Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

In "Everyday Use" one encounters Signifyin(g) in both its street sense and its literary sense. "To rename is to revise," says Gates, "and to revise is to Signify" (xxiii). Thus Wangero thinks she is Signifyin(g) on white culture when she revises her name, but inadvertently she plays false with her own familial culture, as her mother's remarks about the history of the name Dee allow the reader to see. Indeed, if the mother were not so thoroughly innocent, one would suspect her of Signifying on her daughter's misguided aspirations. The master manipulator of the intertexts is of course Walker herself as she Signifies on Africanist pretension, calling into question the terms with which a number of her contemporaries are repudiating the language and culture of what Wangero calls "the oppressor."

Though Gates more or less exclusively considers how African Americans Signify on the discourse of other African Americans, his theory also lends itself to sorting out relations between the shapers of a "minor literature" and the mainstream or majority writers encountered on the road to a problematic literary autonomy. Gates himself dismisses as "reductive" (59) the idea that the Signifying Monkey's adversarial relationship with that ubiquitous authority figure, the powerful but unsubtle Lion, can be understood as symbolically representative of power relations between black and white. However, I would argue that insofar as those relations are literary, they prove interesting and complex. The critic interested in them ought only to keep in mind Gates's assertion that when "black writers . . . revise texts in the Western tradition, they . . . do so `authentically,' with a black difference, a compelling sense of difference based on the black vernacular" (xxii). Surely, then, one can legitimately consider the possibility that Walker plays the Signifying Monkey to a white literary Lion more or less literally in her own Georgia back yard. To come to cases: what is the relationship between Walker's story and the respected and influential body of short fiction about the rural South written by Flannery O'Connor?

As noted previously, Walker considers O'Connor an influence, and Margaret D. Bauer, who has remarked some of the parallels in the work of these two artists, tends to see their relationship as healthily non-agonistic (149-50).(6) But anyone who dips into the essay on O'Connor that appears in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens will be struck by the ambivalence of the younger author's feelings about the elder. "I have loved her work for many years" (42), declares Walker, but she goes on to gauge feelings of "fury" (57) and "bitterness" (58) when she visits O'Connor's house outside Milledgeville, Georgia. Thus one should not be surprised to discover something other than simple homage in "Everyday Use," the little comedy of superficial sophistication and rural manners in which Walker replicates and plays with the many such fictions of O'Connor.

O'Connor contrasts intellectual pretension with certain transcendent realities: Original Sin, Grace, prospects for redemption. Walker, meanwhile, assesses ideas of cultural identity within a community only a few minutes' drive from the home in which O'Connor spent her last years. O'Connor relentlessly exposes liberal pieties--notably regarding race--as humanistic idols that obscure the spiritual realities central to her vision. Writing at the height of Civil Rights agitation, she delights in characters like Asbury in "The Enduring Chill" or Julian in "Everything that Rises Must Converge"--characters who have embraced the new ideas about race only to be exposed for their concurrent spiritual folly. I have been arguing all along that Walker, too, satirizes the heady rhetoric of late 60s black consciousness, deconstructing; its pieties (especially the rediscovery of Africa) and asserting neglected values. At the same time, however, she revises--Signifies on--the O'Connor diagesis, which allows so little real value to black aspiration. Thus Walker parodies the iconoclastic tricks that O'Connor uses over and over again. As Wangero meets in Maggie the self she wants to deny, Walker Signifies on O'Connor's fondness for characters that psychologically double each other. Walker Signifies, too, on the O'Connor moment of divine insight, for Mrs. Johnson's decision to reaffirm the gift of the quilts to Maggie comes as heaven-sent enlightenment. Mrs. Johnson, however, enjoys a positive moment of revelation--unlike Mrs. May in "Greenleaf," Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation," or the Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." When, finally, Walker represents Wangero's intellectual posturing as shallow beside the simple integrity of her mother and sister, she plays with the standard O'Connor plot of the alienated and superficially intellectual young person (Hulga, in "Good Country People," is the definitive example) who fails conspicuously to justify the contempt in which she or he holds a crass, materialistic, and painfully unimaginative female parent. Walker tropes even the O'Connor meanness. Where O'Connor allows at best that the petty complacency and other failings of the mothers in "The Comforts of Home" and "The Enduring Chill" are venial flaws beside the arrogance, the intellectual posturing, and the spiritual blindness of their children, Walker declines to qualify her sympathy and admiration for Maggie and Mrs. Johnson.