A Lesson About Family: Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

A Lesson About Family

Many sociologists define the term values as cultural types of standards by which people measure goodness and beauty. These values also serve as broad guidelines for social living and human interaction. For the most part, values are different for different cultures. However, there are many universal traits that cultures share. For example, most world cultures have some form of music. They have services for marriage and services for death. These examples mainly help to define a culture, however, the values that are placed on them tend to be fairly common. In today's world, family values are values that seem to be losing importance among people.

Unfortunately, many people today can only trace their families back two or three generations. In 1973, Alice Walker wrote a short story about a mother and her two daughters that lived in a time when family members could trace their genealogy back one hundred or two hundred years.

English: Alice Walker, Miami Book Fair Internation...

Dee Alone

Dee

"Everyday Use" is a story about family values and the conflict that can occur when those values are compromised. Upon reading Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use", the reader should leave with new perspectives about the importance of understanding one's heritage, about the significance of a humble beginning in life, and about the importance of being happy and content with who one is and what one has.

The importance of family heritage is something that many people have forgotten in today's world. For example, asking some people what the names are of their past relatives, is like asking them how many stars are there in the sky. They just do not know the answer. It seems as though the people of this generation have not been taught how important it is to be proud of the traditions of...