Quilt Usage
Quilt UsageThe Quilts in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” have different symbolic meaning to each one of the main characters. Dee thinks that she is in touch with her African heritage and that she would be able to take better care of the quilts. Maggie is really the one who is in touch with her African heritage. For this reason her mother wants her to have the quilts. The mother wants the quilts to be put to everyday use. Walker shows that Maggie deserves the quilts because Dee wants them for the wrong reasons, because Maggie is insecure and therefore needs to feel she deserves the special quilts, and because Maggie is more in tune with the families heritage that the quilts represent.
Mama thinks of Dee’s determination to get what she wants. She’s impressed by it, but she also understands that Dee wants the wrong things for the wrong reasons, that Dee is not aware of her true heritage. When Dee was young Mama says, “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 from an old suit someone gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts to get what she wanted”(para. 10). The quilts, however, symbolize a heritage that she doesn’t even want to be a part of. She wants nice things, not old quilts, She wants the quilts to show her friends how bad she had it growing up.
Maggies really wants the quilts, but she it too scared to voice her opinion to her sister. Instead she slams stuff down in the kitchen. “I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed”(para.55). Maggie is insecure and is not as attractive as her sister.”Maggie will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe”(para.5). It is for this reason she does not say anything to her siter about actually wanting to keep the quilts.
Mama’s refusal to give Dee the quilts reinforces Maggie’s new appreciation of herself. Maggie’s smile as Dee leaves without the quilts “is a real smile not scared, Mama says. After we watched the car dustr settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there enjoying, untill it was time to go in the house and go to bed” (para. 90).
Dee does not understand or comprehend, as Mama does, that the people who made these quilts are her true heritage. Maggie, on the other hand, while not overly bright, is smart enough to know the symbolic value of the quilts. The quilts in Alice Walker’”Everyday Use have symbolic meaning to each one of the characters.