Alice Walker Uses Symbolism to Address Three Issues Essay Example for Free

Alice baby carriage Uses symbolic representation to Address Three Issues EssayBorn on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior Walker was the eighth and youngest child of unforesightful sharecroppers. Her fathers great-great-great grandmother, Mary Poole was a slave, forced to walk from Virginia to Georgia with a baby in each arm. Walker is deeply proud of her cultural heritage. In addition to her literary talents Walker was involved in the polished rights movement in the 1960s, walking door-to-door promoting voters registration among the rural poor. Walker was present to see Martin Luther Kings I have a dream speech. In August 1963 Alice traveled to Washington D. C. to take part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Perched in a tree limb to try to get a view, Alice couldnt see much of the main podium, but was able to hear Dr. Kings I Have A ambitiousness address. (Alice Walker Biography) Walker is a vegetarian involved in many other issues, includ ing nuclear proliferation, and the environment. Her insight to African American culture comes from her travel and experiences in both America and Africa.Walker is an activist regarding oppression and power, championing victims of racial discrimination and sexism. After her precedent setting, and controversial thirteen-year marriage to a white, Jewish, civil rights lawyer, Alice fell in love with Robert Allen, editor of Black Scholar. She is currently living in M revokeocino, California and is exploring her bi-sexuality. Alice Walkers first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published the hebdomad her girlfriend was born. Walker received praise for this work, but also criticism for dealing too gratingly with the male characters in the book.Walkers best-known novel, The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and was made into a movie. Walker was the first black author honored by a Pulitzer. In Celies letters to God, she tells her stratum about her role as wife, mother, daughter, and sister, and other women who help shape her life. Walker portrays Africa in a ordained bureau, and looks to it as a form of artistic and ideological expression. Walker was also criticized for her portrayal of men, often as violent rapists and wife beaters.Even as she portrays men, often in a bad light, she likes to focus on the strength of women. In her story, Everyday Use Alice Walker uses symbolism to address three main issues racism, feminism and the black Americans search for cultural identity. The story Everyday Use is set in the deep 60s or wee 70s and the setting is an impoverished home in Georgia. The critical analysis of Everyday Use from the blade site Sistahspace presented the following interpretation This was a time, when African-Americans were struggling to define their personal identities in cultural terminuss.The term blackness had been recently removed from the vocabulary, and had been replaced with Black. There was Black Power, Black Nat ionalism, and Black Pride. Many blacks wanted to discover their African roots, and were ready to reject and deny their American heritage, which was filled with stories of pain and in well(p)ice. Alice Walker is, as David Cowart argues, satirizing the prudent rhetoric of late 60s black consciousness, deconstructing its pieties ( oddly the rediscovery of Africa) and asserting neglected values (Cowart, 182).The central theme of the story concerns the way in which an individual understands his present life in relation to the traditions of his people and culture. (Sistahspace) Everyday Use depicts a poor, illiterate black mother who rejects the shallow Black Power ideals of her older, outspoken daughter, Dee, in favor of the unimaginative values of her younger, less privileged daughter, Maggie.Mama is the orator, and like griots from tribes in Africa, she perpetuates the oral traditions and history of the family. Mamas upbeat self-image in spite of little formal education, leads the reader to feel the intense pride she has in maintaining self-sufficiency. As discussed in David Whites critical analysis of (Everyday Use Defining African-American Heritage), Mamas lack of formal education does non stay fresh her from formulating a sense of heritage unattached to the Black Power movement held by her, purportedly educated, daughter Dee. Mamas daughter, Dee (Wangero), has a much more superficial idea of heritage. She is portrayed as bright, beautiful, and self-centered.Maggie is the younger daughter, who lives with Mama. She is scared and ashamed, assembly back in corners, cowering away from people. (White, David) (Everyday Use Defining African-American Heritage. ) Maggie understands her heritage, and appreciates the significance of everyday things in the house. She is uneducated, and not in the least outspoken, and is unable to make eye contact. Maggie has stooped posture and walks with a shuffle, this, combined with her inability to look you in the eye, points to her vulnerability in dealing with newfound black rights.Mamas daughter Dee, who is portrayed as quite successful, has come home to visit and display her new African style heritage. Dee has adopted things African and has changed her name to Wangero. As she handles the everyday articles fashioned and used by previous generations, she believes they should be displayed to her white girlfriends, especially the old quilts made by Mama, her sister and her mother. Mama has promised the quilts to Maggie but Dee says, Maggie does not understand their value and would just put them to everyday use. (Walker, Everyday Use) Mama must decide which daughter should receive the family quilts. Finally, Mama realizes that her daughter, Maggie, has a closer connection with her view of family history than Dee does and gives her the quilts. This is the first time Mama has asserted any delegacy over Dee. On a deeper level, Alice Walker is exploring the concepts of racism and the evolution of Black Socie ty following the end of slavery, by the era of Martin Luther King, and finally to the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Maggie, Mama, Dee/Wangaro and Hakim-a Barber, typify this. Mama is illiterate, because her school closed when she was in the second grade. The role of black Americans in the late 1920s is best illustrated by Mamas line, School was closed down. Dont ask me why in 1927 colored asked fewer questions that they do now (Walker, Everyday Use) When Mama describes the old house, burning down it symbolizes the ending of slavery and the decreed civil rights.The scars that Mammas daughter Maggie, bear are representative of the pain of the past and difficulty in pitiful from the role of subservience to equality. Maggie has difficulty looking you in the eye just as the American Negro had difficulty moving from the subservient role to peer in dealings with whites. Maggies head down on the chest at first appears as an as shame for her scars from the house hassle, but they come to symbolize a person caught in the old black paradigm, unable to embrace newfound freedoms in society.The fire of slavery has damaged Maggie and she rids herself to a transitional cultural existence, neither old nor new. Mama represents the ideals of Martin Luther King through her dream of going on the Johnny Carson show to meet Dee. She embraces the idea of this fantasy and takes pleasure in replaying it in her mind. Ultimately, Mamma is thrust back to the reality that it will never happen, just as she seems to resign herself to the fact that Kings dreams are not real for her generation but for the next.