Feedback on exam question over Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

The question was:  Show how the theme of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" comes into focus if we trace out the implications of the foil system the story is constructed around.

What's at stake in the question

You want to show here that you know how the story indicates that it's built on a foil system, and that you know what to do with one when you realize it's at work -- i.e., to look for some counterpart contrasting fact or feature of X for every fact or feature that stands out about Y, and vice versa.

The main overt features of Maggie and Dee that the narrator, their mother, makes explicit are that Maggie is unattractive and timid and has stayed home, while her older sister Dee is striking in appearance, bold in manner and opinion, and has had the initiative to go off to college to earn a degree.  When we look more closely at the two sister's values, though, the advantage turns decisively in favor of Maggie -- a fact recognized in the mother's climactic decision to give the family quilts to her rather than to surrender them to Dee.

Key issues to address in this topic are:

(1) What story will Dee use the quilts to tell once she gets them hung on her living room wall, and what role will her family play in this story? 

(2) How does the attitude towards her family that this expresses show up in other specific facts of Dee’s life history? 

(3) What specific facts about the quilts, and of Maggie’s uses of them, enable them to play the particular role they will play in Maggie’s way of integrating them into her everyday life? 

(4) What attitudes towards her relatives will her way of using them express?

On appropriate way to end your essay would be to remark the dramatic irony that the answers to these questions makes clear at the conclusion of the story.  Dee's parting shot at her mother and sister is that "you just don't understand...your heritage."  It's clear of course that Dee doesn't know what she's talking about.

Addressing the above questions

Dee will use the quilts to say, "I saved these from my family, who are you won’t believe how backward!  They didn’t even have enough gumption to realize the artistic value of what they had made, and if I hadn’t intervened, they would have worn them out in mundane use, like covering beds!"  But she will be saying this in order to say, in turn, "Since I have nothing in common with these oafs, the person I am is something I’ve made myself into entirely by my own bootstrap efforts, on the basis of an ideal of a better life [high taste, personal initiative] that I am entirely responsible for forming on my own."  In other words, she will be dramatizing how great she is as a self-made individual — precisely as she is sucking up to the opinion of others, to whom she is in fact hostage.  As with the photos she takes, her family will be exploited only as a lowly foil to feature how great she is.

For Maggie, the quilts will saturate her day with concrete reminders of her ancestors.  She will be constantly mindful of the struggles they faced, the choices (wise or foolish, strong or weak) they made, the sufferings they underwent and the triumphs they enjoyed, how they bore up in the face of these, the relationships they formed.  And she will recall with gratitude her grandmother’s, aunt’s and mother’s care in conveying to her the skill of making a quilt, and in telling her, during the quilting sessions or comforting her in bed under one of the quilts, the stories associated with the clothes from which the patches were taken.  These models of types of conduct, and these acts of care, will give her a sense of her ancestors living beyond their deaths in her thoughts and feelings and conduct.  And these she will pass along to her children in turn.  When the quilts wear out in part, their remnants will be incorporated into new quilts along with new patches, with their stories.

One person lives in and through others, and ends up with a rich self.  The other lives paradoxically both selfishly and only for others, and ends up in solitude and vanity, though she will be too shallow even to notice it.  One is a puppet with the illusion of autonomy.  The other is a richly concrete human being with a sense of ethical seriousness that carries the collective past into the future, happily aware that it is through her family that she is who she is.

More on Dee:  [This isn't something one would need to add to the above, but a different way of getting across essentially the same points.]

The overt story Dee will use the quilts to tell will be the anecdote of the errand back home to get the quilts. But this will be a pretext for telling how she became a self-made person.

She’ll go on and on about how she had to rescue these priceless works of folk art from her ignorant relatives who lacked the artistic taste and judgment necessary for recognizing their worth.  This taste and judgment, of course, Dee herself has. But how amazingly! Coming from such an intellectually dismal background, she must have possessed extraordinary powers of intellect and will to have raised herself to her present condition as worthy curator of such beautiful folk art. Of course, pressed by her admirers, she can go on to elaborate the details of her autonomous education and personal pluck. Obviously this self-congratulatory tale implies a gross contempt for the actual family whose heritage she is promoting herself as rescuing. The sub-text of her story about rescuing the quilts from undeserved oblivion will be the story of her upward mobility, and the superior character to which it attests. "My ancestors, like spiders," we can imagine hearing her say, over an elegant glass of fine wine in her elegantly appointed living room, "instinctively made amazingly beautiful things." Ah, yes, and then we imagine her continuing, "But I made something even more beautiful: myself."

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

      This page last updated 25 April 2000.