everyday use by alice walker character analysis of maggie

A Summary and Analysis of Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Everyday Use’ is one of the most popular and widely studied short stories by Alice Walker. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1973 before being collected in Walker’s short-story collection In Love and Trouble .

Walker uses ‘Everyday Use’ to explore different attitudes towards Black American culture and heritage.

‘Everyday Use’: plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Mrs Johnson, a largeAfrican-American woman who has two daughters, Dee (the older of the two) and Maggie (the younger). Whereas Maggie, who is somewhat weak and lacking in confidence, shares many of her mother’s views, Dee is rather different.

Mrs Johnson tells us how she and the local church put together the funds to send Dee away to school to get an education. When Dee returned, she would read stories to her mother and sister. Mrs Johnson tells us she never had much of an education as her school was shut down, and although Maggie can read, her eyesight is poor and, according to her mother, is not especially clever.

Mrs Johnson also tells us how their previous house recently burned down: a house, she tells us, which Dee had never liked. Dee hasn’t yet visited her mother and sister in the new house, but she has said that when she does come she will not bring her friends with her, implying she is ashamed of where her family lives.

However, Mrs Johnson then describes Dee’s first visit to the new house. She turns up with her new partner, a short and stocky Muslim man, whom Mrs Johnson refers to as ‘Asalamalakim’, after the Muslim greeting the man speaks when he arrives (a corruption of ‘salaam aleikum’ or ‘ As-salamu alaykum ’). He later tells Mrs Johnson to call him Hakim-a-barber.

Dee then tells her mother that she is no longer known as Dee, but prefers to be called Wangero Lee-wanika Kemanjo, because she no longer wishes to bear a name derived from the white people who oppressed her and other African Americans. Her mother points out that Dee was named after her aunt, Dicie, but Dee is convinced that the name originally came from their white oppressors.

Dee/Wangero now starts to examine the objects in the house which belonged to her grandmother (who was also known as Dee), saying which ones she intends to take for herself. When Mrs Johnson tells her she is keeping the quilts for when Maggie marries John Thomas, Dee responds that her sister is so ‘backward’ she’d probably put the special quilts to ‘everyday use’, thus wearing them out to ‘rags’ in a few years.

Although Maggie resignedly lets her older sister have the quilts, when Dee moves to take them for herself, Mrs Johnson is suddenly inspired to snatch them back from her and hold Maggie close to herself, refusing to give them up to Dee and telling her to take one of the other quilts instead.

Dee leaves with Hakim-a-barber, telling her mother and Maggie that they don’t understand their own heritage. She also tells Maggie to try to make something of herself rather than remaining home with their mother. After they’ve left, Maggie and her mother sit outside until it’s time to go indoors and retire to bed.

‘Everyday Use’: analysis

The central crux of Alice Walker’s story is the difference between Dee and her mother in their perspectives and attitudes. Where Mrs Johnson, the mother of the family, sees everything in terms of the immediate family and home, Dee (or Wangero, as she renames herself) is more interested in escaping this immediate environment.

She does this first by leaving the family home and becoming romantically involved with a man of African Muslim descent. She also looks deeper into her African roots in order to understand ‘where she comes from’, as the phrase has it: not just in terms of the family’s direct lineage of daughter, mother, grandmother, and so on (Mrs Johnson’s way of looking at it, as exemplified by their discussion over the origins of Dee’s name), but in a wider, and deeper sense of African-American history and belonging.

This departure from her mother’s set of values is most neatly embodied by her change of name, rejecting the family name Dee in favour of the African name Wangero Lee-wanika Kemanjo. Names, in fact, are very important in this story: Maggie is obviously known by a European name, and ‘Johnson’, the family name borne by ‘Mama’, and thus by her daughters, doubly reinforces (John and son) the stamp of male European power on their lives and history.

Dee, too, is very much a family name: not just because it is the name the family use for the elder daughter, but because it is a name borne by numerous female members of the family going back for generations. But Dee/Wangero suspects it is ultimately, or originally, of European extraction, and wants to distance herself from this. Dee’s rejection of the immediate family’s small and somewhat parochial attitude is also embodied by the fact that she reportedly hated their old house which had recently burned down.

