Alice Walker Uses Symbolism to Address Three Issues Essay

Born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior Walker was the eighth and youngest child of poor sharecroppers. Her father’s great-great-great grandmother, Mary Poole was a slave, forced to walk from Virginia to Georgia with a baby in each arm. Walker is deeply proud of her cultural heritage. In addition to her literary talents Walker was involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s, walking door-to-door promoting voter’s registration among the rural poor. Walker was present to see Martin Luther King’s â€Å"I have a dream† speech. â€Å"In August 1963 Alice traveled to Washington D. C. to take part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Perched in a tree limb to try to get a view, Alice couldn’t see much of the main podium, but was able to hear Dr. King’s â€Å"I Have A Dream† address. † (Alice Walker Biography) Walker is a vegetarian involved in many other issues, including nuclear proliferation, and the environment. Her insight to African American culture comes from her travel and experiences in both America and Africa. Walker is an activist regarding oppression and power, championing victims of racism and sexism. After her precedent setting, and controversial thirteen-year marriage to a white, Jewish, civil rights lawyer, Alice fell in love with Robert Allen, editor of â€Å"Black Scholar. † â€Å"She is currently living in Mendocino, California and is exploring her bi-sexuality. † Alice Walker’s first novel, â€Å"The Third Life of Grange Copeland† was published the week her daughter was born. Walker received praise for this work, but also criticism for dealing too harshly with the male characters in the book. Walker’s best-known novel, â€Å"The Color Purple† won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and was made into a movie. Walker was the first black author honored by a Pulitzer. In Celie’s letters to God, she tells her story about her role as wife, mother, daughter, and sister, and other women who help shape her life. Walker portrays Africa in a positive way, and looks to it as a form of artistic and ideological expression. Walker was also criticized for her portrayal of men, often as violent rapists and wife beaters. Even as she portrays men, often in a bad light, she likes to focus on the strength of women. In her story, â€Å"Everyday Use† Alice Walker uses symbolism to address three main issues: racism, feminism and the black American’s search for cultural identity. The story â€Å"Everyday Use† is set in the late ’60s or early ’70s and the setting is an impoverished home in Georgia. The critical analysis of â€Å"Everyday Use† from the web site Sistahspace presented the following interpretation: This was a time, when African-Americans were struggling to define their personal identities in cultural terms. The term â€Å"Negro† had been recently removed from the vocabulary, and had been replaced with â€Å"Black. † There was â€Å"Black Power,† â€Å"Black Nationalism,† and â€Å"Black Pride. † Many blacks wanted to rediscover their African roots, and were ready to reject and deny their American heritage, which was filled with stories of pain and injustice. â€Å"Alice Walker is, as David Cowart argues, â€Å"[satirizing] the heady rhetoric of late ’60s black consciousness, deconstructing its pieties (especially the rediscovery of Africa) and asserting neglected values† (Cowart, 182). â€Å"The central theme of the story concerns the way in which an individual understands his present life in relation to the traditions of his people and culture. † (Sistahspace) â€Å"Everyday Use† depicts a poor, illiterate black mother who rejects the shallow Black Power ideals of her older, outspoken daughter, Dee, in favor of the practical values of her younger, less privileged daughter, Maggie. Mama is the orator, and like griots from tribes in Africa, she perpetuates the oral traditions and history of the family. Mama’s upbeat self-image in spite of little formal education, leads the reader to feel the intense pride she has in maintaining self-sufficiency. As discussed in David White’s critical analysis of (â€Å"‘Everyday Use†: Defining African-American Heritage), Mama’s lack of formal education does not prevent her from formulating a sense of heritage unattached to the â€Å"Black Power† movement held by her, purportedly educated, daughter Dee. Mama’s daughter, Dee (Wangero), has a much more superficial idea of heritage. She is portrayed as bright, beautiful, and self-centered. Maggie is the younger daughter, who lives with Mama. She is scared and ashamed, lying back in corners, cowering away from people. (White, David) (â€Å"‘Everyday Use’: Defining African-American Heritage. â€Å") Maggie understands her heritage, and appreciates the significance of everyday things in the house. She is uneducated, and not in the least outspoken, and is unable to make eye contact. Maggie has stooped posture and walks with a shuffle, this, combined with her inability to look you in the eye, points to her vulnerability in dealing with newfound black rights. Mama’s daughter Dee, who is portrayed as quite successful, has come home to visit and display her new African style heritage. Dee has adopted things African and has changed her name to Wangero. As she handles the everyday articles fashioned and used by previous generations, she believes they should be displayed to her white girlfriends, especially the old quilts made by Mama, her sister and her mother. Mama has promised the quilts to Maggie but Dee says, â€Å"Maggie does not understand their value and would just put them to everyday use. † (Walker, â€Å"Everyday Use†) Mama must decide which daughter should receive the family quilts. Finally, Mama realizes that her daughter, Maggie, has a closer connection with her view of family history than Dee does and gives her the quilts. This is the first time Mama has asserted any authority over Dee. On a deeper level, Alice Walker is exploring the concepts of racism and the evolution of Black Society following the end of slavery, through the era of Martin Luther King, and finally to the Black Power movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Maggie, Mama, Dee/Wangaro and Hakim-a Barber, symbolize this. Mama is illiterate, because her school closed when she was in the second grade. The role of black Americans in the late 1920s is best illustrated by Mama’s line, â€Å"School was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions that they do now†¦ † (Walker, â€Å"Everyday Use†) When Mama describes the old house, burning down it symbolizes the ending of slavery and the decreed civil rights. The scars that Mamma’s daughter Maggie, bear are representative of the pain of the past and difficulty in moving from the role of subservience to equality. Maggie has difficulty looking â€Å"you† in the eye just as the American Negro had difficulty moving from the subservient role to peer in dealings with whites. Maggie’s head down on the chest at first appears as an as shame for her scars from the house fire, but they come to symbolize a person caught in the old black paradigm, unable to embrace newfound freedoms in society. The fire of slavery has damaged Maggie and she resigns herself to a transitional cultural existence, neither old nor new. Mama represents the ideals of Martin Luther King through her dream of going on the Johnny Carson show to meet Dee. She embraces the idea of this fantasy and takes pleasure in replaying it in her mind. Ultimately, Mamma is thrust back to the reality that it will never happen, just as she seems to resign herself to the fact that King’s dreams are not real for her generation but for the next.