Introduction
“Everyday Use” by Alice Walker contrasts two distinct daughters in search of cultural identity. Each daughter is distinct; the narrator, who is also their mother, notes that Dee attended college and earned a solid education despite their poverty and the low status of black women. The children’s mother narrates a story centered on Dee’s return home.
The plot’s turning point occurs when Dee attempts to take two unique blankets home but discovers they are intended for Maggie. Huge representations of their culture may be found in these quilts. In the text, Dee seems not to deserve to bring the quilts into society because she is so unappreciative of her mother and sister, unlike her own mother and sister. Dee, who lacks knowledge of the past and loses his sense of self, grapples with a crisis of multicultural identity. Dee’s transformation is motivated by her desire to escape her past, embrace her newfound identity, and challenge her family’s traditions.
Dee’s Upbringing and Identity
Dee’s desire for a better life, driven by her harsh upbringing, leads her to reject her heritage and seek a new identity. Her perspective of beauty and how she sees herself as the ideal lady in the eyes of a white guy both heavily depend on culture. Due to commercial culture, she has developed an aesthetic perception of these commonplace objects and the house.
She presented herself as an exquisite connoisseur of fine taste and an expert on African American history (Adedokun-Awojoodu and Oluyemisi 102). Dee essentially has two methods to build her identity within these circumstances. The first is by owning common household goods as decorations for his home, and the second is by using a Polaroid camera to capture pictures of his family. Dee’s yearning for a better existence affects her aesthetic experience, particularly how she views her painful history, the realities of Black American survival, and how consumer society shapes her sense of self as a person of color.
Gender, Race, and Identity
For African American women like Dee, an assertive demeanor and a culture of criticism are racially different. Dee creates herself as a white woman in contrast to her mother, who conforms to the stereotype of black women as “big-boned women with rough, hard-working hands like a man,” based on the preference of white men for women (Walker 41). Dee is the target of the male gaze and the object of white men’s wants due to her diminutive stature and thinness. The following two characteristics of her readiness to abide by the physical and aesthetic standards imposed by commercial society will be covered.
Dee’s character as a young girl is similar to that of a white woman, one drawn to the charm of attractive objects. When Dee was a little child, she enjoyed beautiful things in daily life. Since she is susceptible to color, she has a natural ability to dress appropriately and in original ways without her mother’s help. For instance, she picked “a yellow organdy dress to wear to the graduation ceremony; black shoes to go with the green suit she remade from an old suit… ” (Walker 49). She was sixteen years old when she developed her own sense of style. Dee truly enjoyed dressing up in colorful dresses as a young girl. Therefore, she is receptive and readily charmed by pleasant things, building her identity in this way.
Significance of Cultural Heritage
As a result, Dee’s actions prompt a more in-depth examination of the significance of cultural heritage and the effects of rejecting one’s roots on family dynamics. Dee presents herself as a collector and uses everyday household objects to adorn his residence (Penningroth 878). Her preference for collecting commonplace items over museum-quality or exhibition-quality works of art reflects both the visualization of black women’s miserable reality and the blurring of the lines between art and daily life in a consumer society (Davis 55).
Dee creates photographs of a traditional home using a modern Polaroid while assuming the role of a historian of African American history. When she gets home, she is anxious to “line up picture after picture” of her mother at the entrance to the house (Walker 55). She carefully captures the house, Maggie, her mother, and a munching cow in one picture. According to the narrator, “She never takes a picture without making sure the house is on” (Walker 67). This is where Dee’s decision to take pictures of the house has an impact on consumer culture.
Dee was lucky enough to get a college education, which gave rise to her desire to change her poor and hated status and gain respect in a white-dominated society. She cannot alter her birthplace or skin tone, though. Maybe her mother had the same ambition, a goal she believed was unattainable. According to Dee, marriage provides a fast track to the middle and higher classes in the general population for excluded minorities (Webb 23). She positions herself accordingly so that the language reflects the idealized view of the white guy.
Conclusion
Many factors have a dual function in Dee’s process of developing her identity as a black in a white-dominated society. In actuality, consumer culture’s dual function reflects the new predicament faced by black women in a society where white males predominate. On the one hand, Dee identifies with the picture of a woman caught in a white man’s gaze under the spell of consumer culture. On the other hand, she has an artistic connection to the complex social realities and painful past of Black Americans. Dee is a representative of a tiny number of African American women who, in the 1960s and 1970s, struggled to find their place in the country’s white-dominated society and risked losing themselves because they identified more with the prevailing culture than with their own racial or ethnic culture.
On the other hand, Dee builds her self-identification as a black woman in a white-dominated environment as she starts to define her ethnic culture, inspired by fashion, a significant component of consumer culture that presents itself in name, language, dress, hairdo, and automobile. Dee is an example of a new generation of black women who are shedding their conventional roles as wives and mothers to reinvent themselves in their families and in society, as opposed to her mother and sister, who are chained up within the house. Walker discusses the new challenges faced by black women in a world dominated by white males and their consumerism, as well as his ideas on how to create a black woman’s identity in the context of a consumer culture that is encroaching on the American South. This highlights the importance of investigating how women construct their own identities in a consumer-driven world, particularly when concerns about survival are prevalent.
Works Cited
Adedokun-Awojodu, Blessing, and Oluyemisi Adebola Oladejo. “Emancipating the African Female without a Fuss in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Everyday Use: for your Grandmama and In Search of our Mother’s Garden.” International Journal of Women in Technical Education and Employment, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 100-109.
Davis, Thadious M. Understanding Alice Walker. University of South Carolina Press, 2021.
Penningroth, Dylan C. “Everyday Use: A History of Civil Rights in Black Churches.” Journal of American History, vol. 107, no. 4, 2021, pp. 871–898.
Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. Rutgers UP, 1994.
Webb, Sarah L. “Everyday Colorism.” The English Journal, vol. 108, no. 4, 2019, pp. 21–28.