Point of View in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

Point of View in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

Alice Walker is making a statement about the popularization of black

culture in "Everyday Use". The story involves characters from both sides of the

African American cultural spectrum, conveniently cast as sisters in

the story. Dee/Wangero represents the "new black," with her natural

hairdo and brightly colored clothing. Maggie remains traditional: the

unchanged, unaffected bystander. Nowhere in the dialogue do Walker's

characters directly mention their feelings about the Americanization

of African tradition. But Walker somehow gets the reader to believe

this popularization itself can actually turn into a form of exploitation.

By telling the story from the mother's point of view, Walker's representation

of Wangero is seeped in irony, and therefore Wangero's love of her African

heritage becomes an exploitation of it.

Because the mother is so closely related to the characters in the

story, her perception of them is biased. Walker uses this point of

view to her advantage, because while the reader is familiar with

Wangero's somewhat stereotypical "blacksploitive" personality, this

aspect of her personality remains completely foreign to her mother,

the narrator, who describes it with an innocent wonder. In the

beginning of the story the mother speaks of Wangero's actions in the

past. Even then she displayed an arrogance that isolated her mother

and younger sister, but the mother was too busy being proud of her

daughter's achievements to notice. She says, "At sixteen [Dee] had a

style of her own, and she knew what style was. She used to read to

us, without pity. [We sat] trapped and ignorant underneath her voice."

The mothe...

... middle of paper ...

...ng her mother more ashamed of her dark skin, her culture. The

mother describes her ideal skin shade as the color of an uncooked

barley pancake, a food that is perhaps tan at best. Once again, the

mother continues on about the dream without realizing the weight of

what she is saying. It is the reader's -- and Walker's --

responsibility to understand the real theme imbedded in the story.

In the same way that the reader dislikes Wangero in "Everyday Use,"

so Alice Walker seems to dislike the type of black American who uses

his or her cultural identity as a status symbol. It is not a hatred

that Walker displays in her story, but rather a playful poking-fun-of,

which wouldn't have been possible had "Everyday Use" not been told

from the perspective of the mother. This is exactly how the point of

view affected the theme of "Everyday Use".