Who sew the quilts that Dee wanted to take?

In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,’’ there are three main women. These three women have a great love for memories and history. Each woman’s connection to their grandmother’s quilts suggests something. It suggests that females are instrumental in preserving and handing down a family’s history. Mama knows the story behind each piece of clothing, these clothing are used to make the quilts and she wants the history preserved and handed down. Mama holds a lot of history. History by having two girls and history of the family members before her, especially Grandma Dee. Mama had a great connection to the quilts because she was one of the women who quilted them. Grandma Dee helped pieced the quilts along with Mama and Big Dee. Big Dee and …show more content…
She loved them because they were made from her family. Most parts were actual clothing from her grandmother’s dresses. Some small pieces were from Wangeros grandfather named Jarrell and great Grandpa Ezra. These quilts were hand made, and Wangero loved them especially since they were not stitched by man and its machine. Some of the pieces, like the lavender ones were from old clothes her mother handed down to her. Wangero was furious when Mama said, ‘’ I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she married John Thomas. Speaking angry most likely, wangero said “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” Which is not true but Wangero seemed as if she truly wanted the quilts. Mentioning to Mama that these quilts are priceless. To me She would actually treasure these quilts forever. Wangero even said after Mama asked her what would she do with the quilts; Dee’s response was simply to hang them. Seems like Dee wanted to have a little family history at her place. Even though Mama tried to give Dee a quilt way back when she was going away to college. I guess back then that was to old fashion for her and out of …show more content…
Either by its creation, history, and or memory. Mama had one of the best ones. She actually made them both along with Big Dee. The Lone Star pattern quilt and the Walk Around the Mountain quilt. She got to be the memory, history, and creator of these magnificent quilts. Sharing such memory would last with her, for the rest of her life. Mama got to experience by hand how to quilt along with Maggie. Maggie is the millennium child. Maggie’s great mind such as an ancient elephant, will do wonders with the skills she acquired. Maggie seems smart and loveable. Although she is quit and nice that is not always a bad thing. It seems like Maggie likes the simple things in life and wouldn’t get upset very much. You also notice when Maggie was very happy by smiling after mamma gave her the quilts. Dee seemed like a snob from the way they talked about her sometimes in the story. Mama used to think Dee hated Maggie, but that was before they raised the money, the church and Mama. They sent Dee to Augusta to school. Dee just liked nice things. I feel as Dee got older she wanted more family history with her. So, she wanted the quilts Grandma Dee had pieced up. Dee wanted to preserve them by hanging them and not putting the quilts to use. She did not want them to get used, she wanted them to be appreciated. I do see and now believe, that females are instrumental in preserving and handing down a family’s

Everyday Use

Author	Alice Walker
Genre	Short story
Publication date	1973 (as part of In Love and Trouble)
ISBN	978-0-8135-2075-9
OCLC	29028043

"Everyday Use" is a short story by Alice Walker. It was first published in the April 1973 issue of Harper's Magazine and is part of Walker's short story collection In Love and Trouble. It has since become widely studied and frequently anthologized.

The short story is told in the first person by "Mama", an African-American woman living in the Deep South, with one of her two daughters. The story follows the difference between Mrs. Johnson and her shy younger daughter Maggie, who both still adhere to traditional black culture in the rural South, and her educated, successful daughter Dee—or "Wangero" as she prefers to be called—who takes a different route to reclaiming her cultural identity.

Plot[edit]

Characters[edit]

• Dee: She is an educated African-American woman and the eldest daughter of Mrs Johnson. She seeks to embrace her cultural identity through changing her name from Dee to Wangero Leewanikhi a Kemanjo (an African name), marrying a Muslim man, and acquiring artifacts from Mama's house to put on display, an approach that puts her at odds with Mama and Maggie. She is physically beautiful and is described as having a great sense of style.

