Everyday Use By William Balkner Analysis

When people are young they live in their modern world a young world, but when they grow old the world does not grow old with them it leaves that generation behind for a younger generation. The old living in a new and young world is what inspires writers to tell stories about people who can cope with the young world like in “Miss Brill”. In Miss brill there is an old woman that isolates herself from the real world trying to preserve the old and shelter it from the new. Furthermore, another story that is influenced by this theme of the young world not understanding the ways of the old. Is the short story “Everyday Use” a story about a girl that doesn’t understand the importance of the traditional meaning of the quilts that she has inherited.
The last story “ A Rose for Miss Emily” is about a woman who thinks that her generation never got young and never went out of style, so she deludes herself that she lives in a world that she is popular and pretty. The stories are linked with a theme of a sentimental longing or wistful affection for an object in “Everyday use”, a time period in “A Rose for Emily”, and a generation in “Miss Brill”.
In the short story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker a Quilt is the major conflict between a mother who lives in the past, and a gorgeous daughter that misunderstand the signifance of the past. What starts the difference of opinions between the daughter and the mother is when the mother says to the daughter, “ After second grade the school was closed down don’t ask me why, in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now”. This statement by the mother indicates that her daughter is coming of age in a world much different from hers. The mother had been raised to be wary of speaking out against inequality, instead adapting to injustice passivity. But by the time her daughter was growing up, blacks had begun to challenge the existing social structure. By this time, a stronger African-American voice brought with it greater opportunities for the advancement of blacks than the mother had in her youth. This difference led to misunderstandings of the daughter to miss treat the quilts that have been sewn by the mother’s family leading her to say, “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts”. The mother is dismayed that the daughter would use the quilts everyday. The mother views the quilts as remnants of a culture that is fading from history. For the mother the quilts represent both a practical and emotional consciousness that should remain above the daughter’s influence. The final conflict, between the young daughter and the old mother is this statement, “ 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.” the mothers statement shows that the daughter wants to look like something she isn’t that the daughter doesn’t want to be black but she wants to be white and fit in to the world that she was born into. The mother’s statement fantasy is a teasing statement of what she would look like in the idealized version of the daughter’s vision of herself. In conclusion the daughter and mother age difference shows the influence of the young and rebellious world of the daughter and the old and repenting world of the mother. “A Rose for Miss Emily” by William Falkner is a story about a woman that wants to live in a time that has long since vanished as a grain of sand dose in a desert of time.
Miss Emily grew up during the end or ending of slavery and only one thing from that time besides Miss Emily was left,“ Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps – an eyesore among eyesores”. Miss Emily’s house was an old plantation house from the glory days of the south but after war and time it is the last of its kind on a street once filled with palaces of the old south. Just like miss Emily her house was being coquettishly destroyed by time slowly decaying and flirting with the realization that like the old south her and her house would be forgotten. At one point Miss Emily tried to join the new society but, “Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines”. Here is the transition from the old south when Emily was young to the new south an America in transition away from the only world Emily knows. As Miss Emily's former students don’t want their children exposed to the way of life Emily represents the old south. And just from the presumed influence that Emily’s generation had on society she is cast from the modern young world to slowly disappear. In conclusion Miss Emily clung to a world of happiness and fortune, and because that world was not accepted in the new south she was not able to conform with the new south that took over all that she
knew. In the short story “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield is about a old woman that is living in a world of make-belief that she believes puts on shows for her and treats her like a famous person. Unfortunately she is alone and a nobody that believes she is still pretty and is dressing like the people of her generation even though that generation has long since had its time in the spotlight.