Essays on Alice Walker

In Alice Walker’s short story ‘The Flowers,’ the author depicts the story of a ten-year-old girl named Myop growing up in a day. The story begins with Myop’s feelings of peace and happiness. Walker’s descriptions depict Myop skipping and happily exploring the forest behind her…

‘Everyday Use’ by Alice Walker and ‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver exemplify through a point of view, imagery, and symbolism, an issue of importance: stories that have an important look on life are more imperative than those that don’t. ‘Everyday Use’ and ‘Cathedral’ both appear different…

In this excerpt from “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker it not only shows a failed attempt of persuasion but ultimately an overall message that mama made the right decision to give the quilts to Maggie. The beginning of the excerpt describes the quilts, and provides…

Someone once said knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss. Society may agree that knowledge is power, but too much power can cause someone to lose themselves. In the movie “Spanglish”, there was a little girl who lived with her mom who worked as a…

The short story, “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker displays a rich bond between a mother and her daughters and the importance of how this bond contributes to the character’s African American heritage and their African American identity. There is a conflict when Dee comes home…

In the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, there are many things that are addressed because of how both of these mother’s feel guilt over how her children ultimately turned out. Both mother’s criticized themselves for their…

The Color Purple, by the American novelist Alice Walker, is not only intense and insightful, but a very thought-provoking book to read. By intense and thought-provoking, I am speaking about how the book touches and analyzes incredibly difficult and trifling aspects of the life of…

“Voice is all about your originality and having the courage to express it.” – Rachelle GardnerThrough the use of Epistolary, Black English and Standard American English, Alice Walker distinguishes unique voices between the two writers in the Color Purple.Epistolary is define as a novel composed…

Alice Walker’s Everyday Use, included in the In Love and Trouble short story collection, was published in 1973, a moment in history known as the ‘Black Power Movement’. This movement encouraged racial pride and equality. Everyday Use relates the struggles of African American women due…

The post-Reconstruction paradigm of the mid-twentieth century West gave rise to a body of literature in which wordsmiths from marginalized castes penned compositions that highlighted the pervasive institutional inequities of their respective social microcosms. Beget of this period of civil dissension, “Everyday Use” by Alice…

Alice Walker’s Meridian is a novel which has drawn out a topic of parenthood. Walker shows how parenthood is ‘ a holy messenger of seeing life’ , ‘ of esteeming all life’, of opposing all that may obliterates it’ . She, as a champion of…

An unreliable narrator is a narrator that only tells their side of the story, or one side of the story, that’s why they are an unreliable narrator. In “Everyday Use” our narrator is telling this story about her life and her children, she is speaking…

In the short story Everyday Use by Alice Walker is a glimpse into the lives of three women and how things matter differently to each of them. The narrator, Maggie’s mother, and Maggie see the artifacts described in the story as everyday things. They use…

In the short story, “Everyday Use”, two of the three main characters undergo drastic transformations as the story progresses. The mother is a middle aged, down to earth, hardworking woman who only seems to need the basics in life to be happy. She is more…

The Theme of Cultural Conflict in Alice Walker’s Everyday Use Every individual has a culture and every culture has a history. Cultural heritage is the expression of how the history of a culture relates to the present. Everyday Use by Alice Walker presents a conflict…