• Mrs Johnson: She is described as a "large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands."[1] She enjoys her lifestyle (especially milking cows) and did not receive an education past second grade. She is against Dee's way of living, but says nothing about it in order to respect her and stay civil.
• Maggie : Mrs Johnson describes her as dull and much more brittle and quiet compared to her older sister. She is Mama's youngest daughter, who has burn scars and marks from the burning down of their prior home and she is very nervous and self-conscious because of it. She leads a simple and traditional life with her mother in the South while her elder sister, Dee, is away at school. She has very limited reading ability, unlike her sister Dee.
• Hakim-a-barber: Dee’s partner who is referred to as "Asalamalakim", a Muslim greeting, throughout the story because he is Muslim. Eventually, he tells Mama to call him "Hakim-a-barber" due to Mama being unable to pronounce his real name. According to Helga Hoel, "The mother in the story, Mrs. Johnson, at first thinks this is his name, that he introduces himself, and some confusion arises until he tells her that she can call him Hakim-a-Barber."[2]

Themes[edit]

One of the primary themes that the story revolves around is the idea of a person's relationship with their heritage.[3] In the story, Dee's mother remained close to family traditions, while Dee herself chose to search more deeply into her African roots. Dee has a different mindset; she does not have the same ideals as Mama and Maggie, particularly in regard to cultural preservation and the best way to go about it. Dee (Wangero) only wants the family heirlooms to display in her home for their "artistic value", whereas Maggie and her mother cherish these items because they "remind them of their loved ones."[3] In Mama’s mind, Maggie learning to make her own quilt and putting it to everyday use is preserving the culture, which is how Mama believes the quilt should be used. Even if the quilts "end up in rags," more quilts can simply be made because Maggie was taught how to make them. [1] On the other hand, Dee believes the proper way to preserve her culture is to display the quilt in her home and preserve the quilt itself rather than continuing to live out their culture as Mama and Maggie do. Another theme in this short story is the divisive power of education throughout the story. In the story education is not really talked about and is completely separated from the entire family (Sparknotes).[4]

Point of view[edit]

The story is told in first-person as it unfolds through the eyes and opinions of Mama. As Maggie and Mama wait for Dee to arrive for a visit, Mama's mind wanders with various thoughts and memories of Dee, giving the audience an impartial view of Dee as being self-centered and uncaring.[5] Due to the fact that readers are getting only one viewpoint, it is uncertain if Dee truly does exhibit these characteristics or if it is only Mama's opinion of the eldest daughter that is being forced upon us. It is thought by some that Mama does not judge her children, Dee and Maggie, accurately due to Mama's own insecurities.[5] This is evidenced during Mama's daydream of Dee and herself on an imaginary popular talk show under the context of children who have "made it".[1] Mama notes being overweight and rough around the edges and eludes to the fact that Dee is ashamed of Mama's appearance.[1] As Mama continues to narrate the story, the audience continues to get a sense of Dee's snobbish personality, along with moments of doubt as readers see glimpses of Mama's own shortcomings. As the story concludes, the audience is left with the vision of Mama and Maggie remaining alone on the front lawn basking in the simplicity of each other and the straightforward life that has been built.

Interpretations[edit]

In the essay "'Everyday Use' and the Black Power Movement" by Barbara T. Christian, the story is discussed in reference to slavery and the black power movement. The characters in the story focus a lot on African culture and heritage. Traditional African clothing is described throughout the story, and this is a symbol of the family's heritage. The mentioning of changing names relates back to slavery as well; the characters were trying to forget about their slave names, and think of more traditional names to remember their culture and assert their African roots." Christian brings to light the difference in attitudes and perspectives about a shared culture. Christian points out that to Maggie and her mother, honoring their culture meant honoring the personal past of their family, by carrying on their names or putting the quilt to use, while to Dee, that meant honoring aesthetic and ancient traditions, such as traditional African names or hanging the quilt to be seen but not utilized. It is this very realization that leads to their mother choosing to give Maggie the quilts. [6]

