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In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Critical Essay
African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt
It could of course be argued that what deflects the critics' attention away from the "patch" of a story is not the contrariness of the story, but rather that this edition simply reflects the sign of the times under which criticism tends to be written. The close reading of the text itself has been displaced by a reading which attempts to follow a series of threads leading outside the text: to author, biography, culture, politics, economies, and heritage. In this case, it is the heritage and culture of quilting among Southern, AfroAmerican women which figures largely, and Barbara Christian's introduction to the edition carefully situates both Walker and her story in that culture and its history. [1] But while in both her fiction and non-fiction Walker has courageously pointed to a set of specific historical, cultural, and political references outside and beyond her work, the question still remains of what the relationship is between her art and these references.
Among some critics there is a tendency, which finds encouragement in Walker's writing itself, to claim a strong analogy between quilting and storytelling, which allows one in turn to see Walker's storytelling as metaphorically subsumable to quilting, which in this scenario "precedes" her story. The violence of the metaphor is that it tends to cover over the very differences that make it possible, and the quilt seems to lend itself to this metaphoric violence since its figure tends to be taken literally. If "the most resonant quality of [real] quiltmaking," as Kelley writes, "is the promise of creating unity amongst disparate elements," it is not difficult to understand how a metaphoric slide creates an identity between the disparate elements of quilting, writing, and a world of womanly activity. The quilt is a trope whose analogue (the quilt itself) provides the stitch that untropes the trope; it is a trope stitched to a reality, and the tightness of the stitching depends on the tightness of the identity of any group which claims the quilt as its sign. Even if today, as Showalter notes, the quilt has "transcended the stigma of its sources in women's culhire" and become the "central metaphor of American cultural identity" (215), that generalizing drift away from a certain womanly specificity has not diminished its appeal as a kind of ground for certain groups, particularly women's. Quilting can still be taken as a woman's activity which makes use of a woman's material; it can yet be deemed a woman's social, economic, and political activity which also produces an object of beauty which, moreover, does not drift into the domain of pure art, or the "institutional theories of aesthetics" (Baker and Pierce-Baker 161); just as disparate pieces of cloth get stitched together, the quilt itself is stitched to the world that produces it. The quilt "represents" herstory, history, and tradition, binding women, and men, to the past and the past to the present. And it has been powerful in providing a ground for women, particul arly women writers. Precisely because "the writing of fiction," as Mary Helen Washington notes, can still be perceived as "done under the shadow of men" (103), the metaphor of the quilt and its world can take women out of that shadow and ground them in an open place of their own.
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