Everyday Use
... and necessities to get by. She is humble, and embraces her family history and life style, and it would be safe to say she is stuck in her old ways, and doesn’t care for life outside of her house in the pasture. She is not a well educated person, however she makes up for that in being resourceful with her hands. Now Maggie on the other hand, is a shy girl, who was burned by a fire, in the previous house they lived in. She has always lived with her mother, and has embraced the mother’s lifestyle, and humility. Now her relationship and feelings towards her sister are described in this paragraph from Everyday Use: “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.” Maggie is also an uneducated person, whose ambition in life is lost due to the circumstances of the fire, and her self esteem reflects that in her behavior throughout the story. And in my own opinion she is the most unique character in the story, due to her humble nature, her loyalty to her mother, and her frailty. It almost seems that she is content with her mother living in the house in the pasture. Maggie and her mother are more alike than her and her sister. They enjoy doing the same things, and accept their way of life the way it is. Dee on the other hand, is totally opposite from the mother and Maggie. She is a young ambitious woman, who knows what she wants, and is not afraid to go after it. Dee, unlike her mother and sister was educated, due to the fact that her mother and church raised enough money to send her to school. She wanted more than the life on the pasture. she wanted the finer things in life. And to support this theory, I used a paragraph from the story: “Dee wanted nice things. A yellow dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts.” But, on top of being ambitious, and flamboyant Dee was also selfish, and ignorant. In the fact that she was ashamed of her upbringing, and changed her name in my opinion to fit in with her boyfriend, and the culture or heritage he embraced. She developed this whole persona of herself, being somebody she was not. Now that was just a brief introduction, to some of the characteristics of the main characters in the story. And now that we have a very brief background of the characters, let me explain my point of view, as too why I named the response paper moving on. Even though the story is called Everyday Use, the theme is about this family, embracing things t...