On the other hand, in the essay "'Everyday Use' as a Portrait of the Artist" by Mary Helen Washington, the story is looked at from a more artistic and cultural perspective. The essay describes Dee as an artist who "returns home...in order to collect the material," which indicates that Dee comes home for a deeper understanding of her African culture. Although she changes her name from Dee to a more Native African name and wears African clothing, she lacks real knowledge of her culture. Because of this, Mama chooses Maggie over Dee to take the quilts, because Maggie shows more appreciation and knowledge of their culture and as she said in the story was involved in the making of those quilts whereas Dee had no part in.

In the essay “Stylish vs. Sacred in “Everyday Use” written by Houston A. Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker Dee or Wangero is called a “goddess”. After highlighting a few passages from the story, it is mentioned that Dee/ Wangero has joined the black nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s and she shows it by changing both her name and her style. The essay doesn’t see Dee/ Wangero as an activist of that cause but as someone being “manipulated by the style-makers” as illustrated by the scene in which she described the quilt, for which she passionately fought for later in the story, as “old-fashioned and out of style”.[7] Dee's new name "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo" is misspelt, showing the reader that she doesn't know much about African culture.[8]

Symbolism[edit]

One symbol found in this short story is the quilt. The quilt itself is a very sentimental piece that holds great meaning and history behind it. It includes clothes that Dee's great grandmother used to wear as well as pieces of uniforms that Dee's great grandfather wore during the Civil War.[1] However, it also symbolizes value in Negro-American experience.[9] The quilt additionally adds to the idea of creative activities women came up with to pass down history from generation to generation as a part of their heritage. Dee seems to take the most pride in making these quilts, she views it as her way of giving back to society. Hakim-a-barber and Wangero represented the black power movement by their styles, greets, and outfits.

Another symbol found in “Everyday Use” is the yard. The yard plays an important role in the story and is described as “an extended living room”. Mama and Maggie have both tidied up the yard in preparation of Dee’s visit, and sit out in the yard for hours, even after Dee’s departure. The yard seems to be a place to think for Mama, where she can imagine herself being someone more conventionally attractive than she actually is, but also remember just how much she has done for her family.[10]

Quilting[edit]

In the African-American community, women have engaged in the tradition of quilting since they were brought to America as slaves. Quilting requires sewing pieces of cloth together to create a coverlet that functions as both a piece of art and a household item. African-American women, often regarded as voiceless ‘mule(s) of the world’, inherited such creative legacies from maternal ancestors and their quilts have come to represent black heritage.[11] The voices of African-American women have been stitched into their quilts, providing an account of their cultural past. As Sam Whitsitt observes, the quilt reflects the experiences of African-American women: the quilt is a symbol reflective of ‘herstory, history, and tradition’.[12] The self-expression involved in quilt-making allowed women to take control of their lives through the only medium society permitted them to use. The communal nature of quilting strengthened the bonds of sisterhood and helped to move marginalized women from enslavement to empowerment. Quilting allowed these women to assert control over the colonial practice of slavery as enforced by white hegemony. Historically, products such as cotton and indigo dye were acquired as a result of black oppression. By sewing cotton into their quilts, African-American slaves formed a bond with nature, which replaced the hegemonic relationship enforced by slavery.[13]

Black slaves often attended communal Quilting Bees, which offered these oppressed women the opportunity to create social bonds unsupervised. Thus, quilting became a symbol of sisterly solidarity for African-American slaves. Additionally, quilting functioned as a response to cultural and political change, allowing opportunity for political debate. Black women used quilting as a source of activism: their quilts often depicted anti-slavery slogans. However, quilting also came to represent the hegemony of patriarchal society. Women were often forced to learn to quilt, which became a substitute for the more ‘masculine’ activity of reading and writing.[14]

