Alice Walker's Short Story Everyday Essay

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By simply concentrating on connecting with their African heritage many failed to understand that their parents and their ancestors who lived on the American continent in general created a culture of their own that entailed elements belonging both to the African continent and to the American one.

Most of the short story is about how Dee struggles to find her personal identity by turning to cultural values. While Dee is more concerned with displaying her cultural values and preserving them, Mama and Maggie actually live through their traditions directly. They do not need to pose in individuals obsessed with their background in order to actually understand it. Their ability to preserve thinking present in their ancestors compensates for their lack of knowledge and is more important than Dee's efforts to put across pretentious attitudes. It is not necessarily that these characters are unwilling to accept their African roots, as they actually feel that it would be more important for them to focus on ideas that can actually reflect positively on them.

The quilts play a particularly important role in the story, taking into account that they contain parts of dresses belonging to Dee's predecessors and that they even hold a piece of the uniform her great-grandfather wore during the Civil War. "The visitor rightly recognizes the quilts as part of her fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage.
" (Cowart)

All things considered, Walker puts across a story meant to influence readers to concentrate on getting a more complex understanding of their background in order to be able to truly appreciate their heritage. Dee's behavior is certainly praiseworthy, but it is actually sad that she fails to comprehend the complete nature of her background.

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