students may want to discuss the extent to which she is really angry with her father or
with someone else. Although Plath claimed that the poem was not her own story, she
wrote it on the day her divorce papers arrived. Could blaming her father actually be
her way of masochistically blaming herself for the difficulties of her marriage, of
remaining a victim who tortures herself with guilt? The poem’s assertion that “Every
woman adores a Fascist” recalls the I-must-have-asked-for-it thinking of abuse victims.
The childish language of the poem may trivialize it for some; it is interesting that
even the bits of German she chooses to interweave are one-syllable words a child
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES
LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN, From Plath’s Incarnations (p. 338)
STEVEN GOULD AXELROD, From Sylvia Plath: The Wound
and the Cure of Words (p. 340)
TIM KENDALL, From Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (p. 345)
Before reading the critical interpretations of Sylvia Plath’s poem, students may need to
brainstorm their own ways of seeing it as more than the autobiographical ranting of a
middle-class woman unable to come to terms with her neuroses. Because the father’s
body seems to lie across the American continent, is this young woman living in Eng-
land protesting that her home country is as fascist as the Third Reich? Does the final
scene of villagers dancing remind us of carnival with its implications of overturning
authority? What images and words are repeated, and what could this repetition sym-
of the poem’s last line leaves unanswered the question of whether she succeeds in
escaping through her self-therapy. An important factor in our interpretation of Plath’s
poem involves how closely Plath the victim and Plath the powerful, “aloof”
psychotherapist correspond to each other.
Readers will have different ideas about which critic best answers the poem’s
perplexing questions, though teachers steeped in literary theory may feel that Axelrod
opens up issues of feminism, patriarchy, and the literary canon that give the poem’s
angry tone a broader context. Axelrod’s movement beyond the specifics of the poet’s
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS: STORIES (p. 350)
TILLIE OLSEN
I Stand Here Ironing (p. 350)
Readers tend to have strong reactions to texts by Tillie Olsen. Many feel that she chal-
lenges class- and gender-based societal barriers, whereas others see her as simply mak-
ing excuses for failures to overcome them. In her nonfiction book Silences, published
in 1978, Olsen supports her assertion that both men and women of the working class
were long denied political, intellectual, and literary voices because of the realities of
labor and survival. Olsen was in fact instrumental in bringing texts written by women
back into print and into the literary canons of universities during the 1970s and be-
yond. “I Stand Here Ironing” blends fiction, dramatic monologue, and autobiography.
Many of the details of the story echo details of Olsen’s early life as a working mother
during the 1930s and 1940s.
Today’s college students, living with many of the benefits brought about by social
movements propelled by Olsen’s generation, sometimes have trouble understanding
The ambiguity of the ending’s optimism or pessimism suggests that the issues are
more complex than they appear on the surface. The narrator despairs at ever being
able to explain why her daughter needs help, but she holds out hope that the girl will
find her own way if she is empowered by self-knowledge. A critique of social
conditions is implicit in the text, while the narrator explicitly sorts out her failings as a
mother. She may be trying to forgive herself, and this issue—of where personal
responsibility ends and societal responsibility begins—may be the major theme of her
AMY TAN
Two Kinds (p. 356)
After Amy Tan discovered that her mother had been forced to leave three living
daughters in China, rather than the dead twins that play a climactic part in “Two
Kinds,” she had fears that her mother would drop her for the “good” China daughters.
These fears compounded the already difficult relationship that lends realism to the
stories of The Joy Luck Club, from which this story is taken. A trip to China with her
mother helped Tan place these fears into perspective, however, when she found that
her mother was just as critical of her half-sisters, dashing their dreams of the nurturing
mother they had fantasized about having. For Tan, writing her mother’s stories has
become both a way of finding her own voice as a writer and a way of coming to terms
with her painful resistance to the older woman’s controlling personality. Learning to
forgive herself for being the wrong kind of daughter, the disobedient kind, has been a
and other differences do not matter. Perhaps the little Chinese girl can be a prodigy,
but she cannot be Shirley Temple. The argument does not settle the matter for either
character. The mother is wounded deeply but still cannot accept her daughter as she
is; the narrator becomes the wrong kind of daughter but discovers the power of her
own will. We know less about the mother’s feelings because we see and hear her
through the eyes of the daughter, whose thoughts we are allowed to share. Dialogue
and descriptions of body language bring the mother to life, as do anecdotes of her
failed attempts to make a “prodigy” of her daughter. The characters are dynamic but
ALICE WALKER
Everyday Use (p. 365)
One of the major themes of Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” is the indetermi-
nacy of history and identity, especially for African Americans. Walker’s characters raise
issues about what constitutes a family’s heritage. As autobiographers must, we all identi-
fy the major events in our lives and the characters representing our ancestry by choos-
ing those that fit into the narrative line we have chosen for our story. We look back at
the poem we wrote in third grade and interpret this as a signpost along the road to the
career in English studies, foreshadowing the budding literary giant we hope to become.
