Alice Walkers Everyday Use Essay -- Everyday Use Alice Walker

In every family there seems to be a child that is bestowed with all of the positive aspects of her parents. Unfortunately, for every perfect child there is, it seems that there is one child that is less talented and less beautiful. In the short story, Everyday Use, these two character descriptions fit perfectly in relation to the characters of Dee and Maggie. Dee is the gifted and beautiful child, whereas Maggie seems to have been left behind by the gene pool and luck. In her short story, Everyday Use, Alice Walker utilizes language, the disaster of the fire burning down Maggies familys house, and her portrayal of Dee to pain an extremely sympathetic portrait of Maggie. Walkers use of language when describing Maggie creates a picture of a physically disfigure and unintelligent woman. Maggies physical scarring is pointed out to the reader early in the story to lay a foundation for sympathy. Walker accomplishes this when she states that Maggie has, burn scars down he r arm and legs (383). The yield of fact choice of vocabulary by Walker creates an image of a deformed person that would not be aesthetically pleasing by either stretch of the word. Walker fortifies her effort to create a sympathetic Maggie with her vocabulary when Mama states, Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggies arms sticking to me, her hair locoweed and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes (384). The words arms sticking and hair smoking generates a grisly image in the readers mind of a grotesquely injured little girl that is quite worthy of sympathy (Walker 384). It is not exclusively the physical scars that were left by the fire that create sympathy about Maggies physical appearance. Dee is described... ...e evidence suggesting abuse provides the reader with feelings of sympathy for Maggie. Walker clearly portrays Maggie as the more sympathetic of the two daughters. This is created by giving the character of Dee all of th e good lucks and intelligence, but likewise pairing those positive qualities with the negative quality of arrogance. It is also done by creating the Maggie character without any of the natural gifts bestowed to Dee, but also saddling her with tragedy and allowing the impacts of the tragedy to be evident to the reader. Maggie is depicted throughout the story as a truly tragic character that has been shorted at every possible stop in life. Dee is portrayed as someone who has been given everything, yet has cancelled into a undesirable human being. It is this unfairness that is truly the root of her status as an extremely sympathetic character.