Heritage and Culture in Everyday Use by Alice Walker Research Paper

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Everyday Use

In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Dee is searching for cultural authenticity but in her search, she latches on to material possessions the relics of her family heritage, thinking these represent the identity she is after. However, Dee’s search is frustrated by her own superficial understanding of what culture really and truly is: she believes it is a construct that can be concocted over night—or re-claimed by way of artifice. The reality is that, as the mother shows, culture comes from the heart and its attachment to one’s true heritage—which is why Maggie is awarded the quilt coveted by Dee. Maggie has the heart to love it because it comes from her family, and she has the sense to make use of it; Dee wants it only because she thinks it represents her ancestral blackness—beyond that it means nothing to her. Mother’s role in awarding the quilt to the most deserving daughter reinforces the main idea of the story, which is that real culture is lived, whereas fake or superficial culture is merely talked about. Maggie has the real culture of the family: she is fond of her heritage; Dee is simply posing, attempting to create a hyper-heritage that extends beyond her immediate family history and goes all the way back to a continent she doesn’t even really know.

Walker confirms Dee as a poser when she points out that Dee’s given name comes from a long line of women in the family: she is named after her aunt, who was named for their grandmother and so on—yet for Dee, who has learned at college how white culture has oppressed her people, rejection of her given name is part and parcel of what she is doing now: rejecting everything that defined her previously and setting about constructing an authentic African identity—or at least so she thinks.

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As Helga Hoel points out, Dee’s “African name”—Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo—is inauthentic. It might sound like it originates in Africa, but it has no more connection to that continent, its people and their history than the local dairy mart down the street. Her new self-applied and self-constructed name only serves to reflect Dee’s socio-political rejection of white culture and her white oppressors. It is not a legitimate claim to blackness, heritage or true culture, as Dee would like to think it is.

Dee misses the real meaning of heritage and culture when she arrives at the Johnson homestead fresh from college. The objects in the home—such as the quilt and the butter churn—have an everyday, practical use on top of being things that have been in the family’s possession for generations. They tell something of the story of the Johnson family. Dee sees them only as relics or artifacts of black culture. For Maggie and Mama, they represent real memories and they respect these objects for that reason. For instance, Maggie learned to quilt from her grandmother, as Walker points out, and the butter churn was something that their uncle carved with his own two hands: that is why they are important to Maggie and Mama. To….....

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