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Literature does more than tell a story—it shapes perspectives, reflects values, and influences behavior. Through character portrayals and authorial tone, readers encounter not just fictional narratives, but mirrors of morality, culture, and identity. In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”, this didactic function of literature—its ability to teach and transform—is fully realized. Walker not only delivers a narrative of family, heritage, and personal growth, but also challenges readers to reflect on their own values and the behaviors that stem from them.
💡 What We Learn Through Characters’ Attitudes
Characters in literature often carry attitudes that act as emotional cues or moral compasses. In “Everyday Use,” we meet Mama, Maggie, and Dee (later Wangero) who each embody conflicting perspectives on identity, culture, and self-worth.
Mama, the narrator, is grounded, physically strong, and emotionally resilient—a woman who knows hardship and is proud of practical wisdom and survival skills. Her daughter Maggie is shy, scarred both physically and emotionally, shaped by trauma and societal neglect. Dee, by contrast, is bold, outspoken, and radically transformed by education and ideology. But it’s not just their traits that stay with us—it’s how they respond to life that prompts introspection in the reader.
Mama’s voice, filled with humility and strength, leads readers to appreciate authenticity over appearances. Maggie’s quiet endurance invokes empathy. Dee’s confrontational demeanor and performative cultural pride raise important questions about what it really means to value heritage. These responses trigger readers to assess how they themselves treat their roots, family traditions, and sense of self.
🧶 Inherited Values or Cultural Props? Dee's Conflict with Heritage
Dee’s desire to take quilts and other heirlooms back with her is not rooted in sentimental appreciation but rather in aesthetic and ideological ownership. She criticizes her family's lifestyle while simultaneously wanting to preserve fragments of it as decor rather than as part of a living tradition.
Her insistence that Maggie would be “backward enough to put them to everyday use” reveals a disconnect between performative appreciation and genuine cultural continuity. This scene underscores a key tension in the story: heritage as a functional, emotional inheritance versus heritage as a symbolic possession.
Through Dee, Walker critiques a form of activism or cultural pride that lacks true empathy. Her attitude invites readers to ask: Do we honor our roots by showcasing them, or by living them?
✊ Mama's Moral Awakening: When Behavior Reflects Understanding
The climax of the story sees Mama making a pivotal decision—to give the cherished quilts to Maggie, not Dee. In doing so, Mama defies the daughter who often dominated the emotional space and instead validates the quiet one, the heir to true lived tradition.
This action is not just maternal; it is a symbolic act of justice. It suggests that true appreciation of heritage lies not in rhetoric but in behavior, humility, and quiet preservation. The reader is left stirred by Mama’s transformation—a woman who finally acts on an inner truth rather than deference or guilt. It’s in this moment that literature’s transformative power crystallizes. We, as readers, are invited to question whether we act out of principle or pressure, authenticity or performance.
🖊️ When the Author Speaks Through the Page
Alice Walker’s own beliefs and values pulse throughout the story. A committed feminist and a voice for African American women, Walker brings attention to how culture and gender intersect. Her commitment to elevating marginalized voices, especially those that are often silenced like Maggie’s, reflects a deeper value system that reveres everyday resilience over grand gestures.
Walker’s work consistently challenges readers to dismantle the hierarchies of knowledge and visibility. The fact that Maggie, not Dee, receives the quilts is a reflection of this ethos. It's not about who knows more, but about who lives more honestly.
🔁 The Reader’s Mirror: What Do We Do With What We Learn?
Every reader takes something different from a story—but most will find themselves questioning their attitudes toward family, heritage, and identity after reading “Everyday Use.” The story confronts us with our biases about intelligence, beauty, strength, and tradition. Do we, like Dee, perform our values? Or do we, like Mama in the end, live them quietly but resolutely?
The didactic function of literature—to instruct and influence—is not passive. It works best when it stirs the reader to action, to self-reflection, to transformation. Through characters, conflict, and resolution, literature becomes a powerful force for shaping not just ideas but behavior.
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