Everyday Use by Alice Walker

Everyday Use by Alice Walker is a story of a mother and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. Despite being sisters, Maggie and Dee's personalities are as opposite as night and day. Dee is the popular one who aspires for higher goals. Maggie, on the other hand, contents herself with staying at the shadow of sister and to learn how to quilt.

Towards the end of the story, the mother must make a choice as to whom to give the quilt which they hold for generations. When Maggie spoke and suggested that the quilt be given to her older sister Dee, she began to see Maggie in a different light. She also learned to appreciate Maggie's simplicity and goodness as compared to Dee's sophistication and ambitions.

During Alice Walker's time "the writing of fiction," as Mary Helen Washington observes, may refer to having "done under the shadow of men" (103). Therefore, the quilt could mean it takes the women from the domination of men and give them a voice, a place of their own.

Elaine Hedges narrates how women writers before the mid-1900s protect themselves and calm their nerves on the largely male-dominated literary establishment by used metaphor by saying writing was actually mere sewing-the pen refers to only a needle.

Bakers said that "the sorority of quiltmakers, fragment weavers, holy patchers, possesses a sacred wisdom that it hands down from generation to generation of those who refuse the center for the ludic and unconfined spaces of the margins" (156). This analysis pertains to Dee, the prodigal daughter in the story. She is the character who plays on the margins. Dee, in the story, is being excluded according to Nancy Tuten calls "the establishment of a sisterhood between mother and daughter" (125), which pertains to the sisterhood between Mama and her daughter Maggie, not to the other daughter/sister, Dee.

In the story, Patricia Kane believes Dee is the prodigal daughter who does not receive the welcome she anticipates as opposed to the biblical story "prodigal son". The explanation for this is simple, Nancy Tuten believes that Mama has a "distaste for Dee's egotism" (126), that Maggie feels "disgust with her sister," and that, "in the end, Dee's oppressive voice is mute, for Mama has narrated her out of the story altogether."

Mama's "epiphanic moment of recognition" (Baker and Pierce-Baker 161) is a re-cognition that she ought to live in the moment. That she does not see reality as it presents. Bakers believe that it should be taken in the context of logic or politics of discovering identity.

The story ends with this newly-discovered intimacy between a mother and daughter, found presently as they never have done before. The fact is it is written in the past tense and the story ends that way. This, in turn, leads one to wonder about how present the present tense is at the beginning of the story. This somehow creates a contradiction which is unique to Walker's writings.