Paper One= Everyday Use
Posted by michellex3 , Friday, February 24, 2012 5:00 PM
Everyday Use by Alice Walker is a short
story about the relationship between a mother and her two daughters. In this story, that characters display
conflicts within themselves and with others. The main character I will focus on
will be Dee or otherwise known as Wangero.
Dee shows a lot of dysfunctional behaviors
throughout the story. She has a lot of defenses because there are experiences
in her life that she wants to repress.
Mama points out how Dee shows denial and avoidance when she wrote to
mama “no matter where we choose to live, she will manage to come see us. But
she will never bring her friends” (Walker, 3). Denial is when “we believe that
an unpleasant situation doesn’t exist or an unpleasant event never occurred”
(Tyson, 26). Avoidance is when “we stay away from people, places, or situations
that might stir up repressed experiences (Tyson, 26) Dee shows denial because
she is trying to avoid or forget her home and where she comes from.
Another example in which Dee shows
avoidance is an instant that mama recalls; “I didn’t want to bring up how I had
offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told
they were old-fashioned, out of style” (Walker, 6). In this moment she was denying her roots and
her heritage but in the present tense of the story she was begging for the
quilts.
Dee also shows displacement with Maggie.
She tells her “ you ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie.
It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d
never know it” (Walker, Pg. 7). Displacement is when “we take out our negative
feelings about one person on someone else so that we can relieve our pain or
anger without becoming aware of the real cause of our repressed feelings”
(Tyson, 26). Dee tries to imply that Maggie doesn’t like the life she has as if
she envied hers (Dee’s) but its displacement because it is Dee who doesn’t like
her “old life” or her heritage. The family she comes from. At the same time
this shows her projecting. Which is “when we believe, without real cause, that
someone else feels the same way we feel or that someone else has the same
problem that we ourselves have but want to deny” (Tyson, 26).
Finally Dee shows an insecure or unstable
sense of self because she contradicts herself in the story and you see how she
kind of unconsciously is searching for herself. When her mother calls her by
her name “Dee” she responds “ No, Mama. Not ‘Dee’, Wangero Leewanika Kamanjo!”
(Walker, 4). Mama says, “What happened to Dee?” and Wangero says, “She’s dead.
I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me”
(Walker, 4). She changes her name because she is ashamed of it because its name
by which she is ‘oppressed’. The example
used previously in which she desires the quilt but didn’t in the past also
shows the contradiction she makes upon herself. She is ashamed of her heritage
but later appreciates it so much so that she wanted to take them from Maggie
telling Mama “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward
enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker, 6).
Dee also shows Basements. Which according to Tyson, 28; “ basements are often associated
with the unconscious as the place where we repress unpleasant memories”. An
example of this is shown in “out she peeks next with a polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture
after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering
behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included”.
The house is the base of where Wangero comes from and it indeed is the place
where she has the most repressed memories. Mama even recalls a hate that she
believed Dee had for the house when it was burning “And Dee. I 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 in toward the red hot brick chimney… She had hated the house that much”
(Walker,
Dee
proves to be a very complex character because she contradicts herself and she
is not sure of what she wants. One thing that is shown in the text is that she
was the kind of girl that never knew the words ‘no’. Dee has many dysfunctional
behaviors but the reader can see how throughout the stories she tries to find
herself and her own person by changing her lifestyle.
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