man, from killing and butchering a pig to milking a cow.

The conflict arises from Dee and her disdain for her life at home.  Lacking the basic feelings of sympathy, empathy, and respect, Dee concerns herself only with her needs.  She wants to get away from home and leave all of this banality behind her.

When the family's house burns, Maggie is severely burned; but Dee ignores her and seems pleased that the old house is gone.  Maggie is forever scarred emotionally and physically. Expressing no outward emotion, Mama thinks that Dee hates Maggie. 

After the church and Mama raise the money for Dee to go away to college, Dee promises to manage to visit home. The story circulates around this visit. Maggie dreads the visit, unsure of what Dee will be like.  Mama cannot wait to see her educated daughter.

When Dee shows up, she is dressed in the "Black Muslin" attire. Furthermore, she has changed her name to Wangero.  Mama accepts all of these differences with her usual good nature. Still, Dee shows no affection for Mama or Maggie. 

Dee goes inside the house and begins rummaging around. She comes across two quilts which are an important part of Mama's legacy.  Two grandmothers handmade the quilts using pieces of Mama's ancestor's clothing.  Dee wants to hang the quilts on the walls in her home.  Mama would liked to have reminded Dee that she had offered her a quilt to take with her to college, but Dee said they were old fashioned.

Mama has finally had enough of Dee's arrogance and selfishness.  She tells Dee that she cannot have the quilts because they belong to Maggie.  Unhappy about Mama's refusal, Dee says that Maggie will put them [the quilts] to "everyday use" and ruin them.  Offered other quilts that Mama had made, Dee ignores her. 

Dee tries to explain her black heritage to Mama who knows that this is just for show. 

'You just don't understand,' Dee said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.

'What don't I understand?' I wanted to know.

'Your heritage,' she said. 'You ought to try to make something of yourself, too Maggie, It's really a new day for us.  But from the way you and Mama still live you'd never know it.'

As Mama listens and watches Dee, she realizes that she has been wrong to place Dee up on a pedestal.  Dee has forgotten that she is not only black but American as well. It was as though God spoke to her. She grabbed Maggie and hugged her for the first time. As Dee drove away, Mama felt happy. Her conflict was resolved because she was at home with Maggie.  

Maggie's internal conflict concerns her low self-esteem and insecurities, which are juxtaposed with her confident, successful sister, Dee. As a child, Maggie suffered serious burns during a house fire and is extremely self-conscience about her physical appearance. Maggie is also uneducated and timid, which is depicted by her shy personality and the soft guttural noises she makes when her sister comes home to visit. Essentially, Maggie lives in the shadow of Dee and views her as vastly superior. Maggie does not view herself as worthy until the end of the story, when her mother stands up for her.

Maggie's external conflict concerns Dee receiving their grandparents' antique quilts, which were promised to Maggie when she marries John Thomas. When Dee comes across the old quilts and asks Mama to have them, Mama mentions that they were promised to Maggie. Even though Maggie cherishes the old quilts and wishes to have them, she acquiesces and says that Dee can take them. Maggie is used to seeing Dee get what she wants and comes to terms with the fact that she will not have her grandparents' quilts.

However, Mama stands up for Maggie by refusing to give them to Dee. Despite Dee's pleas that Maggie will use the antique quilts for "everyday use," Mama refuses to give them away. By the end of the story, Maggie seems to have gained more self-esteem after realizing that she truly understands and appreciates her family's heritage in a way that Dee cannot comprehend.

The main conflict in this story is between past and present, between tradition and modernity.

The narrator faces this conflict in the form of her two daughters. Dee, the elder, has gone out into the world, acquired an education and certain, supposedly advanced ideas about what a modern African American woman should be like. Her other daughter, Maggie, lives quietly at home, following the old ways, doing the housework and preparing for marriage. 

The conflict comes to a head in the shape of the old family quilts which Dee wants to take away with her to effectively preserve as museum pieces, quaint relics of a past which she feels she herself has left behind. However, the narrator has always intended these quilts for Maggie when she gets married. Maggie will actually use the quilts because to her and to the narrator they are part of an ongoing way of life, a living culture and not a dead past, as they are to Dee.

The narrator is forced to choose between the two when Dee implacably demands to be given the quilts. In an instant she makes her decision - indeed, it comes as a moment of revelation which imbues her with an almost religious ecstasy: 'just like when I'm in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout'.

The narrator realises that the quilts properly belong to Maggie, to the traditional way of life; this is where they will be truly appreciated and used, and not flaunted as items of folk culture, as Dee would have it. Therefore she resolves the conflict by snatching the quilts from Dee and handing them to Maggie. 

Three of the main social conflicts in "Everyday Use" are illustrated in the relationships between Dee and her sister Maggie. One of these is the social conflict about the need for social connectedness to one's past roots. On one hand, Maggie values her recent roots and what she sees as her individualism stemming from her immediate family line. On the other hand, Dee values her ancient roots and the Africanism behind her Americanism.

