Chapter 3: Character
I. Character
II. Important terms:
1. A character is presumably an imagined person who inhabits s story.
Characterization: the techniques a writer uses to create, reveal, or develop the
characters in a narrative.
Character development: The process in which a character is introduced, advanced,
and possibly transformed in a story. This development can
prove to be either static (flat) or dynamic (round).
Flat character:
(static)
Flat characters stay the same throughout a story. A flat
character has only one outstanding trait. Flat characters are
rarely the central characters in a narrative and are often based
on stock character.
*Stock character: A common or stereotypical character that occurs frequently in
literature. They are often known by some outstanding trait
or traits and require little detailed portraiture, for we already
know them well. Examples of stock characters are the mad
scientists, the battle-scarred veteran or the strong-but-silent
cowboy.
Round character: A complex character who is presented in depth and detail in a
(dynamic)
narrative. Round characters are those who change
significantly during the course of a narrative. Most often
round characters are the central characters in a narrative.
2. motivation: What a character in a story or drama wants. The reasons an author
provides for a character’s action. Motivation can be either explicit or
implicit.
3. allusion: a reference to some famous person, place, or thing in history, in other
fiction, or in actuality.
4. antihero: a protagonist conspicuously lacking in one or more of the usual attribute
of a traditional hero. Antiheroes tend to be loners, without perfections,
just barely able to survive.
5. gratuitous: a deed without cause or motive
Homework #3
1. . Identify the physical descriptions of the three women in the story. Make a
list of their personality traits. Then discuss what each of these women could
symbolize in the story.
Mama:
Maggie:
Dee:
2. What is the importance of the quilt in the story? What does it represent?
Contrast Dee’s attitude toward the quilts with the attitudes of her mother and
sister.
3. What’s the basic conflict in “Everyday Use”?
4. Why is the story titled “Everyday Use”?
5. Write a summary of the story “Everyday Use.”
Question:
The story highlighs not only a generation gap but a contrast between two sharply
different attitudes toward the idea of heritage.
Identify how the narrator describes her garden and what this description would
signify?
P1 1. ________(Whom) and ______(where) will mama and Maggie wait for?
To Mana, this place is more like a(n) _____________.
P2. 1 . How will Maggie be until her sister goes? (in the yard)
2.. Maggie was ashamed of the burn scars down (her arms) and (legs).
3. What’s Maggie’s feeling toward her sister?_ (a mixture of envy and awe)
P3 1. What’s the importance of the TV show in the story? How does it help us
understand Mama and Dee?
(Mama has apprehensions about Dee’s visit before her arrival.. she is insure
about her relationship with Dee.)(Mama anticipated Dee to show some
appreciation of their help )(how she would not have made it without their
parents’ help)
P4. 1. Comment on Mama’s dream? What could it tell us about the characters
and the themes of the story.
(Mama dreams of being appreciated by Dee. She wants to hear Dee
acknowledge that she helped shape her into the successful confident woman
that she is. Mama knows Dee doesn’t appreciate many things about her;
her large bones and body, her dark skin and the way she works just like a
man and enjoys it.)
During the dream, we are told of how “She pins on my dress a large orchid,
even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers”.
It is interesting that by presenting Dee’s fraudulent nature through the
symbolism of the orchid pinning, she says nothing about refusing the flower.
Even more interesting is that she has visions of herself participating in the TV
show at all. It is as if she knows that these things are false but she allows them
to go on and even encourages them by taking part.
(While Mama waits with guarded anticipation for Dee’s arrival, hoping she will
be different this time, everything about Maggie seems to dread the encounter
with her sister..)
Identify the physical descriptions of the three women in the story. Make a list
of their personality traits. Then discuss what each of these women could
symbolize in the story.
(Maggie’s physical description is also symbolic of her personality.)
P5. 1. What’s Mama’s physical description?
2. What would Dee want her mama to be?
P6. 1. Will mama look a strange white man in the eye?
2. How does she talked to them?
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P7. 1 What does Maggie wear? ( in pink skirt and red blouse)
P9. 1 Maggie is like a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless rich
person.
(Walker creates sympathy for Maggie’s character.)
2. How does Maggie walk? (chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle ever
since the fire that burned the other house to the ground)
P10.1 What’s Dee’s physical description?
(Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure)
2. How long ago was it that the other house burned? (10, 12 years)
3. What are the three women’s responses to the fire?
P11. 1. How could Dee afford to go to college? ( We raise the money, the church and
me, to send her to Augusta to school)
P12 1. Dee wanted nice things, what did she wear to her high school graduation?
( a yellow organdy dress)( black pumps to match a green suit she’d made
from an old suit somebody gave me)
P13. 1. Was Mama well educated? (I never had an education myself after second
grade the school was closed) (1927)
2 How about Maggie? (Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along
good-naturedly but can’t see well
3. Whom will Maggie marry? (John Thomas)
P14. 1. How many rooms does the house have? (three rooms)
2. What’s the material of the roof? ( tin)
3. How about the old one? (shingle roof)
4. Where is their house? ( in a pasture)
P15. 1. What kind of friends were Dee’s ? (furtive boys and nervous girls who never
laughed)
P16. 1. Which boy did Dee once courted? (Jimmy T)(He flew to marry a cheap city
girl from a family of ignorant flashy people)
**************************************
P18. 1. When Dee arrived, what was Maggie’s response?
