Write short anwers to the following questions:

1. What is the significance of the title in relation to the central conflict of the story?

2.  Describe Maggie’s personality and her feelings toward her sister Dee.  How does she deal with Dee’s demand for the quilts, and why?  Are there any ways in which Maggie is “better off” than Dee?

3. Discuss some of the positive and negative aspects of Dee’s character, focusing in particular on her relationship with her family.  What is implied about Dee in the passage describing the loss of their previous home?

4. Is there anything ironic about Dee’s accusations that her mother and sister do not understand their heritage?  What are the personal consequences of her efforts to stake her claim to a piece of that heritage?

5. Describe the narrator’s personality and her feelings about her daughter Dee.  In what sense is this “her” story?

6. In the end, where does Alice Walker seem to stand on the issues she raises regarding the characters’ sense of their heritage?

Text analysis

Task: Analyze the elements of Everyday Use, i.e, its plot, characters, point of view, setting, climax, theme and methods to develop the theme. 

“Everyday Use for Your Grandma” is a short story. The following analysis is to focus on the main elements of the short story: plot, characters, point of view, setting, climax, theme and the methods to develop the theme.

1. Plot: Dee’s coming back to fetch Grandma’s everyday use (especially the old quilts) and her changed attitude toward them.

2. Characters:

1)  Dee — a round character

—fashionable, rebellious, strong-minded and ill-temped, a sense of vanity

— a symbol of the modern black women

— superficial love of black tradition

2)  Maggie — a flat character

— docile, timid, shy, good-temped, kind-hearted and unselfish, a strong sense of inferiority

— inherence of black culture, genuine love of black tradition

— a symbol of the tradition black weak women

3)     “I” — a flat character

— uneducated but sensible

— physically strong but spiritually weak, a sense of inferiority

— cherish “grandma’s everyday use”

— a symbol of the black working women: the majority of black women

4)  Asalamalakim — a flat character

— a black Muslim boy

— a symbol of another kind of African culture

3. Point of view: the first-person narration

4.  Setting:

Place —“my courtyard” , the American south 

Time —in the middle of 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights

5. Climax—Dee wanted to take away the old quilts but “I” took the back and gave them to Maggie

6. Theme: — the relationship among the three blacks women and their different attitude towards the old quilts How to deal with the black traditional culture heritage; self-awareness; wisdom and intelligence; 

7. Methods: flashback, foreshadowing, contrast

8. Symbols: the house, the quilts and names

Task: Work out the structure outline of the story

Structure outline:

This text can be divided into three parts, according to the time sequence.

Part one (Paras 1-16)	before Dee comes
Part two (Paras. 17-81)	with Dee
Part three (para. 82)	after Dee leaves