Values in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

This can be seen by way of negative example. The Black Muslim husband is as worldly and materialistic as Dee is, by no nub objecting when she tries to appropriate the churn and the quilts that argon being designd--every twenty-four hour period--by Maggie and Mama. Dee only wants to " devise use" of them, which is a disparate idea.

The narrator's presentation of the setting of " unremarkable Use" shows that Maggie and Mama get it only in the rural southern and work as sharecroppers or at least as members of the black underclass. Although they have television, Mama knows she will never live in the world of TVs: "I am a large, robust woman with rough, man-working hands" (Walker 489). It is as if she has had to discard the features of living a woman's life in favor of hardscrabble field-hand work. The churn is a symbol of that fact. It is as well as a currently functioning dickhead of survival for Mama and Maggie.

The fact that the churn's dasher is dripping with dairy is an movie of the work Mama and Maggie have to do every day to provide for themselves. They are living in poverty at the margins of superior refining. But the image of the dripping dasher is the image of fairish work, and the narrator obviously has positive regard for that.

The determine of the dominant culture have been internalized by Dee, who sees her family-of-origin values only superficially. She sees specie when she looks at the churn and quilts, just as the dominant culture does. Mama and Maggie see food an

d warmth, which are values the narrator prefers to the superficial values of profit and which are more "priceless" than m unrivalledy. To be sure, Dee knows that truly using the churn and the quilts will wear them out. But it is also true that people who use things every day are more likely to take care of them, too.

The narrator shows that Dee does non understand is that the phrase "everyday use" means something different from putting a price tag on everything one sees. In the value system of Mama and Maggie, everyday use is not backwardness but instead an image of their inheritance that sustains their lives. Were Dee to sell them, they would be disconnected from her hereditary pattern and would become commercial, not useful, objects. Wanting to sell them also proves how superficial Dee's valuation of her heritage is.

Neither Maggie nor Mama can formally articulate how they meet the fact and implications of the quilts' iconography; after all, like everybody else with a TV they live in a world of mass-media messages from Johnny Carson. In that regard, why Maggie is willing to let Dee have them has more to do with her mentality of her cosmic "portion" than with what the reader suspects is her duty to her heritage (Walker 494).

Walker, Alice. " commonplace Use." Literature: Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2004. 488-494.

The practical benefit of t
Ordercustompaper.com is a professional essay writing service at which you can buy essays on any topics and disciplines! All custom essays are written by professional writers!