Everyday Use Identity

The obsession with one's quest for identity is part of the human reality of self-defining paradox, and universal theme. In essence, Hawthorne's narrative, the reader are able to witness the importance of one's own definition identity through personal semiotics and the deceiving reality of not finding true self; thus making it both relational and understandable. While Young Goodman brown, may have “taken a dreary road, darkened by the gloomiest trees” (p.1) the universality of discovering one true self, like that of historical figures allows the audience to glimpse at the success of those, only elaborating on the ability to look up to them, but cannot be like them as we define throughout human semiotic practices.

In a similar way, in Alice
In the story represents three culture that exist between the three African - American characters of; Maggie, Dee and her mother. The mother is a character of tradition, her speech throughout the story consist of the dream genre of which she creates a descriptive reality, but still expresses information about her past, culture and people. One of the lines she states is, “who can imagine me looking a stranger white man in the eye?”(p.2). Mama is still living in a world where she is still defines herself in a decade of slavery, of which she is unable to look at white people in the eye. Dee on the other hand is, “always look[ing] anyone in the eye”(p.2) and that “hesitation was not part of her nature” (p.2). Dee is unlike her mother, where she is educated, quick witted and a confident person. Even so, looking about at Dee, she has taken a 'white flight' of which she has journey so far from her culture that she cannot retain any of it. As a dualist, Maggie is sitting directly on the threshold of which, she is slowly transitioning into the future while having her past inlaid within her. Maggie states that, “[Dee] can have them...I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts”.(p.6) Maggie's quilts giver her an advantage of which she can write her own story into a visible quilt, keeping her past, living the present and building the future; something
The threshold in Salem is the lead to the “[Forest] darkened by gloomiest trees....where there are devilish Indian's behind every tree” (p.1). The threshold is not only a physicality of a pathway, but it is a existentialist reality of which Goodman Brown, must find the path out of the cave, and become more knowledgable about his surroundings as individual self, relieving from the mob mentality. Goodman Brown, does past this threshold, but only self-actualizes, not taking it further in transcending to others about the truth that he found. Goodman Brown's traditional faith is shattered completely, that it unable him to go back to the way he once was foreshadowed by his wife's greeting. He returns to the village to have a “gloomy long life” of which he criticizes the people and their actions. Comparable to Dee, nor her or Goodman is able to become a cosmopolitain thinkers of which see both sides of their culture and adapt within between; this makes them isolated and lost. To know one's self is to know one's purpose in the world. The radical path of these characters' choice is deceiving when Dee cannot see things in “new light” and the only thing that solidify their identity is only a temporary realism of artifacts that has hold strong meaning