Many of Alice Walker's characters reflect elements of her own life story. For example, Alice Walker was in a BB gun accident, as a child, that caused her to have a "whitish scar tissue" on her eye. She was very self-conscious about this injury, which she felt stole her beauty. Many of Walker's characters, such as Celie from The Color Purple, struggle with feeling plain, ordinary, or even ugly. Similarly, Maggie, from "Everyday Use" feels broken and ugly:

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. (1)

Maggie cannot see past her imperfections to recognize her internal beauty. Other characters, such as mama, also struggle to recognize their beauty. For example, Mama explains:

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. . . . I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing. (1)

Mama, too, struggles to view herself as beautiful or worthy of notice. This is similar to Alice Walker, who withdrew emotionally from the world after her BB gun accident. Additionally, the passage shows how mama is extremely hard working and how she is capable of doing grueling farm chores (such as killing a hog). Walker grew up as the "youngest daughter of sharecroppers," and she was very familiar with the challenging responsibilities of farm life.

Finally, Walker is like Dee in that both women attend college, though they come from poor families. In the story, Dee gets to go to school:

But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. (2)

Both Dee and Walker use education to move beyond small town farm life.

#3 gives a comprehensive answer that clearly shows the links we are able to draw between Alice Walker and both of her characters. Interestingly one could argue that Walker reflects herself in all of her characters in this short story to an extent - there is a "Dee" and a "Maggie" and a "Mama" side to her that she expresses through their voices, words, actions and persons. Perhaps what this story presents, therefore, is the different sides of ourselves that we all have - for every confident person has a shyer side, and so on.

One connection Walker has to Maggie is that they are both "deformed" - Walker lost sight in her eye when her brother shot her with a BB gun when they were both children. The eye remains scarred today. (See her essay "When the Other Dancer is the Self")

Walker is like Dee in that she was an active voice in the Black Arts Movement as a writer and a speaker. She was an advocate for Womanism (as an alternative to feminism) and she is outspoken on issues of equality.

Walker is like Mama in that she knows the real significance of past. She has lived the experience of being a black woman at a time when this meant double jeopardy or dual discrimination, and she remained strong.