A related social conflict is whether ancestors are best remembered for their personal individuality or for their ethnic individuality. Maggie remembers her ancestors for their personal individuality, valuing their old belongings as mementos of love and devotedness. Dee prefers to remember ancestors and their past possessions for the link they give her to a deeper past identity grounded in her ethnic roots. Therefore their old possessions aren't objects of everyday use but objects of priceless value as representing an historical rootedness.

The same holds true for a third social conflict, that of the menaing of the community. Dee doesn't feel a need to be connected to the present community whereas Maggie does. Dee feels that her real connectedness is with her historic past while Maggie feels her connectedness is with her immediate community. In reality, these conflicts are resolved when past rootedness and present connectedness can exist side-by-side in an individual, as both are needed.

Another feeling that Alice walker evoked in reading the story is sentimentality.  It is felt by visualizing the items being discussed in the story as part of the past.  The quilts, the bench, and the churn were all things made with time, love, devotion and sometimes hardship. Appreciation is another feeling the story conveyed to me. It made me have a greater appreciation for things from my past.  I have alot of embroidered pictures, tablecloths and napkins that my grandmother made and I haven't used them because I've been afraid I would ruin them, but after reading this story I have begun to use them and reminesce about my own past and moments that I had with my Grandmother.  The power of words is amazing!  They can make your life take on a whole new meaning.

Empathy is one strong emotion evoked in Walker's story. We feel for the mother, Mrs. Johnson, as she battles her strong willed and patronizing daughter, Dee. We also feel empathy for Maggie, who though burned on the outside is beautiful within.

We also feel a sense of outrage at Dee for her devaluing the role of her family heirloom, wanting to put the beloved family quilt in a museum. Again, her patronizing ways are what is evident as she chastised Dee: "Maggie wouldn't appreciate these quilts," she said. "She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use."

And she would. For in the quilts, Maggie has a connection to her family that Dee does not, or will not, share. Walker makes the reader feel a real connection to the past as she describes the "scraps of dresses Grandma Dee jad worn fifty and more years ago" and the small shard "that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War."

Walker's Mrs. Johnson and Dee reject the false African identity that Dee (who has renamed heself Wangero) in favor of the flawed, but real, past of black Americans. It is an opinion the author clearly wants to communicate.

Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” involves many parallels with Walker’s own life, including the following:

• Walker was born and grew up in the countryside in Georgia; “Everyday Use” is set in the rural south.
• Walker’s own official biography declares that Walker was “particularly close to her mother,” a mother who displayed qualities of “fearlessness” (see link below). The mother in “Everyday Use” displays fearlessness near the end of the story and is especially close to her daughter Maggie.
• When Walker was a young girl, she was accidentally shot in her right eye by a BB gun and lost her vision from the disfigurement in that eye. The accident also damaged Walker’s psyche, making her feel sad and alienated. Similarly, in the story, Maggie suffers a scarring burn in a fire. She is described as feeling

homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her [attractive] sister with a mixture of envy and awe . . . .

• Walker describes herself as having had an ambivalent relationship with her brothers, in much the same way that Maggie has an ambivalent relationship with her sister Dee.
• Walker’s mother was intelligent enough to help organize a local school, and the mother in “Everyday Use” also reveals solid intelligence, even though she is not highly educated in any formal sense.
• Walker attended college and became well-educated. During her time away from home, she was exposed to broader cultural experiences than she had enjoyed in the rural south. The same is true of Dee in “Everyday Use.”
• Walker’s first marriage was to a man (a white Jewish person) whose background was significantly different from her own. Likewise, when Dee visits her childhood home, she is accompanied by a man whom Dee’s mother comically describes as follows:

The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with "Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!"

• In general, Walker resembles both Maggie and Dee. She resembles Maggie because of her strong connection to her “roots” in the black rural south, and she resembles Dee because she has lived much of her life in places other than the south and in financially comfortable and even “elite” environments. Walker’s clear sympathy for Maggie, as well as her clear disdain for Dee, may imply that she wants to maintain her close affiliation with her nurturing cultural roots.

A common reaction is what to make of Dee's (Wangero's) new take on life. She has embraced her African heritage, but she has dismissed her American heritage. It is admirable that she has taken such a keen interest in her African heritage but is this interest purely genuine? It seems that part of her interest has to do with being fashionable. Dee has always been successful and fashionable and modern. Is her interest in modern femininity and African culture a result of her independence and interest in civil rights? Or is it based on being trendy? 

For instance, the only reason she wants the quilts is to show them as pieces of art. She doesn't value them for their practical use, their cultural application. We (readers) might speculate that she has similarly shallow ways of appreciating her African heritage. Note that Hakim-a-barber won't eat certain foods (for religious or political reasons). Wangero eats anything that is there. This might support the idea that while she claims to embrace a modern, African cultural identity, she is not as committed or certainly not as militant as Hakim. In other words, does really embody and practice this new heritage or is she being trendy and really only adopting this heritage in words?