Feminist Perspective of Everyday Use

A Feminist View of the “Everyday Use”

“Everyday Use” is one of black women writer, Alice Walker’s most popular short stories.   The story opens in the narrative point of view, and its language is trendy, witty and colorful.   The plot is not too complicated and revolves around a conflict over two quilts within a family of black females; Mama, the black mother of Dee, the well-educated first daughter and the cowardly little daughter, Maggie.   The story’s setting takes place in 1960’s during the African-American Civil Rights Movement while analyzing the worlds of three black women spirit worlds and symbols of significance in terms of Feminine Consciousness to project the literature topic of the novel.
Alice Walker explores the black women’s social relationship, living state and spiritual quest.   In this novel, the author interprets three black women, the mother and two daughters.   The mother, who is strong, capable, hardworking, and undereducated, poor but optimistic, is a typical black woman and represents the common American black people.   As the novel describes, the black mother of two girls is “a large, big-bone woman with rough, man-working hands” (Walker, 2011, Page 279) “in the winter she wears ‘flannel night owns to bed and overalls during hot in zero weather” (Walker, 2011, Page 279).   She can “kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man” (Walker, 2011, Page 279).   Using figurative and vivid description of Mama identifies that she is a person lacking unusual abilities but the abilities she has have been inherited to bring up two daughters solely by herself.   She values family relationships and the preservation of black culture and life.   Mama has passed this cultural heritage to at least one of her daughters, and the other not so much.   Alice Walker, wants to carry forward the black people’s traditional culture, through this black mother, and make it exist for forever.
Mama’s two daughters are very opposite.   Maggie, the second child, is portrayed as...