Question

write a essay on , identify and analyze two strategies wangero uses to try to persuade her mother that she should have the quilts. explain why wangero ultimately fails at persuading her mother to give her the quilts what larger message or theme walker is trying to covey through this outcome.

Answer 1

In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” the conflict over two handmade quilts becomes the story’s focal point for competing interpretations of heritage, identity, and value. Dee—who has rechristened herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo—arrives home with a new persona and demands the quilts that her grandmother and mother made. To persuade her mother, she deploys two main strategies: an appeal to cultural authenticity and aesthetic value, and an appeal to authority and modern sensibility. Both strategies expose Wangero’s misunderstanding of what the quilts mean to the family, and both ultimately fail because Walker wants readers to see heritage as a living, everyday practice rather than a collectible symbol.

Strategy 1 — Claiming cultural authenticity and historical value
Wangero frames her demand in terms of reclaiming an authentic African-American heritage. By changing her name and adopting a rhetoric that emphasizes roots and history, she positions herself as the rightful steward of artifacts that represent “real” Black culture. She treats the quilts as museum pieces—objects to be preserved and admired for their connection to ancestors—rather than as items with continuing, domestic function. This strategy attempts to moralize possession: because she now understands and values her heritage in a newly politicized, aestheticized way, she is presented as more worthy of safeguarding these artifacts.

This appeal rests on two moves. First, Wangero’s name change signals a break with the domestic life she criticizes and an embrace of a pan-African identity; it functions as symbolic proof that she has “awakened” to her cultural legacy. Second, she disparages Maggie’s ability to “appreciate” the quilts, implying that Maggie’s ignorance and passivity disqualify her from inheriting them. Wangero’s rhetoric elevates the quilts from family heirlooms to cultural trophies—valuable precisely because they can be displayed as signs of authentic ethnic identity.

Strategy 2 — Invoking modern education and aesthetic judgment
A second strategy is a claim to superior taste and modern sensibility. Wangero’s education and exposure to broader cultural discourse are presented as credentials that entitle her to decide how the quilts should be used. She argues, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that preservation and display are the correct responses to historical artifacts, and that her mother and sister, who view the quilts as everyday objects, are ignorant or backward. By insisting that she would “preserve” the quilts’ integrity—rather than letting them be “misused” for daily purposes—she frames herself as the rational, enlightened caretaker and delegitimizes the family’s practical, memory-filled relationship to the quilts.

This strategy also relies on performative condescension: Wangero’s tone and demeanour toward her mother and Maggie reveal a distancing and judgment that assumes her interpretation of heritage is the only legitimate one. The combination of an academicized understanding of culture and a consumer’s instinct to curate objects gives her the rhetorical upper hand—at least on the surface.

Why Wangero fails
Despite the force of these strategies, Wangero fails because her claims are revealed to be shallow and inauthentic in two interlocking ways. First, the narrator (the mother) and Maggie embody a different, lived relationship to heritage: the quilts are records of labor, family history, and everyday love. They were stitched with scraps from dresses and uniforms that belonged to ancestors; their use is inseparable from remembrance. For the narrator, heritage is not a static artifact to be put behind glass but a practice—used, worn, and passed on. When the mother gives the quilts to Maggie, it is an assertion that the quilts’ value lies precisely in being used and integrated into family life.

Second, Wangero’s arguments are undermined by her performative stance. Her renaming and rhetoric come across as a surface-level appropriation rather than a deep connection. The narrator sees through the posturing: Wangero’s newly adopted identity does not include the embodied histories and household knowledge that give the quilts their meaning. Moreover, Wangero’s condescension toward Maggie signals that she does not truly respect the people who made or cared for the quilts. The mother’s refusal is therefore an act of moral judgment: she rejects Wangero’s attempt to convert family memory into aesthetic capital. The story makes explicit that Wangero’s claim to “authenticity” is self-serving and that her supposed enlightenment cannot substitute for the quiet continuity of family tradition.

Larger message and theme Walker conveys
Through this outcome Walker advances a critique of surface-level or commodified cultural reclamation. The story distinguishes between two senses of heritage: the academicized, aestheticized notion (which can be detached, ornamental, and even alienating) and the everyday, lived heritage of practice, memory, and service. Walker champions the latter. By rewarding Maggie—shy, scarred, and untrained in outward rhetoric—with the quilts, Walker affirms that genuine cultural continuity comes from embodied experience and intergenerational care, not from slogans, fashion, or display.

More broadly, Walker interrogates how identity movements can sometimes foster a kind of cultural tourism in which symbols are prized over the people and practices that created them. The story also centers the perspective and moral agency of black women—especially those whose labour and domestic life have historically been devalued—arguing that their standards of value deserve respect. Finally, Walker suggests that empowerment and self-definition need not be performative; they can be rooted in ordinary acts of belonging.

Conclusion
Wangero’s two strategies—an appeal to cultural authenticity as a claim to ownership and an appeal to modern, educated aesthetic judgment—fail because they misunderstand the quilts’ true significance and reveal her claims to be performative. Walker uses this failure to insist that heritage is not an object to be acquired but a living practice to be lived and passed on. In doing so she defends the dignity of everyday life and cautions against reducing culture to symbol and spectacle.