A Mother’s Heartache
By
Eric Sissom
English Composition II
Paper 4
07 November 2006
Outline
Thesis statement: A mother tells the story about her life with her two daughters, Maggie and Dee.
A Mother’s Heartache
The story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is about a family that went through difficult times. A mother tells the story about her life with her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. Maggie is a country girl who is lonely, and never wins any arguments or disputes with her sister, Dee. As Maggie and her mother wait for Dee to show up for a visit, Walker states, “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand there hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe” (2). Dee is a big shot city girl who is totally different from her sister, and always gets her way with her sister. Maggie “thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that ‘no’ is a word the world never learned to say to her” (2). Their mother is in the middle of this awkward relationship.
The family experienced a house fire when the daughters were young. Their mother remembers, “Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them” (10). As for Dee, who probably was glad to see the house burn down as the mother can “see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much” (10).
Dee always wanted everything prefect, the house, her appearance, etc. Walker states, “Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made . . . At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was” (12).
They moved into another house that wasn’t perfect and had problems as “There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes on a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one” (14). Dee would be ashamed of the new house as Walker states, “No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down,” (14) and when she comes to visit, “she will never bring her friends” (14).
Dee finds two old quilts left from their late grandma. When she asks her mother if she can have them, Maggie, who was hiding in the kitchen, overheard and got mad as “I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed” (57). Dee wants the quilts so bad because, “’These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!’ She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them” (61).
The mother confesses that she promised to give the quilts to Maggie when she got married. Dee was shocked that her mother would promise the quilts to Maggie by saying, “’Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts’ . . . ‘She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use’” (66). Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton states, “Quilting symbolizes the process out of which the unimportant and meaningless may be transformed into the valued and useful” (1). The mother says, “’God knows I been saving ‘em for long enough with nobody using ‘em’” (67).
Dee actually did not show an interest in the quilts when her mother first offered her a quilt when she went away to college because at that time Dee thought “they were old-fashioned, out of style” (67). Now, Dee has a change of opinion. When her mother continues insisting for Maggie to have them, Dee yells, “’But they’re priceless!’ she was saying . . . furiously; for she has a temper. [Dee continues], ‘Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags’” (68). Dee said that she’ll put the quilts to use by hanging them “As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts” (72). Piedmont-Marton states, “Walker . . . does more than acknowledge that the quilts these women produced can be regarded as art; she is impressed ‘with their functional beauty and by the process that produced them’” (4).
Maggie finally gives in and says “’She can have them, Mama’” (74) as if Dee always gets what she wants and Maggie rarely gets anything. Although, she was not happy, she accepted it that she wasn’t getting the quilts even though “It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself” (75). Piedmont-Marton states, “Maggie's own scarred body resembles the faded patches of the quilt, where stitching resembles healing” (7).
The sisters have their differences and neither one will ever understand the other. Dee thinks “Maggie may not understand what Dee means by ‘heritage’ and as a consequence she will never make anything of herself” (7 Piedmont-Marton). Dee leaves with a “final gesture . . . [of putting on] a pair of sunglasses ‘that hid everything above the tip of her nose and her chin,’ which suggests that despite this lesson in what heritage really means, she will continue to see the world through the frames she chooses” (7 Piedmont-Marton).
Works Cited
Piedmont-Marton, Elisabeth. “An Overview of ‘Everyday Use’.” Short Stories for Students. (1997): Literature Resource Center. Galenet. RODP Lib. 25 Oct. 2006. < http://vl.rodp.org >.
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 98 - 104.
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Grade: 180/200 | This essay was written by Eric Sissom, autism@ericsissom.com