Jennifer Martin explains in her article "The Quilt Threads Together Sisterhood, Empowerment, and Nature in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Everyday Use", "When women participate in the tradition of quilting this trinity of strength provides a positive channel for them to mend together the pieces of their lives and to move from fragmentation to fusion... Martin emphasize the quilt provides a bond between the sisters and females because in the African American community often times women are oppressed[15].Quilting is not an end-point where women achieve elusive wholeness, but a way to meld together parts of their lives and achieve power from the joining of all the components that make them unique."[16] This also explains why Mama and Maggie are so fond of their heritage and continuing to live it out, unlike Dee. They see it as a way to feel connected to one another, as well as to their ancestors, and as a way to mend their pasts and move on from them. By showing their culture and living it still, they are able to show how despite everything that may have happened to them they never lost who they really were. Quilting symbolizes this movement for them and this feeling of wholeness.

Quilting features in "Everyday Use" as a symbol of black heritage. Mama Johnson’s quilts symbolize cross-generational female bonding: they were sewn together by Grandma Dee, passed down to and then quilted by Mama and her sister, Big Dee. One quilt even features a piece of the uniform worn by their Great Grandpa Ezra during the Civil War. These quilts represent the creativity of the sisterhood that created them; however, Mama’s daughters, Maggie and Dee, view them very differently. Dee visits her family, intending to collect the artifacts of her family’s past; she wants to display them in her home with museum-like accuracy. As David Cowart notes, ‘The visitor [Dee] rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage.’[17] The story’s climax, which sees Mama give the quilts to Maggie, rather than Dee, is viewed as representative of the quilts’ functionality. Dee views the quilts as worthy of museum display ("Maggie can't appreciate these quilts!...She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use."), whilst Maggie treats them as household items ("I been saving 'em for long enough with nobody using 'em. I hope [ Maggie puts them to ‘everyday use’]!”).[18] Both Mama and Maggie recognize that the quilt is meant for ‘everyday use’, as practiced by their ancestors.

Reception[edit]

In critical readings the largest trend around the story has been to criticize Dee and the way she goes about reasserting her personal culture. Matthew Mullins argues in his essay, "Antagonized by the Text, Or, It Takes Two to Read Alice Walker’s 'Everyday Use' however, that this perspective isn’t necessarily fair. In reading and teaching the text, he found the character Dee was universally a disliked character, saying that in an epiphany he found in his defense of Dee rather a pitying attitude and concluding that "it was impossible to see how anyone could truly 'like' Dee". This, however, he goes on to point out as not being a direct result of Dee’s actions alone, but rather the framing of her actions in the story. He argues that the text itself is what antagonizes the reader to grow this dislike of Dee: "The first-person narrative voice, the fact that Mrs. Johnson [Mama] is both narrator and character, has an immediate and forceful effect upon our perception of Dee." Mullins backs this up by quoting another scholar, Wayne Booth, who said in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction, "No narrator ... is simply convincing: he is convincingly decent or mean, brilliant or stupid, informed, intelligent, or muddled. ... we usually find our emotional and intellectual reactions to him as a character affects our reactions to the events he relates." Mullins points out that if Dee herself, or even Maggie, were the narrators of the story, we would come away with a completely different perspective on probably all of the characters. “The text actively prevents us from identifying with Dee,” and this perspective has shaped the scholarly resources on this text since it came out.[19]

Joe Sarnowski, in his article "Destroying to Save: Idealism and Pragmatism in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'", also points out this discrepancy but taking it one step further, arguing that even though it would be naïve to claim Dee doesn’t have faults, she, “more than any other character in the story, identifies and pursues corrective measures against the oppression of African-American society and culture.” Her fault, Sarnowski says, is in not realizing how idealism and pragmatism are"“intertwined" and how "privileging one undermines both".[20]

In "Quilt as a Metaphor in 'Everyday Use'" by Elaine Showalter, Mama explains that because Maggie can recreate the quilts made by her mother and grandmother, that she is the one that understands the culture and will keep it alive.[21]

