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How does The Color Purple compare to "Everyday Use"?
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Walker's short story "Everyday Use" details the conflicts between sisters Dee and Maggie Johnson over the ownership of family quilts. Mama says the quilts are Maggie's, but Dee refuses to believe her mother. The quilts represent a metaphor for the generational gap between Mama and Dee that comes about because of their different life experiences. The theme of "Everyday Use" is that no matter how much you love someone or something, you have to let it go in order to move on with your life.
The most obvious similarity is that both The Color Purple and "Everyday Use" centralize Black women and reveal how their lives can, and often do, diverge. Celie, Maggie, and Mama are characters who remain rooted in an older, agrarian mode of existence, while Dee, Shug, and Nettie lead more ostensibly dynamic lives, marked by movement.
What Walker notes in both works is that the more physically static characters do not remain so due to a lack of desire or curiosity to experience other worlds. Their relative lack of physical movement comes from an absence of opportunity. On the other hand, the more physically static characters undergo evolutions within, which allow them to progress in ways that they never could have imagined. Celie embodies this trait. At the start of the novel, she is timid and lives in fear of Mr.______. However, through her friendship with Shug, which marks...
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the beginning of her sexual discovery, and then through reading Nettie's letters, which open her imagination, Celie realizes that life can and should look different.
In "Everyday Use," Walker reveals how Mama subtly comes to the realization that Dee doesn't use her education and experience to uplift those around her. Despite all of her talk about heritage and Black pride, Dee uses her newfound education it to denigrate others, particularly those who are closest to her. When Mama asserts that Maggie will take the quilts, her decision is a refusal to give in to Dee's sense of entitlement. It is also a validation of the simpler and more traditional way of life that Maggie has chosen.
The relationship between sisters figures prominently in both The Color Purple and "Everyday Use." In The Color Purple, Celie feels that Nettie, her younger sister, is the one person in the world who loves her (before Shug), and it is that love that sustains Celie through the long years without her sister, before she finds Nettie's letters (which her husband, Albert, has been hiding). Celie also tries to protect her little sister from bad people, even provoking their stepfather to abuse her so that he doesn't touch Nettie. Their relationship, along with their similar experiences though they reside on different continents for much of the story, is the cornerstone of the text.
In "Everyday Use," on the other hand, the relationship between Dee and Maggie is antagonistic at best. At one point in the text, Dee actually calls Maggie "backward" and she only praises Maggie to offer back-handed compliments. Maggie feels that "the world has never learned to say no" to Dee, that Dee's been handed everything she's ever wanted, and she seems to resent Dee for this. There seems to be no evidence that they truly care for one another at all. In fact, rather than protect her sister, Dee may actually have burned down the house, an event which scarred Maggie for life. Despite all the terrible things that happen in The Color Purple, the loving relationship between Celie and Nettie gives the text a kind of warmth that is lacking in "Everyday Use."