, ending on the claim that living tradition matters more than aesthetic display.
Alice Walker: Biography and Authorial Voice
When reading the biography of Alice Walker, it is not difficult to see her past woven into her prose. Just as she speaks about weaving and texture in her literary works, she is weaving her own history into her words. Throughout Walker's books and stories, she continually displays her pride in and support of her African-American and female heritage. She emphasizes that no one can leave to others the responsibility of continuing that heritage. Rather, as she demonstrates in "Everyday Use," it is up to everyone who is part of a culture to carry it forward.
Walker was born and raised in Eatonton, Georgia. Her father was a sharecropper. When she was eight years old, her brother accidentally shot out her eye with a BB gun. Left blind in one eye, she became shy and self-conscious, and she turned to writing as a means of expressing her inner self. Despite her disadvantaged childhood, she won a scholarship to Spelman College and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Since then, her poems, short stories, and novels have combined a deep pride in black women and in the broader African-American heritage.
References
Christian, Barbara T. "Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward." Everyday Use. Ed. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994.
Cowart, David. "Heritage and Deracination in Walker's 'Everyday Use.'" Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 171–184.
Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay. Robert DiYanni, Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 408–413.
Walker, Alice. "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." Ms. Magazine. Sept–Oct. (1997): 11–15.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
White, David. "'Everyday Use': Defining African-American Heritage." 2001. Anniina's Alice Walker Page. 15 April 2008.
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