‘Everyday Use’ was published in 1973, and Dee’s (or Wangero’s) search for her ancestral identity through African culture and language is something which was becoming more popular among African Americans in the wake of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Indeed, a productive dialogue could be had between Dee’s outlook in ‘Everyday Use’ and the arguments put forward by prominent Black American writers and activists of the 1970s such as Audre Lorde, who often wrote – in her poem ‘ A Woman Speaks ’, for example – about the ancestral African power that Black American women carry, a link to their deeper roots which should be acknowledged and cultivated.

However, Walker does some interesting things in ‘Everyday Use’ which prevent the story from being wholly celebratory off Dee’s (Wangero’s) new-found sense of self. First, she had Mrs Johnson or ‘Mama’ narrate the story, so we only see Dee from her mother’s very different perspective: we only view Dee, or Wangero, from the outside, as it were.

Second, Dee/Wangero does not conduct herself in ways which are altogether commendable: she snatches the best quilts, determined to wrest them from her mother and sister and disregarding Maggie’s strong filial links to her aunt and grandmother who taught her how to quilt. The quilt thus becomes a symbol for Maggie’s link with the previous matriarchs of the family, which Dee is attempting to sever her from.

But she is not doing this out of kindness for Maggie, despite her speech to her younger sister at the end of the story. Instead, she seems to be motivated by more selfish reasons, and asserts her naturally dominant personality and ability to control her sister in order to get her way. The very title of Walker’s story, ‘Everyday Use’, can be analysed as a sign of Dee’s dismissive and patronising attitude towards her sister and mother: to her, they don’t even know how to use a good quilt properly and her sister would just put it out for everyday use.

We can also analyse Walker’s story in terms of its use of the epiphany : a literary whereby a character in a story has a sudden moment of consciousness, or a realisation. In ‘Everyday Use’, this occurs when Mrs Johnson, seeing Maggie prepared to give up her special bridal present to her sister, gathers the courage to stand her ground and to say no to Dee. She is clearly in awe of what Dee/Wangero has become, so this moment of self-assertion – though it is also done for Maggie, too – is even more significant.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

Analysis of Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2021

Probably Alice Walker ’s most frequently anthologized story, “Everyday Use” first appeared in Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories by Black Women. Walker explores in this story a divisive issue for African Americans, one that has concerned a number of writers, Lorraine Hansberry, for instance, in her play Raisin in the Sun (1959). The issue is generational as well as cultural: In leaving home and embracing their African heritage, must adults turn their backs on their African-American background and their more traditional family members? The issue, while specifically African-American, can also be viewed as a universal one in terms of modern youth who fail to understand the values of their ancestry and of their immediate family. Walker also raises the question of naming, a complicated one for African Americans, whose ancestors were named by slaveholders.

The first-person narrator of the story is Mrs. Johnson, mother of two daughters, Maggie and Dicie, nicknamed Dee. Addressing the readers as “you,” she draws us directly into the story while she and Maggie await a visit from Dee. With deft strokes, Walker has Mrs. Johnson reveal essential information about herself and her daughters. She realistically describes herself as a big-boned, slow-tongued woman with no education and a talent for hard work and outdoor chores. When their house burned down some 12 years previous, Maggie was severely burned. Comparing Maggie to a wounded animal, her mother explains that she thinks of herself as unattractive and slow-witted, yet she is good-natured too, and preparing to marry John Thomas, an honest local man. Dee, on the other hand, attractive, educated, and self-confident, has left her home (of which she was ashamed) to forge a new and successful life.

Alice Walker/Thoughtco

When she appears, garbed in African attire, along with her long-haired friend, Asalamalakim, Dee informs her family that her new name is Wangero Leewanika Kemanio . When she explains that she can no longer bear to use the name given to her by the whites who oppressed her, her mother tries to explain that she was named for her aunt, and that the name Dicie harkens back to pre–CIVIL WAR days. Dee’s failure to honor her own family history continues in her gentrified appropriation of her mother’s butter dish and churn, both of which have a history, but both of which Dee views as quaint artifacts that she can display in her home. When Dee asks for her grandmother’s quilts, however, Mrs. Johnson speaks up: Although Maggie is willing to let Dee have them because, with her goodness and fine memory, she needs no quilts to help her remember Grandma Dee, her mother announces firmly that she intends them as a wedding gift for Maggie. Mrs. Johnson approvingly tells Dee that Maggie will put them to “everyday use” rather than hanging them on a wall.

