Alice Walker's In Love And Trouble

In the year 1973 Alice Walker published a collection of short stories titled “In Love and Trouble” which includes one of the most widely studied pieces of work till this day titled “Everyday use”. In this short story the author Alice Walker incorporates the struggle and stereotypical beliefs that circulated among the lives of rural black American women during the time and did this by demonstrating the numerous adversities a rural family has surpassed by assimilating it through the tension between the main character, who in this case was the mother, and her oldest daughter. The subjective view of the story is made possible by the observant voice of the first-person narrator, the mother. In “Everyday Use” the mother’s point of view is what allows us to get an
Susan in her literary criticism titled the “Fight vs. Flight: A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”” states the importance of the ending in this short story because here “Walker shows that Mama's moment of triumph is achieved because she is able to attain a balance between the two types of her heritage represented by her very different daughters—at the end Mama combines Maggie's respect for tradition with Dee's pride and refusal to back down, the combination Walker seems to feel is necessary if true social change is to come about”(179). Keeping in mind that this short story was written during times where tradition meant focusing only on the past and our ancestors Alice Walker believed in something different, perhaps a more in depth understanding on what heritage truly is about and the acceptance of both the old and the