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Paper on Alice Walker. Images of animals and references to animal husbandry
pervade Alice Walker's justly famous 1973 short story ...
concert review paper. Mama’s Daughters In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,”
tells us a story of two daughters’, Dee and Maggie Johnson, with ...
... it is blood, long as frozen lake building messages on typewritten paper, faces of ...
Alice.” This poem makes reference to a story Alice Walker told concerning ...
... Whilst this writer does not agree with this novel or anything that Alice Walker
thinks or feels, obligingly this paper is been written. ...
Drown Compare & contrast. In this Paper I will compare and contrast the some of
the relationships in "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker, to Drown by Junot Diaz. ...
Submitted by SexyShanT on April 16, 2008
Category: English
Words: 792 | Pages: 4
Views: 47
Popularity Rank: 108,624
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Images of animals and references to animal husbandry pervade Alice Walker's justly famous 1973 short story "Everyday Use." Not only is each of the three characters, Mama, Maggie, and Dee, explicitly or implicitly associated with animals, but the story takes place in a "pasture" (27), down the road from which several "beef-cattle peoples" (30) live and work. Some of the comparisons between the women and fauna are highly conventional or purely descriptive: Maggie's memory is linked to that of an elephant (31); the voice of a pleading Dee sounds as "sweet as a bird" (32); Dee's hair stands erect "like the wool on a sheep" (28); and her pigtails are compared to "small lizards disappearing behind her ears" (28). Image patterns involving cows and dogs, however, foreshadow the story's climactic scene, in which Mama decides to give the quilts to Maggie rather than Dee, and they play an integral role in the scene itself and its aftermath.
Mama frequently describes Maggie as a docile, somewhat frightened animal, one that accepts the hand that fate has dealt her and attempts to flee any situation posing a potential threat. When Dee arrives, Mama tells us that "Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. 'Come back here,' I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe" (27). Maggie's characteristic stance in such situations is aptly summed up by Mama in the word "cowering" (29). Although the etymologies of the words "cow" and "cower" differ, it seems likely that Walker is hinting at the former by employing the latter. Yet Maggie is not the only person described in bovine terms. Mama refers to herself as "a large, big boned woman" (24) and informs us that her own body language, at least in her encounters with white men, resembles Maggie's: "It seems to me I have talked to them with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is furthest from them" (25). Mama and...
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