The Different Facets of Alice Walker's Life in Everday Use

In 1973, Alice Walker published the short story, "Everyday Use." While this story is interesting when criticized under many different literary theories, it is perhaps the most interesting when viewed from a historical approach. In this paper, I plan to give a short summary of the elements of Alice Walker's life that seem to correlate to the lives of the characters in "Everyday Use." By doing this, I plan to show how the characters in "Everyday Use" are actually representations of the different personalities Walker has taken on in her own life, and, essentially, the different ways she has questioned her connection to her ancestry.

Alice Walker was born in Georgia in 1944. Her mother, Minnie Walker, was a homemaker and seamstress, and her father, Willie Lee Walker, was a sharecropper who was raising eight children on his $300 a year salary. Though her parents embodied the lives of a typical African American family of their time, they wanted more for their children, including an education and an escape from the prejudice of the south. However, Willie often became frustrated with his inability to gain rights in their southern community, and, as a result, he often psychically abused his children, not excluding Alice. Alice's mother, on the other hand, was a carling and loving woman who had done her fair share of man's work in her lifetime. While she was often left to take care of all aspects of the house, she also found time to quilt, grow a garden, and tell stories to her children (Guerin 69).

Alice began school at the age of four. She excelled in her classes and was very outgoing. However, when she was eight, one of her five brothers shot her in the eye with the pellet from a BB gun. They convinced her to tell her parents that she'd been hit with a piece of wire, likely because they feared the punishment that their father would inflict upon them if she were to tell them the truth. Because of the lie they were told, Alice's parents waited before taking her to the doctor. By the time she was treated for her injury, she'd lost her vision in that eye, and, consequently, the injury healed as a "hideous white scar" (qtd. in Danielle 1).

Because of her injury and the scar that it left, Alice became very socially withdrawn. She began to perform poorly in her classes, and she felt very self-conscious about her now-deformed appearance. According to Danielle, "When people looked at her face, she would quickly look down or turn away" (2). Finally, when she was 14, she spent a summer babysitting for her brother who realized how much Alice had suffered as a result of her injury. He took her to a doctor who surgically removed the scar.

No longer suffering from what she perceived to be a deformity, Alice again began to excel in her classes. She graduated from high school as valedictorian, and she was voted the most popular girl in her graduating class. She was, however, awarded a college scholarship based on her blindness in one eye. When she left home to go to college, her mother gave her three things to take with her: a sewing machine, a suitcase, and a typewriter (Danielle 2-3).

Alice went on to graduate college and become a very active member of the civil rights movement. In 1964, she spent a summer in Uganda as an exchange student. In addition to her many accomplishments as a civil rights advocate, a writer, and a teacher, Alice created the first class in America devoted to the study of African-American women writers while working at Wellesley and won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple (Danielle 6-8).

Though the information presented above is in no way a complete biography of Alice Walker's life, it does present the elements of her life that are essential to understanding her short story, "Everyday Use," from a historical perspective. "Everyday Use" is the story of a mother and her two, very different daughters. The mother, who is the narrator of the story, presents her account of a meeting between her two daughters, Dee and Maggie. Dee has left home in order to go to college and, in many ways, has succeeded in a way that black women of the narrator's time were never given the opportunity. Maggie, on the other hand, was badly burned in a house fire in her youth, and, consequently, she became a very shy, quiet adult. Maggie, unlike Dee, chose to life a life in the home, much like her mother's (Walker 401-403).

The story opens with the narrator sitting in the yard of her home thinking about the impending arrival of Dee, whom she has not seen for many years. The narrator refers to herself as "a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands" (402). However, later in the story, you learn that, in addition to doing all of the work around the house after the passing of her husband, the narrator also has time to quilt and garden (Walker 401-10).

This portrayal of the narrator is interesting when considering the characteristics of Alice's own mother. Like the narrator in "Everyday Use," Minnie Walker was also a woman of many talents; she could perform the work of men, but, at the same time, she found time for sewing, gardening, and telling stories. "Everyday Use" opens with the narrator studying the intricacies of her yard, a reference to gardening. Next, the story essentially revolves around which of the two daughters have the right to possess two quilts that were made by the narrator, her sisters, and her mother. This, when compared to Alice's own mother, could be considered an inference to her inclination toward sewing. Finally, the mother in "Everyday Use" is also the narrator of the story, leading one to make the connection between the choice of narrator in "Everyday Use" and Alice's own mother's love of storytelling.

"Everyday Use" moves from describing the narrator to describing Maggie. Maggie was badly burned in a house fire and left with scars. The scars defeated her self esteem, leading the narrator to describe her as "a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person" (403). This description of Maggie is interesting when compared to Alice's own injury in her childhood that left her with no self-esteem and no ambition to do well in her studies.

Dee finally arrives at her mother's and sister's house, taking pictures and introducing them to her boyfriend. Dee and her boyfriend have adopted African names because they do not want to be associated with the people who enslaved their ancestors. This connection to Africa could be connected to Alice's own trip to Africa in 1964, during the height of the civil rights movement. Dee is an educated woman, having graduated college and becoming successful in a way that neither her mother nor sister had ever known.

Alice Walker, at different times in her life, had lived as both Maggie, the deformed outcast, and Dee, the successful civil rights activist. The overall theme in "Everyday Use" seems to be that, regardless of how successful you become, you should never forget your roots. In that way, it seems that Alice is essentially placing herself in the roles of the two sisters who are both desperately clinging to their heirlooms. Though both sisters cherish these heirlooms for different reasons, they're both still clinging to that part of their history. Above all, the story is told from the point-of-view of a character who is very much like Alice's own mother, insinuating that Alice is trying to view her own accomplishments and failures from her mother's perspective.

If connections can be made to between both Alice and Maggie and Alice and Dee, then it can be assumed that these two characters are simply reflections of facets of Alice's own personality during different times in her life. Additionally, the story being told from the point-of-view of a character much like Alice's own mother leads one to believe that Alice is trying to questions the decisions she's made in her life by looking at them from the point-of-view of her ancestors. Therefore, I believe that "Everyday Use," when viewed from a historical perspective, can be seen as simply Alice Walker's own struggle to connect with her ancestry.

Works Cited
Danielle, Chris. "Biography of Alice Walker." April 1999. Living By Grace. 27 Apr. 2006 .
Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "Everyday Use." A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 69-73.
Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." In Love and Trouble: Stones of Black Women. 1973. Rptd. in A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 401-10.