( She attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling, but Mama stay
her with her hand.
P19. 1. How does the man look? ( a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a
foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail)
P20. 1. What does Dee wear? ( a dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A
dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellow and oranges enough to
throw back the light of the sun. Earings, too, gold and hanging down to
her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her
arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose
and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it hair. It stands straight up like
the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two
long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.)
P22 1. What could Dee’s taking a Polaroid photograph signify?
Why do you
think Dee prefers to exclude herself from the photograph?
(She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included.)
P25 1. What is the importance of names in the story?
(What happened to the name “Dee”?)
(I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress
me.)
(You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie)
(Dee changes her name to Wangero to reflect the new fad of “getting in
touch with African heritage.” However, the name Dee already has come
from her heritage. As Mama says,”You know as well as …)
(Dee has the education to understand the history of her people, but the irony
is that she is missing the people standing right in front of her)
P44 1. Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and
raising cattle is not my style.)
Hakim-a-barber is a symbol of the new life that Dee has chosen. He may or
may not be her husband, which hints at both Dee’s transitional nature.
Hakim-a-barber is referred to as Asalamalakim. This title gives the reader
the sense that he is a generalization representing certain Muslim thought.
It semmes that Alice Walker shows respect for the militance and progressive
agricultural program of the Muslims, but at the same time shows some
skepticism about a young man who claims attachment to the Muslims
because he admires the rhetoric. It allows him to acknowledge his
contempt for whites, which is all he believes the group is about. He doesn’t
practice the actual life of a Muslim, but preaches his fashionable
membership. Like Dee, he takes what he wants from the fashion that is in
style at the moment and doesn’t truly investigate the heritage he claims to
have.
P46. 1. benches—Grandma Dee’s butter dish-the churn
(“This churn top is what I need,” “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree
you used to have.)
(I can use the churn as a centerpiece for the alcove table.)
2. I want the dasher, too”
(and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.)
(“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash” said Maggie so low you almost
couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”
*What is the importance of the quilt in the story? What does it represent?
What does it mean to Dee, Mama and Maggie? Do these three women differ
from one another in relation to their perceptions of the quilt?
Theme
The story suggests that by using the quilt and by having learned the traditional
skills passed from generation to generation, Maggie, the homely, uneducated
sister, knows more about her African American heritage than does Dee. Maggie
and her mother live their cultural heritage; they are nourished by it through
everyday use and versed in the craftsmanship needed to pass it on to future
generation.
(“ A patchwork quilt, laboriously and affectionately crafted from bits of worn
overalls, shredded uniforms, tattered petticoats, and outgrown dresses stand as a
signal instance of a patterned wholeness in African Diaspora.”)
Quilting as a metaphor for the ways in which discarded and fragments may be
made into a unified, even beautiful whole. Quilting symbolizes the process out
of which the unimportant and meaningless may be transformed into the valued
and useful.)
(Mama steps as if to say heritage is not to be owned, it is to be used. Maggie
has worked on these quilts. She knows how to create them again if they
become worn. It is not the quilts that are important, it is the quilting.)
(Maggie said ”I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts)
(Maggie learned how to quilt from her grandma and that important connection is
what makes the quilts a piece of history for her. The quilts mean a lot to her
because of the people they represent, and not merely because of the concept that
they were stitched by hand)
P55 Where did Dee find two quilts ? (the trunk at the foot of my bed)
(They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung
them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the
Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them
were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago.
Bits
and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s paisley shirts. And one twenty faded blue piece,
about the piece of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s
uniform that he wore in the Civil War.)
P57 1 Why did something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door
slammed? Why was Maggie mad?
(Mama promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she married John
Thomas.)
P67 1.Mama offered Dee a quilt when she went away to college.
(She had told me they were old-fashioned, out of style.)
P67 1. Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less
than that
Dee will hang them. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
P74 1. Maggie said : She can have them, mama I can member Grandma Dee without
the quilts.
In contrast with Dee’s stylish heritage, Maggie knows that ancestry is a part
of everyday life. Maggie knows the history behind the clabber and the
dasher. Dee makes the mistake of believing that one’s heritage is
something that one puts on display if and when such a display is
fashionable.
 Why does the mother compare her daughters to different animals? What
does this reveal about her attitude toward Dee and Maggie
(The story takes place in a pasture down the road from which several “beef-cattle
peoples’ live and work.
The allusion is intended to suggest that Maggie and
Mama are more like cattle on a ranch, feeding and living day to day, with no
worries about the world beyond them. On the other hand. Dee and her
friend are described in reptile like terms, painting them as untrustworthy,
suspicious, and opportunistic creature.)
 Why is the story titled “Everyday Use”?
 Why does Maggie have a real smile at the end of the story? Comment on the
mother’s choice at the end.
Mama has her epiphany and does something she’s never done before. It took
Mama many years to allow her youngest daughter to win a battle over her sister.
The result was a smile on Maggie’s face. It gives one the notion that there is a
newfound confidence on the way for her.