Paper on Alice Walker

Images of animals and references to animal husbandry pervade Alice Walker's justly famous 1973 short story "Everyday Use." Not only is each of the three characters, Mama, Maggie, and Dee, explicitly or implicitly associated with animals, but the story takes place in a "pasture" (27), down the road from which several "beef-cattle peoples" (30) live and work. Some of the comparisons between the women and fauna are highly conventional or purely descriptive: Maggie's memory is linked to that of an elephant (31); the voice of a pleading Dee sounds as "sweet as a bird" (32); Dee's hair stands erect "like the wool on a sheep" (28); and her pigtails are compared to "small lizards disappearing behind her ears" (28). Image patterns involving cows and dogs, however, foreshadow the story's climactic scene, in which Mama decides to give the quilts to Maggie rather than Dee, and they play an integral role in the scene itself and its aftermath.

Mama frequently describes Maggie as a docile, somewhat frightened animal, one that accepts the hand that fate has dealt her and attempts to flee any situation posing a potential threat. When Dee arrives, Mama tells us that "Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. 'Come back here,' I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe" (27). Maggie's characteristic stance in such situations is aptly summed up by Mama in the word "cowering" (29). Although the etymologies of the words "cow" and "cower" differ, it seems likely that Walker is hinting at the former by employing the latter. Yet Maggie is not the only person described in bovine terms. Mama refers to herself as "a large, big boned woman" (24) and informs us that her own body language, at least in her encounters with white men, resembles Maggie's: "It seems to me I have talked to them with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is furthest from them" (25). Mama and Maggie's connection to cows is reinforced when Dee lines up a Polaroid shot of her mother, her sister, the house, and a real cow that has wandered into the yard (29). More important, in a key passage that adumbrates the ending of the story, Mama tells us that she used to enjoy milking cows until she was "hooked in the side" in 1949, adding, "Cows are soothing and slow and don't bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way" (26). This is precisely the kind of mistake Dee will make later when she demands the quilts that Mama has already promised to Maggie.

Mama's comparisons between animals and Maggie, who bears the scars from a fire that destroyed the family's previous home (and who was perhaps burned trying to save the very quilts Dee covets), often seem insensitive.