Because we didn’t become Michael Jordan, we omit the hours perfecting the free
Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker’s generation—and earlier generations—who paved the
way for the independent African American woman who strides through today’s world.
These are the women who worked in the homes and took care of the children of white
families or labored on farms to battle for the education and equality—and survival—of
their own children. Most of the students coming into our college classrooms today
know these women, if they see them at all, as elderly neighbors and grandmothers,
Another life With gentlefolk
Far less trusting
And moved and moved and changed
Her name
And sounded precise
When she spoke And frowned away
Our sloppishness (18)
African American students born in the 1980s feel far removed from the afros, the
dashikis, and the earnest quest for black pride of their parents’ 1960s and 1970s youth
and glimpse images from the period perhaps in the stereotypes of television reruns.
Ironically, although “Everyday Use” could be taught until recently as a contemporary
view of conflicting values about history, today’s students need a historical context to
understand the characters in Walker’s story and the issues of concern to them,
including the trendy Dee/Wangero, who now seems dated to many readers.
Although we are meant to see Dee and her male companion as pretentious and
ironically humorous, Alice Walker’s treatment of them in 1973 was not applauded
by all African Americans. She was questioning blind political correctness before the
Most readers will agree that Walker visualizes an audience that needs to be
reminded that family and community values are not to be discarded simply because
one acquires an education. There is history that we read in books, and this is good. As
a writer and speaker, Walker has shown that she knows this sort of history. She has
lived in Africa, and the topics of her writing are international. In her imaginative
fiction, she has traveled as far back in African history as one can go, which means she
While a valid argument could thus be made that Dee, in her newly awakened
consciousness about African American history, has more in common with the writer
Alice Walker than the stay-at-home Maggie ever could have, Walker makes Maggie
the more sympathetic character. Walker calls on us to feel compassion for Maggie
from the second paragraph, in which Mama, the narrator, indicates than Maggie has
been burned and that she is in humble awe of her sister. Because the narrator clearly
has more tender feelings for the damaged sister, we more readily accept her “everyday
use” of items of material culture over the museum curator’s impulse that would take
them out of context. Maggie is a part of folk culture while Dee is a romantic—
disconnected—collector. Mama is hostile to Dee because she recognizes the rejection
and coldness behind Dee’s motives.
Dee seeks her roots because this activity is in style, and she is concerned more
with style than with substance. She thus misses her chance to see the more immediate
history that her mother could pass on to her because hypocrisy and arrogance blind
her to its value. Most college readers can understand Dee and would probably feel
more comfortable having coffee with her than with the formidable narrator and her
pathetic daughter Maggie. We’d be more likely to hang the quilt on the wall than to
to educate the people around her as an adolescent. Mama puts a negative connotation
on these actions, but they could be interpreted as love and concern. She might have
portrayed Dee as an insecure person searching for her identity, and Mama might have
found a way to force Dee to listen to the oral history that gives the objects meaning
beyond their value as folk art. A less positive view of Dee might have painted her
actions as even more deliberate than they seem in the narrative as it now stands. Dee
seems uncomprehending rather than deliberately evil. Like white liberals who exhibit
unconscious prejudice while thinking they are free from any taint of racism, Dee
shows by her attitude toward her mother and sister that she does not truly value her
African American culture.
decision for some people.
