Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Susan Farrell

In contrast to her own fearfulness, Mama, with grudging admiration, remembers Dee as a fearless girl. While Mama imagines herself unable to look white people in the eye, talking to them only "with one foot raised in flight," Dee "would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature" (49). Mama remembers Dee as self-centered and demanding, yes, but she also remembers this daughter as a determined fighter. Dee is concerned with style, but she'll do whatever is necessary to improve her circumstances. For instance, when Dee wants a new dress, she "makes over" an old green suit someone had given her mother. Rather than passively accept her lot, as Mama seems trained to do, Dee "was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts" (50). Mama's fearful nature is also apparent in her reaction to knowledge. Words for Mama are associated with "lies" and "other folks' habits" (50). She remembers feeling "trapped and ignorant" as Dee reads to her and Maggie "without pity" (50). This is partly because Mama never had an education herself. When her school was closed down in 1927, after she had completed only the second grade, Mama, like the other African Americans in her community, didn't fight: "colored asked fewer questions than they do now," she tells us (50). Again, Mama is trained in acquiescence while Dee refuses to meekly accept the status quo.

Most critics see Dee's education and her insistence on reading to Mama and Maggie as further evidence of her separation from and lack of understanding for her family identity and heritage. Tuten, for instance, argues that, in this story, "Walker stresses not only the importance of language but also the destructive effects of its misuse.... Rather than providing a medium for newfound awareness and for community ... verbal skill equips Dee to oppress and manipulate others and to isolate herself" (125). Similarly, Donna Winchell writes that "Dee tries to force on" Maggie and her mother "knowledge they probably do not need." She continues,

   Mrs. Johnson can take an objective look at who and what she is and find not
   disillusionment but an easy satisfaction. Simple pleasures--a dip of snuff,
   a cooling breeze across a clean swept yard, church songs, the soothing
   movements of milk cows--are enough. (82)

But are these "simple pleasures" really enough for Mama in the story? When she imagines her future she seems vaguely unhappy and apprehensive about it: "[Maggie] will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I'll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune" (50). Not quite sure what she will do with herself when Maggie marries, Mama can only imagine herself alone, engaging in an activity which she feels she is not even very good at. Although she perhaps goes about it in the wrong way--Mama says that Dee "pressed us to her with the serious way she read," only to "shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand" (50)--Dee at least tries to change what she foresees as Mama's fairly dismal future, a vision of her future Mama herself seems to reinforce rather than dispute. Thus, I'd suggest the possibility that Dee's attempt to educate Mama and Maggie may be read much more positively than other critics have suggested. Again, we must remember that Mama's perspective is the only one we see throughout the story. Told from Dee's point of view, we might expect a very different rendering of this incident. Rather than simply abandon her mother and sister in their ignorance and poverty, in their acquiescence to an oppressive system, Dee tries her best to extend her own education to them, which is surely not such a bad thing.