Character Analysis of Everyday Use by Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” is about a young woman that attempted to escape their traditions; she has set aside for the dowry of a sister into her own hands(, 1984). This you woman has switched her given name to Dee Johnson and for the second time to a much more sophisticated name, Wangero Leewanika Kemanio. This name made it hard for the narrator of the story, her mother because she thinks that this name is appropriate. The name Wangero had madecentral character of the story to be fashionable political as the story becomes the outwit to African American community, past and present, and its struggle for liberation.
Walker had made the situation of Wangero to be comparable to the cultural position of herself, they are both against to the fate of the abused in the language and literary structures of the abuser, finds a more valid idiom and theme. Walker used the character of Wangero to present cultural reality and her art of pushing linguistic and literary inter-texts (1994, ).
Wangero also represents the bigger African American past. The coverlet that Wangero desires had connected her generation to her grandmother’s generation (, 1994). The coverlet is made of her grandmother’s dresses and her great grandmother’s. The coverlet also has a scrap of the uniform of her great grandfather who served the Union Army. During the war between the States. Wangero, rightfully identifies the coverlet as a portion of her very easily broken heritage, although, she cannot see the degree to which she herself traced her heritage (, 1994). That is why, her mother Mrs. Johnson is against to her new name, because they cannot trace the Dee in her latest name. Dee means “back beyond the Civil War”, however, Wangero is the name that reminds the deprivation of African Americans of their authentic names. According to Mrs. Johnson she cannot stand it anymore, being named after her oppressors.
After changing her name, Wangero now dresses like a fashionable African and looks like an American who wants to become a African that made it in becoming a phony. Her name, her clothes, her hair, her accessories, the way she talks and her black Muslim friend, shows an awful extent of Wangero’s estrangement from her traditions and her family ( 1999). The irony in this aspect of the story is minor, Wangero criticizes her ignorance of their tradition, but she herself is alienated from her tradition.
In other words, the Africa-smitten Wangero one meets in the opening pages of the story is a precipitate of the cultural struggles of a generation struggles adumbrated in the stages of this character's education (, 1994). She had left home to attend school in Augusta, where apparently she immersed herself in the liberating culture she would first urge on her bewildered mother and sister, then denounce as oppressive. Now, with her black Muslim boyfriend or husband in tow (her mother hears his name as "Hakim-a-barber"), she has progressed to an idea of nationality radically at odds with all that has hitherto defined the racial identity of African Americans.
Wangero hates her sister, her mother and the church that assisted her education. She is very self-centered. Walker made her reader’s to hate her central character and had showed Wangero’s differences to her sister Maggie. Maggie symbolizes the many black women that suffers from oppression while her sister Wangero struggling to escape from this (, 1992). Maggie is described to be disfigured, unintelligent and uneducated. Maggie is a critic to a survivor like Wangero.
Maggie is the combined underclass that has been marginalized by people like her sister Wangero as they strive to have an access to independence. The Johnson’s family is presented as collective abused underclass. Each character represents their identity in the society. Walker had attempted to satirize her characters (, 1992). However, Wangero does not see the integrity of African American cultural institutions that evolved as the creative and powerful response to the general oppression. She is embarrassed of her roots including her mother, her sister and her whole community.
Wangero claims to worth heritage and Walker are certainly concerned to someone who seems to distinguish, on the other hand ineptly, the must to conserve the often flimsy relics of the African American past. But Walker pictures Wangero's preservationist as desperately self-centered and mistaken (, 1996). Although the author in another place grieves the rareness of photographs in the African American historical record, she demonstrates little endurance with Wangero's desire to take pictures of mother and cow in front of the house. Wangero's desire is to have a trace of how far she has come. No hesitation she will scrutinize as "attractive" these images of a rural past. She desires the photographs -and currently the agitate lid, the dasher, and the coverlet for purposes of display, prompts that she no longer has to live in such a house, care for such a cow, have daily communication with her mother and her sister.
According to ’s critics, “Everyday Use” dramatically presented the Black Nationalist and feminist ideologies. In its insistence on addressing cultural nationalist issues, the short story has all the traces of a nostalgic text, evoking a past removed by nearly a decade from its historical moment. Its intersection with a burgeoning feminist movement locates it within the matrix of one of the dominant political phenomena of the period (, 1992). This juxtaposition of two antithetical ideologies produces narrative tensions between the nationalist enterprise and the surfacing of feminine feminist desire and ambivalence. Its politics are largely inscribed in its representational strategies, which take four forms: (1) more complex constructions of women, stressing their roles as cultural rebels and political activists; (2) an enlarged and extended projection of the Black girl as a child-woman who embodies nascent cultural and political consciousness; (3) an increased marginalization of Black males with emphasis on their diminished importance; and (4) more intensified depictions of white males and females as disruptive forces in the community.
Women who are physically and spiritually a part of the political struggle are depicted as having made an uneasy commitment to the ideology of cultural nationalism, and they feel a conflict about having done so. For other women, political consciousness is still evolving (, 1996). For both types of women, however, conflicts are not easily resolved. The feminist voice constantly interjects itself in these stories, challenging and sometimes displacing the nationalist discourse
The cultural nationalist politics of the text dictates that these women move from questioning to accepting their roles in the political struggle. Self-realization is achieved only in terms of group racial identity (, 1992). For these women, then, personal frustrations and their uneasiness with the demands of nationalism must be reconciled within the mythical Black community. Like her works in other genres, Walker’s short stories primarily aim at truth speaking, particularly as truth is related to the semiotic mediation of Black existential modalities. Of primary importance are the construction and representation of an organic Black community and the articulation of Black Nationalist ideology. Walker’s insertion of themes related to the desires of Black women and girls disrupts and often preempts the stories' primary focus on classic realism and nationalism.
Works Cited
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