[Piedmont-Marton is a professor of English and the coordinator of the writing center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she discusses the quilting metaphor in “Everyday Use.”]
Alice Walker's early story “Everyday Use” is clustered around a central image: quilting and quilts. Her use of this metaphor is important to critics because she went on to develop the theme more fully in her later work, especially the novel The Color Purple. Simply put, the quilt is a metaphor for the ways in which discarded scraps and fragments made be made into unified, even beautiful, whole. Quilting symbolizes the process out of which the unimportant and meaningless may be transformed into the valued and useful. Walker finds this metaphor especially useful for describing African-American women's lives, which traditional history and literature have often ignored and misrepresented.
Alice Walker is not the first to turn her attention to the importance of cloth making in women's culture. Women have been associated with textiles since the days of recorded history. Although weaving and sewing has often been mandatory labor, women have historically endowed their work with special meanings and significance. In classical mythology the fates were portrayed as women, but nearly all mythologies bear traces of the Triple Goddess as the three fates, rulers of past, present, and future. One type of goddesses spin time, another group measure it and weave events together, and yet another group cut off lengths of cloth. In Homer's Odyssey, for example, Odysseus's wife Penelope uses her skill at the loom to keep suitors at bay until her husband returns.
Walker herself explained the significance of quilting (and gardening) to the collective lives of women, especially those of African-American women, in an essay written the year after “Everyday Use” was first published. In the essay titled “In Search of Our Mother's Gardens,” Walker asks us to consider what would have become of black women artists who lived in slavery and oppression. Would they have been “driven to a numb and bleeding...