For Dee, the impulse differs on the surface from slavish assimilation into white
society, but underneath lie a similar falseness and fear. Dee and her friend pass for
political thinkers who celebrate their African roots, but they bypass the living family
heritage. Walker has the narrator remind us how much is owed to the hardworking
people who lived and created in between the romanticized African ancestor and the
beautiful, educated woman of the late twentieth century. Their names deserve to be
continued and put to everyday use. But the newly christened Wangero denies this
honor to the Dees in her ancestry. Students interested in exploring the social and
historical issues raised by the discussion of Alice Walker’s texts might turn to other
texts in our anthology that deal with similar issues. They might compare generational
conflicts in texts by Nikki Giovanni (p. 316) and other writers in this chapter. We can
have them research contemporary African American and Caribbean writers to
determine how many chose new names and what reasons they give for the change.
The narrator does not share the story of the blue piece of cloth from the Civil War
uniform or the knowledge that Dee’s name goes “back through the branches” much
farther than the younger woman realizes. Dee has cut herself off from the family tree
and chosen other ancestors. She devalues Maggie’s keen memory, saying that her
“brain is like an elephant’s.” Their difference highlights the difference between
recorded history (fixed in writing or displayed on museum walls) and oral history and
folklore (worn and constantly changing with everyday use). It is easy at this point to see
these views of history as being in conflict, and the narrator must choose between their
The symbolism of the quilt now seems important to Dee, standing (as in “In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”) for the art of working women. The irony, of course,
lies in our recognition that Dee values the working people who created the artifacts
but not the working women in front of her face. The symbolism of the quilt could be
expanded to stand for America itself. The cliché of the melting pot does not capture
the reality of an American culture that is not homogeneous but rather is made up of
separate subcultures that retain their identities. Like a quilt, the colorful scraps are
sewn together but form one functional whole. This image of diversity is striking;
however, we should recall that it comes close to Booker T. Washington’s metaphor in
his Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895 (p. 1226). Washington argued that blacks and
whites should remain separate but equal, like the fingers on a hand, one in social
responsibility but segregated in all other ways. W. E. B. Du Bois strongly disagreed
with Washington, arguing for full integration and equality of opportunity (p. 1229).
Students may think of metaphors that more closely capture the fluidity and
overlapping of subcultures within American society, perhaps coming up with organic
At one point in the story, the educated daughter proclaims of her former identity
as Dee, “She is dead.” For her, culture and family history are reduced to lifeless
commodities, things that can belong to her but are no longer filled with the memory
of life that gives them value to Maggie and the narrator. Dee has been influenced by
her education and by the political movements of the time, as represented by the
farming collective that operates in the neighborhood, one of many efforts to organize
people and to better economic conditions in the South. Dee’s friend makes it clear
that he is not involved in this sort of active labor. The implication is that he wears the
trappings of black pride but doesn’t allow the philosophy to sink in to the extent of
helping others or breaking a sweat. Dee seems to be influenced by him. But she has
always been concerned with whether or not something was in style, and even refused
the quilts as “old-fashioned” when she left for college.
Few readers would suggest that Dee should be like her mother and sister; what
she needs most is to learn to respect them and to find out who they are and what they
know and value. This is not easy. Walker has given them qualities that have figured in
racist stereotypes and have been used in some African American groups to sort by
social class. The narrator and Maggie are dark-skinned. Numerous people of color
have spoken of the “paper bag rule” or the “blue vein society” that kept African
American women out of debutante balls and social clubs if their skin was a shade
darker than a paper bag or too dark to see the vein on the inside of the wrist. The
Mothers often side with daughters with whom they are more politically or
culturally sympathetic, but the reverse sometimes happens, as well. Working-class
mothers are often less forceful than Mama of this story and would not have been able
to stand up to a daughter like Dee. If Dee’s mother had internalized the values of the
dominant culture (as Dee herself may have internalized them before encountering
people proud of their African heritage), Mama may have despised herself and her
daughter Maggie. Elements of this attitude are apparent in the early scenes of Walker’s
narrative in which Mama imagines herself to be lighter-skinned, less heavy, and quick
with the repartee of television talk shows. The narrator of the story would be
intellectually capable of identifying with Dee, but she chooses the traditional values of
her family, one of which seems to be compassion for the underdog. Basic human
kindness seems to be lacking in Dee, and this shortcoming is what finally causes
Mama to side with Maggie, the daughter who needs her. Although most mothers try to
be equally supportive of each of their children, children seldom see it this way. Some
parents favor the successful child, but others spend an inordinate amount of time with
the child whose needs seem most compelling, often to the detriment of seemingly
more independent children in the family.
