Consumer
F.R.R. Mallory
May 8, 2006

...many live as enemies...Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things.
Philippians 3:18-21 (NIV)

Poverty is a commodity whose purchase and use masquerades as status offering the illusion of personal glory to those who feed off of it. Alice Walker in "Everyday Use" exposes the indignity of societies and people who violate their poor by gorging on their lives. She examines the spiritual betrayal of a young woman who turns on her own impoverished family in order to add 'quaint' decoration to her home. Through her story Walker examines this intimate betrayal and usage by juxtaposing this elder daughter's actions against those of her illiterate mother and injured and slow, younger sister.

By choosing to view this story in archetypal form, we are allowed to see that each of these women represents the silent class structure that haunts and profanes our American culture. The eldest daughter Dee, who has changed her name to Wangero, has reinvented her identity to clearly define her separation from her origins, distancing herself from her heritage. She represents the all American uber consumer. Mama, the illiterate and impoverished mother, has spent her life working hard to provide for herself and her children. To Mama, the consumer driven world is a foreign land beyond her comprehension that summons a darkness of spirit in those it enthralls. She represents the people who get by with what they have without lust or resentment. Maggie, the injured and slow younger sister, is shy, fragile and vulnerable. She is used to the world crushing her and she represents the poor who understand pain, betrayal and loss and those who know how very precious the gift of love is.

With every advertisement urging consumption, "Be a good consumer, help the economy. Go shopping!" It is all too easy to understand Dee's path down the rabbit hole. Haven't each of us been lured by the promise of the 'American Dream'? What does this mean? To consume is to eat, devour, waste, squander, destroy, and use up. We used to call this gluttony and identified it as one of the seven cardinal sins. "The thoughtless waste of everything, overindulgence, misplaced sensuality, uncleanliness, and maliciously depriving others. Marked by refusal to share and unreasonable consumption of more than is necessary" (Wikipedia). But cardinal sins are old school morality in this day of imposed Christian conservatism, a morality that doesn't fit with the hypocritical greed of its proponents so gluttony has been relanguaged to become the 'good consumer' or shopper. Come sin with us, our Federal Reserve encourages. Spend. Consume, more and more and more. To be a good and patriotic American, you must consume more than you need. If you don't feel good, buy something. You will feel better once you do. The path to spiritual silence is through waxed plastic credit cards at your local mall. Consume more. It doesn't matter that what you buy is being produced in China by a child making pennies a day. Look away. Be a good American.

Walker prepares us by opening with a scene of the dirt swept floor of Mama's outdoor living room, to "wait for the breezes that never come inside the house" (Walker 1159). In this brief, telling description, we can imagine that the visitor whose arrival is being prepared for, is like this breeze. This is a person who never enters the home or the heart or the poverty but blows through them, past them, without lingering or leaving any trace of themselves behind. Mama knows that Mother nature cannot be poor, so an outdoor living room has all the splendor and majesty of the natural world and this room will not confront their visitor with the substance of their lives. It is the welcome and greeting that Mama can courteously extend.

Dee has adopted a new heritage, she's learned to relanguage herself into a past of her own fabrication, a self created personal history that fits her idea of story, of place, of how she wants others to see her. She tells her mother, "Not 'Dee,' Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo! ...I couldn't bear it any longer being named after the people who oppress me" (Walker 1162). When Mama explains that Dee's name came from her aunt, grandmother and great grandmother she can see that this history doesn't fit with her daughter's story. We are left to consider whether Dee is actually saying that her aunt, grandmother and great grandmother oppress her. Does this mean her mother and sister oppress her too? Are her real family members a spiritual burden, do their personal truths weigh heavily upon Dee? Dee answers this in an earlier letter when she says, "...no matter where [you] 'choose' to live, [I] will manage to come see [you]. But [I] will never bring [my] friends" (Walker 1161). Mama and Maggie have begun to represent the sin of poverty, they belong to the silenced peoples of the world, those become fodder.

Yet Dee has discovered that even in a three-room shanty with no real windows and a swept front yard living room in a cow pasture, there are objects to be coveted. She lusts after the worn bench she sits on. She lusts after Grandmother Dee's butter dish and then her eyes settle on the butter churn, still in use, still full of butter her mother and sister eat for their survival. This too she wishes to take from them. Not because she needs it. Its function is ended, in her mind. "I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table...and I'll think of something artistic to do with the dasher" (Walker 1163). She is beyond hearing her family, her heritage - she hears only the gluttonous whispers of her new identity, her imagined status, her attained right of utter betrayal. It doesn't matter that she steals food from their table to decorate her alcove. They are only to be used, enslaved to her vanity and ego. She has become 'master' of their damnation. The churn top and dasher are metaphors for her mother and sister.