Dee leaves in a huff, telling Maggie she ought to make something of herself. With her departure, peace returns to the house, and Mrs. Johnson and Maggie sit comfortably together, enjoying each other’s company. Although readers can sympathize with Dee’s desire to improve her own situation and to feel pride in her African heritage, Walker also makes clear that in rejecting the African-American part of that heritage, she loses a great deal. Her mother and sister, despite the lack of the success that Dee enjoys, understand the significance of family. One hopes that the next child will not feel the need to choose one side or the other but will confidently embrace both.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” In Major Writers of Short Fiction: Stories and Commentary, edited by Ann Charters. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1993, 1,282–1,299.

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Everyday Use

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The Narrator (Mrs. Johnson/Mama)

The narrator and protagonist is a working-class black woman from the American South; her surname is Johnson, but Walker provides her with no first name. At the time the story takes place, Mrs. Johnson has two adult daughters (Dee and Maggie) and is therefore likely middle-aged or perhaps slightly older. Although she never received more than a second-grade education, the wry and observant nature of her narration makes it clear she is both intelligent and level-headed. She is also hard-working, as well as physically and mentally resilient; she describes herself as “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands” who “can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man” (Paragraph 5), and who seems to have raised her daughters largely on her own (she mentions their father at one point, but it is unclear what happened to him). Mrs. Johnson’s strength of character is bolstered by a deep sense of personal and familial identity; while explaining the family history of the name “Dee,” she remarks, “I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches” (Paragraph 32).

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Analysis of Everyday Use by Alice Walker

“Everyday Use” was published in 1973 as a part of Alice Walker’s short story collection, In Love and Trouble . The story highlights the cultural aspects of African-American s in the United States. African-Americans are citizens of the United States whose ancestors came from Africa. They were brought to American colonies as slaves. They remained slaves till the end of the 19th century when most were freed after the American Revolution. The story set in late 1960 when many African Americans were struggling to redefine and seize control of their social, cultural, and political identity in American society. At the time, the educated became interested in re-examining the African American past. They were particularly interested in the aspects of African heritage that had survived centuries of slavery and were still present in African American culture. Many black Americans, uninspired by a bleak history of slavery in North America, looked to their African roots in an effort to reconnect with their past.

Mama, or Mrs. Johnson waiting in the yard with her younger daughter Maggie to welcome her elder daughter Dee who was sent to the city for her higher education. On the arrival of Dee, Maggie who suffered by inferiority complex after a disastrous accident she faced, attempts to flee. Mama manages to hold her back. Dee’s dress and attitude seemingly changed and she pays much attention to take photographs rather than greeting her mother and sister. Mama is informed that Dee has changed her ancestral name into a more African name. She comes with her partner whose name was a harder one for mama to pronounce than Dee’s. Dee is interested in old household objects and she wants them to exhibit them in her home. She snatches some quilts which have a connection to their ancestors. The conflict is raised as they were to be given to Maggie at her wedding as a gift. Maggie is desperate and gives up the quilts but Mama intervenes the matter to restore the quilts to Maggie. Dee is crossed and complains Maggie would probably use the quilts for everyday use which is a waste according to her idea, she hopes to hang them as exhibits in her home. Mama does not change her decision which makes Dee angry and leave the house. Mama and Maggie spend the time together in the yard, their bond seems to be strong after the conflict.      

The story takes place in the house of the Johnsons in rural Georgia in the 1970’s. Dee, who is from the city, visits her mother and sister who live in the country house.

Theme: The Meaning of Heritage

The definition of African-American heritage is juxtaposed using the character Dee vs Mama and Maggie. Dee who belongs to modern generation and is educated, does not like to consider their ancestral heritage as their roots as it is connected to slavery; she represents the African Americans of the late period of the civil rights movement who wanted to find an identity separate from that of the white American society. However, Mama is proud about her ancestors who survived maintaining their own culture. Though their lives have been painful, they have retained spiritual strength and have used it to strengthen their community. Maggie represents a segment of their cultural chain. She has the interest in quilting and using the quilts for everyday use maintaining the cultural bond between generations. To Mama and Maggie, their cultural heritage is a living breathing one connected back to a long lineage. In contrary, Dee believes their African-American culture is now dead and she wants to exhibit their objects in the past as decorations in her house. She desperately tries to connect their root African culture to her life, ignoring her own living breathing heritage.

