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How do Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" compare and contrast?
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Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" both explore cultural heritage and norms, focusing on the transmission of traditions from mothers to daughters. In "Girl," the mother's advice imparts cultural heritage but also reinforces restrictive gender norms. In "Everyday Use," Mama challenges Dee's superficial view of heritage by choosing Maggie for the quilts, reflecting authenticity. Both stories critique societal norms, with "Girl" addressing gender roles and "Everyday Use" questioning cultural preservation during the Black Power Movement.
To complicate the previous educator's excellent point about cultural heritage in the two stories, I would also suggest looking at the presentation of tradition. In both stories, mothers pass down aspects of cultural heritage—recipes and quilts, respectively—to daughters, with the expectation that those traditions will not only have practical use, but will instill some sense of having a lineage. In "Girl," the mother's advice is double-edged. It offers a connection to heritage, but it also constricts the girl by reinforcing gender norms.
In "Everyday Use," Mother decides not to give Dee (Wangero) the quilts that she wants—those which Dee thinks best represent heritage. She has promised the quilts to Maggie, her daughter who lives at home, and it seems that she finds Dee's connection to heritage faddish and inauthentic. There is also the suggestion that Mother rejects Dee's expression of gender, finding her boldness and independence offensive. On...
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the other hand, she identifies with and sympathizes with Maggie, who would get "everyday use" out of the quilts, just as the girl in Kincaid's story would get everyday use out of the speaker's advice about cooking, gardening, doing household chores, and loving.
Both stories establish a relationship between heritage and domesticity. Dee's sophistication distances her from her family's particular local heritage and domestic sphere. Mama recalls that, even as a child, Dee had wanted to learn "other folks' habits," implying a rejection of their own. Furthermore, according to Mama, Dee had hated their old house, which she watched burn down with "a look of concentration on her face," causing Mama to wonder why she did not "dance around the ashes."
You can compare and contrast Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" to Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" through their shared theme of the norms and expectations of one's cultural heritage. For example, "Girl" revolves around the strict cultural norms of what it means to be a "decent" woman in the narrator's environment (presumably in the Caribbean). The narrator's mother has a definitive set of "rules" that her daughter must follow so that others view her positively. Similarly, "Everyday Use" explores cultural norms regarding cultural practices. Mama and Dee disagree on whether family artifacts should be used or preserved. Both stories challenge cultural norms that were present at the times they were written: "Girl" suggests that women should not have to follow stereotypical norms to be viewed as worthy of respect, and "Everyday Use" goes against thoughts held during the Black Power Movement regarding cultural preservation. The two stories differ in the nature of the issues presented (one about gender, the other about culture), but they both are stories that speak as a challenge to commonly held beliefs of their time.