"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker

" 'What happened to 'Dee'?' I wanted to know.
'She's dead... I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.' " (page 177).

This is probably the biggest insult that Dee could say to her mother. Dee is ashamed to be associated with the lifestyle in which her mother and sister Maggie live in. Dee is ashamed of the person she was before. I feel that the mother's being 'hooked in the side' while milking a cow symbolize that her mother worked her whole life to provide for her family, but she still faced many challenges along the way. Perhaps it also represents the fact that no matter how much she worked, it still would never change the lifestyle in which she lived. And further still, I think that it represents the fact that she worked so hard to provide for her daughters, and yet Dee is ungrateful for what her mother had done for her. I think that Dee's refusal to accept a quilt when she went away to college represented her refusal to stay with her lifestyle at home with her mother and her sister. It symbolizes that Dee is ungrateful for the hard work and service that people provided her with all of her life. Dee's name and costume represent that facade that Dee puts on. She is entirely fake, but she is ashamed of her past. So, she puts on a costume to disguise the girl the world around her knew before. I think that the mother's refusal to let Dee have the quilts indicates a permanent change in character because the mother says, "When I looked at her (Maggie) like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet." This defining moment of seeing Maggie differently would impact the way the mother looked at Maggie from then on. Of course the mother would be more sympathetic toward Maggie from that point forward.