In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

Moving out of the shadow of men, however, can lead to entanglements in the threads of women. In her article "The Needle or the Pen: The Literary Rediscovery of Women's Textile Work," Elaine Hedges shows how women writers prior to the mid-1900s sought to protect themselves and allay the fears of the male-dominated literary establishment by implying that what appeared to be writing was really only sewing--the pen was really only a needle. Today, many women writers who are neither forced to nor supposed to sew also invoke this metaphor. While the considerable power of the metaphor today is no doubt linked to an attempt to establish for women a ground of their own, this leads to a problem, which is also linked to the problem of grounding in general. The very identity and security a ground might give creates a problem for the writer insofar as writing is an activity which is transgressive, or contrary. For women writers prior to the mid-1900s, taking up the pen rather than the needle was a transgressive act which the metaphor of the needle facilitated. Today, however, this same metaphor runs the risk not only of being quite conservative but also of establishing a ground which can make a woman writer who does not "quilt" or use the metaphoric "needle" appear a transgressor or betrayer of that community. If the metaphor once helped women to get out of line, that same metaphor today runs the danger of working to keep women in line. To push the point, no one either yesterday or today seems to want to think of women as writing. Men wanted women literally to sew only figures; and many critics today, both male and female, literally want women to sew figuratively--which is to say, they want women to write as if they were really sewing, and all the better if about literally sewn things--like quilts, for example. Alice Walker writes a short story in which quilts are an important figure, but today it would seem that the story itself is but a figure for quilts.

Both Elaine Hedges and Elaine Showalter acknowledge the critical significance of quilting, but have reservations about how the quilt as a figure is employed. Hedges asks "whether the needle doesn't at times move too magically to dispel conflict, to solve complex issues of gender and male power" (359), and Elaine Showalter convincingly argues that, "while quilting does have crucial meaning for American women's texts, it can't be taken as a transhistorical and essential form of female expression, but rather as a gendered practice that change[s] from one generation to the next..." (197-98). While there is much in Alice Walker's short story which allows for a reading which would see it as a story which grounds itself in the figure of the quilt, the figurality of the ground itself always threatens to undo its grounding. As Diana Fuss notes, with regard to Irigaray, while "two lips" seem to be ever so literal, it is also a metaphor for metonymy (66).

In the highly politicized world of literary criticism, however, the space for the ungrounded, or the "wayward," to borrow Barbara Christian's term, is given little quarter. Identity politics and its polarizations, which seem to appear unproblematically alongside a discourse of difference, eclipse the space of a difference. What Fuss says of the use of metaphors borrowed from modern physics can also be said of how the quilt as a figure is often employed: "By locating difference outside identity, in the spaces between identities...the radicality of the poststructuralist view which locates differences within identities" comes to be ignored (103). When the Bakers write that "the sorority of quiltmakers, fragment weavers, holy patchers, possesses a sacred wisdom that it hands down from generation to generation of those who refuse the center for the ludic and unconfined spaces of the margins" (156), the ludic and unconfined space along the margins becomes carefully controlled to the limited extent that quilting ta kes place on holy ground; there is little space for the ludic at the heart of such a sorority when it comes down to the hand that hands something down and the hand that receives. That the Bakers close down differences within this identity and accentuate the difference between this identity and what does not belong to it becomes clear in their analysis of Dee, the wayward daughter, the figure who plays on the margins. That Dee does indeed leave at the end of the story does not coincide with the idea that Dee is being excluded from what Nancy Tuten calls "the establishment of a sisterhood between mother and daughter" (125), which is to say, the sisterhood between Mama and her daughter Maggie, but not the other daughter/sister, Dee. Both the Bakers and Tuten, as well as other critics, see Dee as being "narrated...out of the story altogether" (Tuten 127). What never seems to be noted is that what makes possible the sisterhood they value is their exclusion of a sister. The story out of which Dee gets narrated is n ot Walker's, but the critics' story of identity, which shuts down any room for a ludic play of differences. The aim of this article is to propose a reading which respects a play of difference, which keeps "things" like Dee, in play.