What Do Use a Quilt For?

What is culture? Alice Walker searches for that answer in her short story, Everyday Use. This is a postmodern story in true form. Walker provides interesting insight about a single mother, the narrator, and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. The story itself is a powerful testament to feminism, culture, and family.

Everyday Use is a simple story about a mother and her two daughters in the country part of the South. The narrator’s daughters, Maggie and Dee, are polar opposites of each other. Maggie is meek and selfless. Dee is more stuck-up and proud. The latter left home for college to get away from her poor background. Dee is embarrassed of her family’s poor background. She even hated their first house and was happy to see it burn to the ground. Maggie and the narrator are enjoying a quiet day together when Dee stops by for a visit. However, something has changed about her. The older sister has gotten into the African movement of the time. She even changes her name to Wangero. Because of this, Dee comes with ulterior motive. She wants to take the quilts because they are authentic to the culture. But, does she want to use them? Dee wants to hang up the quilts for the whole world to see. Hang them like a lifeless painting. The mother is shocked to hear this. However, Maggie says that Dee could have the quilts if she wanted. This prompts the mother to give the quilts to her younger daughter, Maggie. Though the whole story, the message Walker is trying to say is clear: do not use your heritage for pride and ego purposes. Culture is meant to be used in the way that it was made to be used in everyday life.

This is definitely a post modern story. The narrator comes to an epiphany towards the end of the story. “When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.” (Walker) The mother has decided that her younger daughter is the rightful heir to the quilts. Dee is of course shocked and appalled by the outcome. The next section says, “But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim~a~barber. ‘You just don't understand,’ she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car. ‘What don't I understand?’ I wanted to know. ‘Your heritage,’ she said, and then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, "You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It's really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you'd never know it." (Walker) It is clear that it is not Maggie and the narrator who do not understand their heritage. Dee is so wrapped up in trying to be better than her family, that she is too blind to the reality of her own background.

Everyday Use reminds me of Girl by Jamaica Kincaid and How to Talk to Your Mother by Lorrie Moore. Both stories deal with mother-daughter relationships. Girl reflects on the narrator with Maggie while How to Talk to Your Mother reflects on Dee with the narrator. With Girl, the mother is giving her daughter advice on how to grow up. In a strange, overbearing way, the mother truly does care what happens to her daughter when she gets older. She tells her daughter things like, “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothes-line to dry;” (30/30 Pg. 183) While she is talking, the girl only says two lines in the whole story, but her mother does not listen and keeps on with the advice. However, the mother really does care about both of her daughters when it is all said and done at the end of the day. For How to Talk to Your Mother and Everyday Use, both have daughters that are distance from their mothers in the story. The narrator in How to Talk to Your Mother has an unhappy life and very disconnected relationship with her mother. The fact that she is childless does not help her situation either. Pages 240 and 241 of 30/30 says, “The mothers see you eying their children. They smile sympathetically. They believe you envy them. They believe you are childless. They believe they know why.” The same thing is observed in Everyday Use with Dee and the narrator. In fact, Dee looks down upon her mother and sister while missing the whole point of culture itself. This snobbery has blinded her so much that she does not realize that she is really flawed herself as a person. Everyday Use also makes me think of Faulkner’s work in The Bear from Go Down, Moses. Both deal with stories in the South. They both also deal with the theme of change and resistance in a sense. Isaac refuses to inherit the plantation just the narrator in Everyday Use refuses to give the quilts to Dee. In The Bear, Faulkner shows the Old South’s beliefs on page 243 in Go Down Moses, “Then he was twenty-one. He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land which was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man’s money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too.” This passage also shows, Isaac’s core reason for not taking his inheritance. If Isaac took the plantation, he would be going along with the Southern hypocrisy that Faulkner pokes fun at in his stories. The same goes to the narrator in Everyday Use in another sense of the word. If she gives Dee all of the quilts to hang up on display, she would be giving away a valuable treasure of their pride and culture to someone who does not really care about the true meaning of heritage. Finally, Everyday Use reminds me of Roman Fever on the point of the meek will rise above and win when it is all said and done. Alida Slade may have tricked Grace Ansley years ago with a fake letter and married Delphin, but Ansley still wins by saying, “I had Barbara.” (Pg. 20, Roman Fever and Other Stories) With that little sentence, it is clear that she won in the end. Mrs. Ansley is calm throughout the whole story, but at the end she still manages to show the reader and Mrs. Slade that she had a strength of her own. Maggie is the same as Mrs. Ansley in Everyday Use. Her mother does not seem to have high hopes for her in the beginning. But when Maggie says, “"She can have them, Mama," she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts."

This sentence alone pushes her mother to go through with her promise to give the quilts to Maggie instead of Dee. Both Mrs. Ansley and Maggie have a quiet strength to overpower the enemies in the end.

What is a short story? It has grown and developed for many years. But, where did the short story first begin? From what I believe, it started when man started to write words down on paper. The short story became popular during the romantic period. Then, it which through the changes in the modern and postmodern periods. Despite the times changing, romanticism, modern, and postmodern still live on in the short story. One of the dominant themes that has been present in short stories is the human spirit and relationships with one’s fellow man. Whether it is love or hate, the human will continue to interact with each other until the end of the earth. The short story shows that well and will do so as long as it lives on in the world of literature.