Understanding Life Through Culture and Tradition

It never occurs to her that they, too, are symbols of oppression: Her family made these things because they could non afford to buy them. Her admiration for them straightway seems to reflect a cultural trend toward valuing handmade objects, kind of than any sincere interest in her "heritage."

After all, when she was offered a quilt before she went away to college, she rejected it as "old-fashioned, come on of style." Yet a careful reading of the story result show that Dee is not the lone(prenominal) one conf utilise astir(predicate)(predicate) the heritage of the black woman in the rural South. Although the niggle and Maggie are skeptical of Dee, they recognize the limitations of their own lives. The mother has only a second-grade education and admits that she cannot imagine looking a crazy white man in the eye. Maggie "knows she is not bright" and walks with a sidelong shuffle. Although their dispositions lead them to make the best of their lives, they admire Dee's approximative pride even as they feel the force of her scorn. interpreted as a whole, while the story clearly endorses the habitual sense perspective of Dee's mother over Dee's affectations, it does not condescension Dee's struggle to move beyond the limited world of her youth. Clearly, however, she has not yet arrived at a stage of self-understanding. Her mother and sis are ahead of her in that respect.

The thematic richness of " workaday Use" is made possible by the flexible, perceptive vocalise of the first-per

son narrator. It is the mother's point of interpret that permits the ref's understanding of both Dee and Maggie. Seen from a greater distance, both unripe women might seem stereotypical one a clever further ruthless college girl, the other a sweet except ineffectual homebody.

The debate over how the quilts should be treated used or hung on the wall summarizes the black woman's dilemma about how to face the future. Can her brio be seen as never-ending with that of her ancestors? For Maggie, the arrange is yes. Not only will she use the quilts, but also she will go on making more(prenominal) she has learned the skill from Grandma Dee. For Dee, at least for the present, the answer is no. She would frame the quilts and hang them on the wall, distancing them from her present life and aspirations; to put them to everyday use would be to admit her position as a member of her old-fashioned family.

In Dee's case, the reader learns that, as she was growing up the high demands she made of others tended to gravel people away. She had few friends, and her one boyfriend "flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant gimcrack people" after Dee "turned all her faultfinding authority on him." Her drive for a better life has follow Dee dearly, and her mother's commentary reveals that Dee, too, has scars, though they are less visible than Maggie's.

The mother'
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