In first person point of view, Mama gives life to her own African-American identity which had been silenced by Black American revolution. Her honest voice evokes a sense of realism; her colourful language, specialized diction and use of her own unique phrases to describe things add ingredients to that.

Quilts symbolize the heritage of African-American people. It is woven using the pieces of garments used by the ancestors. Thus, they carry a hereditary value beyond their artistic and traditional value; it connects generation to generation. It carries a living history that passes through generations. Maggie who knows how to weave quilts and intends to use them for everyday use is the future link that connects the chain of generations; whereas Mama is the link to their past generation. However, Dee believes that the African-American heritage has ended due to Black American revolution. Therefore, she needs quilts to use as exhibits linking them to her root African culture. The conflict between Mama, Maggie and Dee is in a way of portraying the vulnerability of generation bond with the advancement of time.    

Dee wants to preserve the quilts and protect them from the harm her sister might inflict, but she shows no true understanding of their inherent worth as a family totem. She relegates the objects to mere display items. On the other hand, Mama risks Maggie’s harming or destroying the quilts, valuable and irreplaceable documents of family history.

The fire that destroyed their old house and how Maggie and Mama caught between fire as well as how they accumulated money to send Dee to Augusta for schooling are revealed as flashbacks in the first part of the story.

Juxtaposition

At the beginning Dee’s arrival and Mama’s fantasy on meeting her is juxtaposed as Johnny Carson’s television show. Mama Describes the appearance and qualities of Dee and Maggie keeping their characters’ side by side.

Mama’s encounter with brand new Dee who changed her name which she finds a bit hard to pronounce as well as her encounters with Dee’s partner Hakim.a.barber whom mama introduces as Asalamalakim evokes humor showing her alienation to the new culture she encountered.  

Characterization

Mama, the narrator of the story is single parent, physically heavy and strong woman. She is proud of her capabilities and is a loving mother who has soft corner for both of her female children. She is aware of the limitations of Maggie and proud of Dee’s achievements. She expects gratitude for what she had done Dee for her development but when they meet she feels how underappreciated she is. She is less aware about Black American revolution but find pride of her own cultural heritage. She is critical about Dee’s perception of their heritage and entrusts Maggie with quilts which symbolize her cultural identity.

Maggie is the youngest daughter of Mama. Her ugly appearance hides her generous, pure and complex emotional character. She is shy and quiet and is very self-conscious of her limitations due to the injuries she had when their house burnt. Though she is uneducated, she is well aware of her heritage and has capability to carry it to the future.  

Dee is the eldest daughter and represent black power movement. Her fair appearance, high ambitious nature and self-centered judgemental nature sharply contrast her with Maggie. She is less aware about her own heritage and seeks her roots by changing her appearance and name. Mama sees Dee’s thirst for knowledge as a provocation, a haughty act through which she asserts her superiority over her mother and sister.

Everyday Use by Alice Walker is an exploration about the side effects of Black American Revolution. As she views, the African-American’s developed and maintained their own culture which reflect their hardships, struggle for survival and their capacity to survive. They are proud about their perseverance. However, the generation after the revolution is reluctant to link their roots in their history as slaves. Therefore, they urge to link their roots to original African culture which has created a conflict between generations.

What are your views about the short story? Kindly leave a comment to join the discussion. Share your articles related to literature by joining #litspring community. Share the post if you find it useful.   

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Post a comment.

hi sir,is it ok if we directly use the word "ugly" towards maggie in our answer?

Please don't, if we use such words it is considered as a bias word. On the other hand the word ugly does not accurately define Maggie.

thanks alot sir.����

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Everyday Use

Alice walker, everything you need for every book you read..

Mama and Maggie ’s house works in “Everyday Use” to represent both the comfort of their family heritage and the trauma built into that history. The house is beloved by Mama and Maggie, who treasure…

The family’s quilts, sewn by Maggie and Dee ’s grandmother, become the site of the family’s struggle over its heritage and the question of how best to engage with that heritage. Dee wants to take…

Eye contact / Vision / Gaze

The idea of eye contact, vision, or gaze recurs throughout “Everyday Use,” representing the various ways that characters, particularly Dee , interact with or create hierarchies of power. For example, when Mama contrasts her inability…