Everyday Use Essay

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Everyday Use by a. Walker Order

Alice Walker

There have and are well-known authors that literature students are introduced to and discussed because of the intensity, reasons, persona, and literary devices that the authors add to works they publish. Using writing techniques, like Alice Walker has done in "Everyday Use" she originally wrote in 1973, she sets the scene from a place in her time when she was living life and facing the facts and realities of prejudice people in America that were directly mean to her for being an African-American. However, when Walker went to these extremes for her readers, she became one of many of the bestselling novelists in which some of her work turned in to motion pictures like her major fiction The Color Purple A Native to Georgia, Walker, as an African-American her main themes to the stories she chose to write about had a lot to do with the reflection of living in America as a black woman who wanted to be treated like her white native neighbors and have equal rights like the whites had over blacks at one time. Her creative writing skills were from gender issues, children's stories, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, abuse to women through mutilation, and racial stories from her own persona that she has in writing what she does. However, before her hit the story Everyday Use in 1973, begins with the storyline that starts out with Mama, an African-American women living during the 1950s and 1960s when segregation was highly common and tolerated, who is standing out in the yard awaiting for her daughter, Dee to come to her house to visit even though she knows that her other daughter, Maggie is anxious about Dee's arrival and insecure about the scars, burns, and other cruel marks that made Dee's life seem easier than her sister's that still had a pretty simple life that Maggie really envied. However, Mama was constantly dreaming of Dee and Maggie getting along when Dee arrived in hopes for her to stay, however, Mama knows during hard times in society and within her home along with how the poverty and unequal human rights were a main stress within her household and the fragile bonds between Mama and her daughters could easily keep Mama unhappy and stressed.

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It is obvious that with Walker's own personal background it is closely related to the story within the literature, and it is obvious that Alice has her own issues with segregation, family problems, being different as a child, having troubling siblings, and Walker's persona is evident in the plots that lead up to the climax. While Walker talks in third person she does an exceptional well job of imagining how a mother would act during this time in history, and why the Mama character would have different fantasies about her daughter Dee coming home and embracing her because she remembers a time over 10 years ago when their house burned to the ground and she struggled getting Maggie safe, and that is why Maggie still had evident severe burns because back then there was no removing scars just watching them fade and get smaller.

The plots that occur in this story is appropriate for the era of time that this supposed story was supposed to have happened in, and nowadays there is more ways to help low income households and single parents, like Mama, that can help in addition to her community to find a way to come up with enough funding to see to it that Dee made it to a school in Augusta. Yet, Mama is furious with her daughter, Dee, her looks, her different ethnic looking boyfriend, and appalled by what she is wearing when they finally arrive. In those days a mother felt that what her daughter did outside the home, how she dressed, her attitude, and everything else was expected that the child act as they are setting an example for how they were raised so they won't be thought less of. Over the past half century, couples who have had children have became less worried about where their children and their safety and what are they doing and if they are behaving as each generation becomes teenagers and more on their own, yet Mama tries to control Maggie and Dee's attitudes toward one another, and she is proper like women were back….....

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