Cultural Heritage and Identity in Alice Walker's Everyday Use
This paper examines Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" through the lens of cultural heritage and African-American identity. It analyzes the central conflict between the narrator-mother and her eldest daughter, Dee (Wangero), whose opposing attitudes toward tradition are embodied in the story's key symbols — particularly the handmade quilts. The paper argues that Walker criticizes the obsessive preservation of cultural heritage as a mere emblem of identity, contrasting it with the mother and Maggie's more grounded, practical relationship with their past. Walker ultimately suggests that authentic cultural identity requires living engagement with tradition rather than static display.
- Introduction: Heritage and Identity in Everyday Use: Central conflict between heritage as living practice vs. emblem
- The Mother and Dee: A Study in Contrasts: Physical and moral contrast between mother and Dee
- Names, Appearances, and the Performance of Identity: Dee's name change as performance of African identity
- The Quilts as Symbol of Cultural Heritage: Quilts symbolize opposing views of tradition
- Maggie, Everyday Use, and Authentic Tradition: Maggie embodies grounded, practical use of heritage
- Walker's Critique of Obsessive Cultural Preservation: Walker warns against harmful obsession with the past
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What makes this paper effective
- It builds its argument around a clear central claim: cultural heritage is most meaningful when put to "everyday use" rather than preserved as a static emblem of identity.
- It uses direct textual quotations to anchor its interpretive claims, letting Walker's own dialogue illustrate the characters' contrasting worldviews.
- The paper maintains consistent symbolic focus throughout, returning to the quilts as the story's central object of analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates character-based symbolic analysis: it reads two characters — the mother and Dee — as embodiments of opposing philosophical stances on heritage, then traces how a single object (the quilts) crystallizes that opposition. This technique allows a compact literary essay to sustain a coherent argument across multiple textual moments without losing thematic focus.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis-driven introduction that frames the central conflict, then develops the character contrast through physical description, naming, and behavior. It pivots to close analysis of the quilt symbol before concluding with Walker's broader cultural critique. The structure moves logically from character to symbol to theme, following a classic literary analysis progression suitable for undergraduate-level work.
Introduction: Heritage and Identity in Everyday Use
Cultural heritage should be something for "everyday use" — not something to be stored away as a mere emblem of identity. In Alice Walker's short story Everyday Use, the tension between the mother-narrator and her eldest daughter is driven by their conflicting ideas about identity and cultural heritage. Dee understands identity as the strict preservation of tradition, whereas the mother simply lives her life by remembering the past while also engaging with the present. This contrast forms the story's central conflict and shapes every key symbol within it.
The Mother and Dee: A Study in Contrasts
The contrast between the narrator-mother and her oldest daughter is both striking and deeply symbolic. The mother describes herself as a rather rough and uneducated person, possessing the strength of a man both physically and morally. Dee, by contrast, is educated and stylish, with a forceful personality. The two women appreciate their shared heritage in fundamentally different ways. The mother and her younger daughter, Maggie, live their lives in the manner they inherited from their grandmothers, yet they also participate in the present of American society. Dee rejects the American context altogether and immerses herself in a strictly African way of life, which ultimately becomes an obsession.
Names, Appearances, and the Performance of Identity
For the mother, tradition is something she carries with her but does not use as an emblem. Dee, on the other hand, changes her name and her appearance to better fit her new identity and to become, in her own view, entirely African. The mother and Maggie are shown to be wiser in how they put tradition to everyday use. Moreover, they prove themselves more capable of adapting to the present — a capacity demonstrated when they manage to learn the unfamiliar names that Dee and her partner have adopted:
"'You don't have to call me by it if you don't want to,' said Wangero. 'Why shouldn't I?' I asked. 'If that's what you want us to call you, we'll call you.' 'I know it might sound awkward at first,' said Wangero. 'I'll get used to it,' I said. 'Ream it out again.'" (Walker, 236)
The mother's willingness to learn and use Dee's chosen name, without resentment or ridicule, reveals a flexibility and openness that Dee herself ironically lacks.
Works Cited
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama, 10th ed. Longman, 2006.
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