Sentimental Value

John Smith
May 11, 2012

“She’d probably be backward enough to put it to everyday use”
In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker uses the quilt and the butter churner as symbols to illustrate the importance of sentimental value within families. The quilt is the more significant of the two, so as a result, Maggie and Dee argue over who should have it. When one wants it for everyday use and the other wants to basically “retire” it and use it as a decoration, who should Mama Dee give it to? Dee is the hip, artistic daughter out of the two, and when she wants to take just part of the butter churner for decoration, the churner becomes unusable. Mama Dee gets put in difficult situations in this short story and the magnitude of sentimental value gets tested throughout “Everyday Use.”
The quilt becomes the central conflict towards the end of the story, and for good reason. Mama Dee says that both of the quilts had scraps of Grandma Dee’s dress she wore fifty years ago, bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts, and finally a blue piece of Great Grandpa Erza’s Civil War uniform. These quilts are undoubtably priceless. Mama Dee has kept this quilts for a long time because she feels like every time she uses them, she is connected to memories of the people she loves. This is the reason that Mama Dee does not want to give them to Dee and let her use them as decoration. Dee says this about Mama Dee saying she is going to give the quilts to Maggie, “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker, 172)! Mama Dee ends up responding and saying that she would love for them to be put to everyday use and cherished. Dee definitely does not want the quilts to use, she wants them to hang up, but possibly she wants them so when she has friends over she gets attention because they think she preserved them so well and is artistic. Either way, Maggie deserves the quilts more than Dee because, in this instance, everyday use trumps over everyday decoration....