Character Analysis: Everyday Use By Alice Walker

“I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon”(Walker 345). Mama is waiting on Dee’s arrival to the house. Dee, the one who left Mama and Maggie for Jimmy T, is one of the characters who was seen as a hero in the beginning of the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. When Dee was first seen as a hero it was because of her determination to become better than what her family and her qualities in general. Dee then becomes the anti-hero towards the end of the short story and it was because of her selfishness and her change. However, when Dee is becoming the anti-hero, Mama takes her place of being the true hero because she tells Dee, she can not have the quilts, because she “promised to give them
I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights”(Walker 345 ). In this quote the reader can get a visual of what mama looks like, what she is capable of doing, and how she thinks Dee the hero would love to see her, but the readers could also assume the mother feels Dee is not impressed with her mother's qualities, because she uses the phrase “I am the way my daughter wants me to be: a hundred pounds lighter”(Walker 345). Causing Mama to seem as the anti-hero at the moment, because she does not have the qualities or looks the hero Dee has or would want her to
When Dee asks for the quilts Mama tries to tell Dee to take the other two quilts, but she refuses to. Mama then remembers the reason she can not give Dee the two quilts her and Big Dee made using their grandmother's clothing, is because she “ promised to give the quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas” (Walker 351). However, Mama does remind the readers when she “offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college.. She had told me they were old-fashioned”(Walker 351). During this point of the story Dee is turning into the anti-hero, because she is becoming because she is having a non heroic attribute which is selfishness and not respecting her mother's answer when she tell her she can not have the two quilts. Although Dee, the oldest sister of Maggie, does not want to take the other two quilts her mother has offered her, she says Maggie could have them. “When I looked at her like that something hit me on the top of my head and ran down the soles of my feet…… I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me , then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap”(Walker 351). At this point readers can suspect Mama is feeling happy to stand up to Dee and becomes the hero, because she does that and takes the quilts from Dee and gives it to