On the day the story takes place, Dee arrives on a very infrequent visit. Mama is astonished because Dee is wearing African clothing and jewelry. She’s also taken an African name and the religion of her boyfriend which is Islam. In the 1960’s African Americans in response to widespread racism, they embraced and began affirming their true roots. She was trying to establish here new proud African identity but also authentic southern rural roots.
Literary Analysis “Everyday Use” In the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, there are three main characters. The mother, youngest daughter Maggie, and Dee, the oldest daughter who is trying to leave her past behind while attempting to find herself and her African heritage as she thinks it should be. There has always been an unspoken jealousy between Mama and the oldest daughter. Dee is seeking a way out of the poverty and oppression of the times, so much, that while she was away at school she had changed her name to one that has an African meaning while omitting any trace of her current true history. Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo is Dee’s new name.
Mrs. Walker talks about her traveling to Africa and being given the name “Wangero” , by her Uganda family. She reflects back to the 60’s while living in Mississippi and how her peers began to return back to Africa figuratively. Many changed their hair and clothes and behavior trying to mimic their African descendants. However, Mrs. Walker felt it was very disrespectful to their ancestor that they had already known. She says that “Even though parents had done the best that they could be dismissed and denied” ( A Stitch in Time ).
Jubilee by Margret walker is a novel on the story of vyry a slave who since a child went through many struggles starting with the death of het mother and beging her life journey when forced to move into the " bug house" with her biological father. Miss Salina, Master Dutton’s wife, doesn’t like Vyry because since Vyry is also Dutton’s daughter, Vyry looks as if she could be twins with Lillian, who is Salina’s daughter. Dutton isn’t that hateful towards his slaves. He has conversations with them and everything and there’s this occasion where Vyry forgets to throw out something that Lillian used to pee during the night so Salina throws it on Vyry and another times Vyry is being punished by being hanged by her thumbs in a closet and John Dutton comes and he takes Vyry out of there and he gets mad at Salina. While Vyry is in the Big House, she works with Aunt Sally in the kitchen.
Jenna’s mother and her get into arguments over Jenna asking her mother to watch her son. Jenna has to pay for daycare after school for him while she is at work and has little money to pay for additional daycare when she would be at college classes. Her mother says that she has raised her children and does not believe that she should have to help her daughter because she received no help with her children. Jenna has a 17 year old sister who does help with watching her son, but Jenna also feels guilty always having to ask her and has no money to pay her to watch her son. Jenna and her sister are close, her sister plans on attending college at the end of her senior year and wants to study to become a doctor.
Louise was workaholic who ran the family meat business, she supervised the kids and expected them to put in long hours slopping pigs and looking after other animals, even on school days. Louise was the type of woman who did not take care of her hygiene, nor did she wear clean clothes. She also allowed the farm animals to roam freely throughout the house, she never even bothered to clean up after them. Louise believed that her daughter,
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Evoked Female Identity During the 1960s in America, where phallocentrism is still ruling society, many social problems caused younger people to be unsatisfied with reality and to become rebellious. In Oates’s story, the character of Connie is affected by patriarchal oppression. Oates gives Connie an independent identity while using her mother and sister as opposite characters to reflect her uniqueness and to let the reader understand the female identity. Connie's mother and sister portray typical females under patriarchal oppression. In the case of Connie’s mother, she rejected Connie’s attitudes because it often went against the patriarchal society's code of conduct.
Her estranged father Peter Walker was a West Indian man of color from Saint Croix. Shortly after her father left the family, her mother remarried a Scandinavian man named Peter Larsen. Like many parents of interracial children during this time, her mother was unable to deal with the issues of raising an interracial child and begin to alienate herself from her young daughter. Feeling rejected from her step father and also her biological mother she begins to exhibit the symptoms of an identity crisis. One wonderful thing her parents did for her was to send her to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
And she was and she goes on to explain her mother's life to the reader so she can prove this person wrong and justify her mother's long hardworking career on the farm. Despite the vast commitment her mother has to her family, farm, and lifestyle, Bonnie is denied death benefits only because she did not work at a desk job or any other work the government considers a legitimate job. The government needs to appreciate and reward more people like Martha Smith, a person who gives everything she has as service to her society. While it is quite difficult to define someone as a hardworking person, one cannot deny the amount of contribution a person serves to his or her country. Many people these days just get a regular job at some mediocre company just to get by.
Heather Skinner-Lucas English 1302.09 Mrs. Heinzelman 24 April 2012 Being Educated does not imply one knows his/her Heritage “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker that was published in the collection In Love and Trouble in the year 1973. The narrator of the short story is "Mama"; Mama is an African American young woman who lives with one of her daughters within the Deep South. Everyday Use humorously shows the distinctions between Maggie, her introverted younger daughter Maggie and Dee, her educated daughter. Dee returns from college after a long time away; there is a disagreement between Mama, Dee and Maggie over heirloom family belongings. Dee prefers to be referred to as Wangero and ridicules her present ancestry for a pretentious "native African" personality (Walker, 445).