Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

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O'Connor contrasts intellectual pretension with certain transcendent realities: Original Sin, Grace, prospects for redemption. Walker, meanwhile, assesses ideas of cultural identity within a community only a few minutes' drive from the home in which O'Connor spent her last years. O'Connor relentlessly exposes liberal pieties--notably regarding race--as humanistic idols that obscure the spiritual realities central to her vision. Writing at the height of Civil Rights agitation, she delights in characters like Asbury in "The Enduring Chill" or Julian in "Everything that Rises Must Converge"--characters who have embraced the new ideas about race only to be exposed for their concurrent spiritual folly. I have been arguing all along that Walker, too, satirizes the heady rhetoric of late 60s black consciousness, deconstructing; its pieties (especially the rediscovery of Africa) and asserting neglected values. At the same time, however, she revises--Signifies on--the O'Connor diagesis, which allows so little real value to black aspiration. Thus Walker parodies the iconoclastic tricks that O'Connor uses over and over again. As Wangero meets in Maggie the self she wants to deny, Walker Signifies on O'Connor's fondness for characters that psychologically double each other. Walker Signifies, too, on the O'Connor moment of divine insight, for Mrs. Johnson's decision to reaffirm the gift of the quilts to Maggie comes as heaven-sent enlightenment. Mrs. Johnson, however, enjoys a positive moment of revelation--unlike Mrs. May in "Greenleaf," Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation," or the Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." When, finally, Walker represents Wangero's intellectual posturing as shallow beside the simple integrity of her mother and sister, she plays with the standard O'Connor plot of the alienated and superficially intellectual young person (Hulga, in "Good Country People," is the definitive example) who fails conspicuously to justify the contempt in which she or he holds a crass, materialistic, and painfully unimaginative female parent. Walker tropes even the O'Connor meanness. Where O'Connor allows at best that the petty complacency and other failings of the mothers in "The Comforts of Home" and "The Enduring Chill" are venial flaws beside the arrogance, the intellectual posturing, and the spiritual blindness of their children, Walker declines to qualify her sympathy and admiration for Maggie and Mrs. Johnson.

One of the ironies here is that both Walker and O'Connor are themselves intellectuals struggling to make their way in a world of competitive ideas and talents--not to mention competing ideologies. Each critiques herself through mocking self-projection, and each stakes out an ideological position at odds with prevailing thought. O'Connor addresses herself to the spiritual folly of a godless age, Walker to a kind of social shortsightedness. The measure of Walker's success may be that one comes to care as much about the question she poses--"Who shall inherit the quilts?"--as about the nominally grander question posed by O'Connor: "Who shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven?"

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Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

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