Pauline Rabut
02/05/2011
Everyday Use - Rough Draft
WRIT 161 - M04

The two girls don’t value the quilts in the same way because even if they are sisters, they didn’t grow up the same way, they don’t have the same level of education, and they don’t have the same values of family.

I don’t believe that you can love one of your child more than another one but I do believe that you can feel closer to one. That’s what happens in Everyday Use. A mother has two girls, Maggie and Dee, but the two sisters are the complete opposite. One is shy whereas the other is self confident. From the beginning of the story, we can feel that the mother thinks that Dee - the self confident one - didn’t grow up the way she expected to and turned out to be a stranger to her. Dee was self confident, “hesitation was not part of her nature”, whereas her mother was the opposite of her, she “couldn’t even look a white man in the eyes.” She wanted nice things very young and soon became an independent and self confident woman: “ At sixteen she had a style of her own and knew what style was.”
The mother hardly had a proper education. She didn’t go to college, and ended up taking care alone of her two daughters. As for Maggie, the younger one and obviously not the smartest one, she has always been “chin on chest, eyes on ground.” She got burned when the neighbor’s house took fire and now she’s ashamed of the scars on her legs and arms.
When the neighbor’s house was burning, Dee was watching the “spectacle” whereas her sister was almost dying. I think that’s when Maggie’s mom started to see Dee differently. The mother never had an education. She looks like Maggie. Even Maggie looked smarter than her: “sometimes Maggie read to me.” Dee was really different from her mom and sister. Her mom was “a big boned woman with rough, man-working hands,” Maggie was “chin on chest, eyes on ground.”

Obviously, the mom never understood Dee. She says that until she got the money to send her to Augusta