The Concept of Heritage in Alice Walker´s Everyday Use

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Würzburg (Institute for Anglistics/ American Studies), course: American Female Writers, language: English, abstract: Introduction Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use", from the collection In Love and Trouble published in 1973, was written during the heyday of the Black Power movement, when African Americans were trying to reach more than mere racial equality and insisted on self-determination and racial dignity. The tracing of ancestral African roots, the slogan Black is Beautiful, and the Afro hair style arose. African American short stories of this period were often concerned with problematic issues of integration, separation, redefinition of the past, distant African heritage, and immediate family history. In "Everyday Use", the contrast between two sisters and the domestic struggle over old hand-made quilts reveal the use and misuse of the concept of heritage and different attitudes towards one's familiar traditions and cultural background. Alice Walker not only explores a disturbed intrafamily relationship between three black women of the South, but represents a severe conflict within America's black society, where new radical views and misperceptions of the word heritage collide with traditional black rural life style. A singular general meaning of the term heritage does not exist. Dictionaries mostly carry several definitions. For example, the Reader's Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following two entries: 1. Property that is or can be inherited; an inheritance. 2. Something other than property passed down from preceding generations; a legacy; a tradition. (Rattray 789) [...]