Of course, this isn't enough. Dee goes to her mother's trunk and rifles through it, removing two old quilts. "Grandma...She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!" (Walker 1164). Imagine. In this telling statement Dee reveals her astonishment that anyone would stitch a quilt by hand. The concept of such hard work is beyond her yet its outcome, the quilt itself, she lusts for. Prov 23:21 KJV offers, "For the ... glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags." "(Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn't reach the quilts. They already belonged to her" (Walker 1164). Mama tells Dee the quilts are promised to Maggie, "for when she marries John Thomas" (Walker 1164). Dee announces, "...they're priceless!...she'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use" (Walker 1164). Everyday use. This is the name of Walker's story, come full circle to the division of perception between a person who uses a quilt to stay warm in a shanty in a pasture and a person who would take the quilt from their own mother to hang it on a wall because a human being had to work hard to make the quilt and that hard work has consumptive value beyond how warm the quilt might keep a person on a cold night. To hang the quilt is to steal the warmth, to leave the poor in the cold, without butter, and to feed upon their very necessities of life.

Mama, "I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero's hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap" (Walker 1165). And "Maggie smiled...a real smile, not scared" (Walker 1165). The mother, has identified the loss of her daughter Dee to the glutton Miss Wangero and made a choice, and chose Maggie who asks for nothing more than to have a mother, to feel the breezes in the dirt swept front yard and to be visible to the consumer trying to eat her.

Work Cited

The Seven Deadly Sins, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

The Seven Deadly Sins, http://www.velocity.net/~edju/1deadly.htm

Walker, Alice, Everyday Use, Literature For Composition, Essays, Fiction,  Poetry,and Drama, 7th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, William E. Cain. New York, Pearson/Longman, 2005. 1159-65

Alice Walker
1944-

I'm not Catholic. I do live in a country dominated by Christianity, its ideologies, dogma and rhetoric. To some extent, most Americans are Christianized whether they embrace the religion or not. I am so Christianized or exposed to the concepts of Christianity to be intimate or familiar with aspects of its ritual and dogma. I certainly grew up understanding or hearing about sin. I am less certain I understood how rational adults could believe a child had sinned purely by being born, that never quite seeded itself in my consciousness, but, sin, as an associate to crime or violations of rules I certainly understood because I was a child growing up in a world of pre-set rules.

However, although people around me and messages directed toward me talked about being 'in sin' the details of this violation were always held off to a somewhat vague position.

What was sinful appeared to vary from person to person, the time of day, the state of the weather, the needs of the sin in service to the person declaring the state violated. Not only that, sin appeared all encompassing or to fill up everything certain persons didn't personally agree with while other sin seemed to be possible from something like the 'accident' of birth. Sin was bundled into categories of big ones or little ones and if as a child I grew frustrated enough to ask specifically where the sin 'list' was so that I could get a grip on this sin thing, I was likely to experience a rise in irritation from the adult I was asking, followed up with some kind of dismissive punishment. They ran out of answers or seemed to me to get right to the edge of a confusion quite similar to my own.

None of this reassured me. Was sin a crime? Was sin a schoolroom rule to improve children's behavior in class? Why did it seem like everyone was always 'at sin' unless they were physically kneeling on the wood floor of some church and maybe even then?

As I grew up I grew more curious about this 'sin' that seemed to be in the business of punishment from on far. Then there came a day when I encountered the most curious thing. I read, in an obscure book, that there were 7 major sins and 7 cardinal virtues. I was truly shocked. There was a list and even more startling, that list was limited and had both good and bad pieces to it. In this book the sins and virtues were listed. Amazing.

I held this knowledge close in my mind, or thought I did until, a few days later when, in attempting to impose my newfound knowledge on my sister, I cockily attempted to list the list. To my startled shock, I was unable to do so. Now, at that point in my life my memory was darn good - I wasn't the kind of child to forget things, particularly things with as much 'coin' as the sins.

In my mind the list had grown slippery. It wasn't hard for me to relocate the list, which I did, and copy it to paper, which I did. All of this effort you might think would ensure my retention of the list. I certainly believed it would. But, that peculiar thing I was mentioning? Memory loss. The inability to retain the data.

I discovered that not only would the 'list' get slippery in my brain - when I tested the list out on other people they demonstrated an equally difficult ability to retain the list.

That was a cardinal moment in my life. What was going on here? What mechanism could operate in my and other people's brains to limit retention of specific data - particularly when that data was attributed to a level of significant cultural importance?

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