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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

Dee returns, but constructs a frame around a picture in which there is no risk of her appearing. She makes a picture of her not being in the picture. Mama, however, is in the picture--but it is Dee's picture of her; and getting out of Dee's frame around her, getting out of being framed by others, as it were, will be the drama of the way Mama narrates the story. What is unusual about what Nancy Tuten calls Walker's "unusual narrative structure" (126) is its double nature. The story is told by Mama, in the first person, but in two different tenses: It begins in the present tense, only to subtly shift to the past tense about midway through the story. As Tuten notes, Mama changes to the past tense right after Dee has announced that "Dee" is dead. Tuten writes,".., when Dee goes so far as to disown her family identity, Mama reaches a watershed," and drawing on Marianne Hirsch's article ("Clytemnestra's Children: Writing (Out) the Mother's Anger"), Tuten goes on to note how Mama, who has previously been unable to express her anger at Dee, has now been pushed too far-- or far enough so that Mama is finally "able to objectify the situation, to distance herself from it." Tuten continues, "The use of present-tense verbs in the first half of the story suggests less narrative authority: if Mama is telling the events as they happen, she is merely reacting. By shifting to the past tense, Walker strengthens Mama's voice, giving her more control" (127).

If framing a narrative allows Mama to gain more control, which also results in her "increasing emotional distance from Dee" (128), we can consider more acutely what is at stake in Dee's emotions, since she feels a need to frame the "story" from the outset. It would seem that Dee's emotions are indeed much more precarious than are those of Mama, who, beginning without a frame, as it were, risks from the outset. A significant difference between Mama and Dee is that Mama has this capacity to risk. I agree with Hirsch when she mentions Mama's "ability to take pleasure in her daughter's difference without conceding any of her own choices and values," and her ability to maintain a distance from Dee "without visibly rejecting her" (203). While critics often point to Dee's aggressiveness, which intrudes into the pastoral calm of Mama's home, by quoting Mama's comment that the dress Dee wears is "so loud it hurts my eyes," they fail to note that Mama says shortly after, "I like it" (28). Mama has held a place for "De e," and if "Dee" is no longer there, she will try to accommodate "Wangero." But in trying to find a place for Dee! Wangero, a figure of both presence and absence, it is Mama who is slowly being displaced.

While a certain distance may result from anger, it seems more important to take into account what Mama says when she does shift to the past tense. After Dee indicates that she no longer bears the name of "Dee," Mama responds with," 'What happened to "Dee"? I wanted to know'" (29; emphasis mine). It's not so evident that Mama expresses anger here (something like anger, or perhaps frustration, comes later in the story), but it is evident that she expresses her desire "to know," and when the narrative shifts to the past tense, we are being told that Mama knows that she wants to know. If the narrative had remained in the present tense, as in" 'What happened to "Dee"? I want to know,' "it would imply that Mama is not only "merely reacting" (Tuten 127) but remaining in the immediacy of the present, where there is no distance for knowing that one knows; it would not be a recognition of what one is doing, but only the doing. It's as if there would be the claim that the linguistic representation of feeling and desire is not only identical to that feeling, but that there is no difference between representation and presentation. It is, however, precisely such a claim which seems to be at stake in the use of the present tense.