This essay examines how Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" and Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." portray family conflict and permanent familial rifts through the dynamics of sibling rivalry and cultural identity. Both stories center on tension between sisters, yet differ in the nature and resolution of their conflicts. Walker's story explores a rift rooted in competing understandings of heritage, while Welty's depicts petty yet deeply felt domestic squabbling. Together, the two stories illustrate how the African-American family experience, though culturally specific, speaks to universal truths about how family relationships shape individual identity and emotion.
The essay demonstrates comparative literary analysis by placing two thematically related short stories in dialogue. Rather than treating each story in complete isolation, the writer uses one to illuminate the other — for example, contrasting the sense of narrative resolution at the end of "Everyday Use" with the open-ended frustration that closes "Why I Live at the P.O." This technique shows how meaning can emerge from juxtaposition rather than from individual close reading alone.
The paper opens with a general reflection on family as a literary theme, then introduces the African-American context before moving into individual story analyses. "Everyday Use" is discussed first, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O.," with the final paragraph synthesizing both. The structure is linear and thesis-driven, suited to a short comparative essay at the introductory undergraduate level.
Few subjects provide more fodder for characters and situations in fiction than families. The relationships, conflicts, influences, and understandings that exist among family members are almost universally recognized by readers, and they are also hugely influential in shaping the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of all individuals, including authors. It is little wonder, then, that families feature so heavily throughout American literature. The African-American experience of the family is somewhat unique, but its prominent features still find common ground with readers of all cultural backgrounds. Two different examples of the African-American family in twentieth-century short stories illustrate both the unique poignancy of the cultural background of the authors and characters, and the universal nature of family conflict.
The action of Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use" takes place in a single day, when Maggie and her mother — the narrator known alternatively as "Mama" and Mrs. Johnson — are waiting apprehensively for a visit from Mama's elder daughter (and Maggie's sister), Dee. Dee has a very different understanding of heritage and family than do Maggie and Mama, having taken an ancestral African name ("Wangero") and showing a marked condescension toward the lack of appreciation that Maggie and Mama show for a land they have never seen and a culture that isn't their own.
The conflict in this story largely unfolds in the past, as Mama recollects the difficulties Dee presented as a child. These difficulties obviously still exist even now that she is an adult, but the true danger of the conflict has passed. There is a clear sense in this story that a permanent rift has formed in this family.
The danger and heat of the conflict in Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." is very present in the action of the story and is even hinted at persisting long after the action closes. Again, this conflict exists between two sisters, but in this story it is the sister who stays home that is treated as essentially unwelcome by her family, while the sister who returns home is welcomed and praised despite the many problems apparent in her life.
At its heart, however, this story is one of senseless bickering and the type of frustration that crops up during periods of familial unfairness. Neither sister makes a real effort to make the other happy, and the other family members are equally guilty of perpetuating a kind of squabbling that has no real merit or purpose — the arguments are over senseless things such as whether a beard is cut or not — yet the rift this creates in the family seems just as permanent as the one that exists in Walker's short story.
The narrator of Welty's tale is the "wronged" sister, who ultimately moves out of her family's home and into the post office where she works. While the reader's sympathies remain with Mama and Maggie at the end of "Everyday Use," there is not the same sense of completion and satisfaction at the end of "Why I Live at the P.O." It is as if Welty is commenting on the depth of family emotions regardless of their root cause or the rationality of the disagreements.
Both of these short stories depict families in conflict that eventually experience a schism of one degree or another. The fact that the families are African-American is relevant in some ways, but their struggles and feelings can be understood and appreciated regardless of this fact.
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