Literary Criticism In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

1100 Words3 Pages

Alice Walker, the author of the short story, “Everyday Use”, grew up in a family of sharecroppers who raised cotton (Kirzner and Mendel 463). So she has a very firm idea of what it 's like to be at the bottom of the America’s capitalist economic system. This is reflected in “Everyday Use” through the conditions in which she places the characters. The story centers around a single mother and her two daughters who have inherited a life of hard-work and destitution from their ancestors. Through analysis of Mrs. Johnson, the mother, using the Marxist school of literary criticism, it can be determined that she demonstrates how difficult it can be to raise a family that is discriminatory of people of low wealth and education, while at the same Johnson has and even though Dee has already taken all of her mother’s savings and thrown away the name she was given, she wants to take the quilts as well. Mrs. Johnson knows that Dee has gained knowledge and lost herself. Along with her name, she has also cut the ties to her roots and no longer would value the quilts in the same way that her mother values them. In the same way artists take pictures of the less fortunate and hang them in galleries instead of doing something useful, Dee wanted to “’hang them,’she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.” (469) This is another example of the social gap that now separates Mrs. Johnson from her daughter. The quilts “ ...had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and...in both were scraps of dresses..pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts...and one teeny faded blue piece...from Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore during the civil war...” (469) sewn together and given a second life because that 's what they had. Mrs. Johnson and Maggie live in a social class were it is understood that you do what you have to do and use what you have to use regardless of what others think. They cherish the memories and feelings rather than the items. Dee has transcended into the world where items mean more than thoughts, which is rather ironic since she left home to gain a higher

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