References[edit]

1. ^ a b c d e "Everyday Use" (PDF). weebly.com.
2. ^ Hoel, Helga (1999). ""Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's" Everyday Use"". American Studies in Scandinavia. 31 (1): 34–42. doi:10.22439/asca.v31i1.1479.
3. ^ a b Walker, Alice, 1944- (2004), Everyday use, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, OCLC 55770645{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
4. ^ "Everyday Use Themes - eNotes.com". eNotes. Retrieved 2016-11-03.
5. ^ a b Farrell, Susan. "Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'". Literature Resource Center. 35 (2).
6. ^ Christian, Barbara (1994). "everyday use" and the black power movement. Pearson. pp. 492–494. ISBN 0-13-458638-7.
7. ^ Baker, Houston A.; Pierce-Baker, Charlotte (1985). "Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker's" Everyday Use"". The Southern Review. 21 (3).
8. ^ Hoel, Helga (1999). "Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"". American Studies in Scandinavia. 31: 34–42. doi:10.22439/asca.v31i1.1479. S2CID 153133781.
9. ^ Cash, Floris Barnett (2012-02-22). "Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition" (PDF). The Journal of Negro History. 80 (1): 30–41. doi:10.2307/2717705. JSTOR 2717705. S2CID 141226163.
10. ^ "SparkNotes: Everyday Use: Themes, Motifs, and Symbols". www.sparknotes.com. Retrieved 2017-04-05.
11. ^ Walker, Alice. "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens". Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994): 402.
12. ^ Whitsitt, Sam (2000). "In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"". African American Review. 34 (3): 443–459 (445). doi:10.2307/2901383. JSTOR 2901383.
13. ^ Martin, Jennifer (2014). "The Quilt Threads Together Sisterhood, Empowerment and Nature in Alice Walker's The Colour Purple and "Everyday Use"". Journal of Intercultural Disciplines. 14: 27–43 (38).
14. ^ Hedges, Elaine (1977). "Quilts and Women's Culture". The Radical Teacher. 4: 7–10 (10).
15. ^ Martin, Jennifer (2017). ""The Quilt Threads Together Sisterhood, Empowerment and Nature in Alice Walker's the Color Purple and 'Everyday Use.'"". Journal of Intercultural Disciplines. 14: 27–44.
16. ^ Martin, Jennifer (Winter 2014). "The Quilt Threads Together Sisterhood, Empowerment and Nature in Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple' and 'Everyday Use'". Journal of Intercultural Disciplines. 14: 27–44.
17. ^ Cowart, David (1996). "Heritage and Deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use"". Studies in Short Fiction. 33: 171–183 (172).
18. ^ Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use". In Love and Trouble. New York: Harvest Books, 1974): 314–321 (p. 320).
19. ^ Mullins, Matthew (May 2013). "Antagonized by the Text, Or, It Takes Two to Read Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'". Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. 37: 37–53. Retrieved November 28, 2017.
20. ^ Sarnowski, Joe (2012). "Destroying to Save: Idealism and Pragmatism in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'". Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 48 (3): 269–286. Retrieved November 28, 2017.
21. ^ "alice walker - Showalter Elaine Quilt as Metaphor in Everyday Use Literature An Introduction to Fiction Poetry Drama and Writing Eds X.J Kennedy and | Course Hero". www.coursehero.com. Retrieved 2020-04-16.

Bibliography[edit]

• Walker, Alice: "Everyday Use," The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Anna Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedfor/St. Martin's, 2011: 852–858. Print.
• Whitsitt, Sam: "In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use,'" African American Review 34.3 (2000): 443. Web. Retrieved October 24, 2011.
• "Everyday Use": Sparknotes.com. n.d. Web. Retrieved October 24, 2011.

Who pieced the quilts that Dee wants?

What does Dee want to do with the quilts?

Why does Dee want to take her family's quilts?

Why does Dee want to take the homemade quilt in Everyday Use?