Everyday Use Psychoanalysis (REVISED)
Posted by michellex3 , Sunday, March 11, 2012 12:55 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.
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 a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were
old-fashioned, out of style” (Walker 6). In this early moment she was already 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 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).
According to Tyson, “certain objects tend
to have symbolic meaning for most human beings, whether we are aware of this
meaning or not , and these symbols often show up in our dreams” (17). Dee shows the dream
symbol, Basements. Which according to
Tyson; “ basements are often associated with the unconscious as the place where
we repress unpleasant memories”(28). 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 2).
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. If Dee never accomplishes
her personal goal on finding herself, then she will be living in cycle in which
she will always want more then what she already has and she will never be
happy. Wangero will not achieve self satisfaction judging by the way she treats
and thinks of her own family.
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