Everyday Use

• Study Guide
• Group

Everyday Use | The Quilting Metaphor in "Everyday Use"

Alice Walker's early story "Everyday Use" is clustered around a central image: quilting and quilts. Her use of this metaphor is important to critics because she went on to develop the theme more fully in her later work, especially the novel The Color Purple. Simply put, the quilt is a metaphor for the ways in which discarded scraps and fragments may be made into a unified, even beautiful, whole. Quilting symbolizes the process out of which the unimportant and meaningless may be transformed into the valued and useful. Walker finds this metaphor especially useful for describing...

[The entire page is 1373 words long]

Navigate

See Also:

• - Everyday Use summary and study guide in the eNotes.

Tell a friend about Everyday Use at eNotes.