The Quilt in the Short Story "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker as a Symbol for the Appreciation of the Heritage of African-American People E-Book

Nina Schütze

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: -, Bielefeld University (Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: This essay deals with the short story “Everyday Use“ by Alice Walker, which was first published in 1973 as a part of the short story collection "In Love and Trouble". The short story contains many symbols, one of them a handmade quilt, which the two sisters Maggie and Dee (or “Wangero”, as she calls herself) both want to have, but for different reasons. In this essay I am going to show that the handmade quilt as a family heritage both symbolises the appreciation of the history of the family and the history of the African-American people. I will also argue that the two sisters, who both want to have the quilt, represent different ideas of how to appreciate the family’s heritage and their origin: While Maggie sees the quilt as an everyday object and wants to maintain the traditions, Dee wants to keep it as a piece of art to depict it as an artefact of a past life, which is no longer reality for her and the African-American people.