We feel compassion for Maggie. She may remind readers of Celie in Walker’s
novel The Color Purple in her shyness and the extent of her pain. Her life is limited
not only by her burns but also by her future with the husband with “mossy teeth in an
earnest face.” Students sometimes ask if Dee set the fire that burned down the hated
Most readers will take the story seriously, though they recognize the humor and
irony. Certainly there is nothing funny about the image of Maggie’s arms sticking to
her mother or about the rejection the other women feel from Dee. But we laugh
when the narrator humorously refuses to understand the name of the man who
comes with Dee. She first pretends that she confuses his name with the greeting—
meaning Peace be with you—that she has heard used by people at the collective
farm; then she mispronounces his Muslim name so that it sounds as though he’s a
barber. This makes him look ridiculous, as does Dee’s African greeting, which we
know she uses simply to show off. The characters are exaggerated, and the hyperbole
makes us smile. By contrast, hints of a real political situation are understated. The
narrator has gone out of her way to see the farmers guarding the collective with rifles
after whites poison their cattle. This contrasts with Dee and her companion, who
playact at fighting oppression while others do the work. The narrator seems justified
in her evaluation of Dee’s world as characterized by lies and make-believe. She
speaks of Dee’s reading to everyone as if it were a punishment. It is as if she reads at
them rather than to them, using reading as a weapon. But don’t we value reading
and make-believe? Do we agree with the definition of fiction as lies? We may be left
It is always difficult to predict how a child will respond to different styles of
parenting. The mother in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” blames her poverty as a
single mother for the emotional neglect of her child, but the mother in Alice Walker’s
“Everyday Use” is also poor and seems to be on her own as a parent. Both mothers lack a
Despite these differences, both are outsiders. Had Dee been brought up by
unloving surrogates rather than by her mother and had her teachers failed to
recognize her abilities, she may have become more bitter and vindictive, but she may
have been less self-absorbed and demanding. Olsen’s narrator ends by blaming society,
saying that Emily has been “a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.” Dee,
growing up a generation later, benefits from her own turbulent age and is shaped by
the civil rights movement and the subsequent black power and black arts movements.
As a gifted African American woman, Dee would have found few avenues for her
talents in the early twentieth century and would have found herself frustrated and
angry, trapped in a society that offered little help for people of color or of the working
class. Ironically, it is her success that separates Dee from her mother, while Emily’s
life has been characterized by failure.
Taken together, the three narratives of this cluster demonstrate three different
responses to a generational conflict in values. Emily seems to have bad luck, suffering
illness that only complicates the division between mother and daughter. After a
lifetime of unintentional rejection, she seems to be coming into her own, choosing
the life that suits her, rejecting the academic world that tries to supply pat answers to
complex issues. Emily, like Dee, could come to reject her mother’s values, but the
story’s ending indicates that perhaps she will not, that her mother approves of Emily’s
independent action and does not want a passive daughter. And Emily’s wry comment
about her mother’s constant ironing hints at an understanding of the reasons her
mother has neglected her and an acceptance that this is just the way her mother is, a
woman constantly working. One could see her comedy, however, as a way of turning
pain into art. Although Dee could be seen as doing something similar by hanging
quilts on the wall, she fails to recognize the pain of her sister. Emily’s motives seem
to run deeper. The daughter in Amy Tan’s story seems closer to Dee, and perhaps the
major difference in our evaluations of the two exists in the point of view of the stories.
Because we hear Tan’s story from the daughter’s perspective, readers may have more
empathy for the daughter than we do for Dee. Looking from the outside, we might
see the pleasure of the daughter in Tan’s story when her mother gives her the piano
Of the daughters in the stories, readers will find Dee the least kind. The daughters
in the stories by Tan and Olsen seem less cruel. Most readers will find Tan’s narrator
the kindest in the end because we know her thoughts and see that in the long run she
cares about her mother while insisting on her own autonomy. Dee’s sister Maggie
seems perhaps to be the kindest character in the stories, but her willingness to
completely efface herself and her needs in favor of her sister stems from an attitude of
worthlessness, and it could be argued that one must have a certain amount of power
for kindness to be meaningful.
Dee may be the smartest daughter if we use academic ability as a measuring rod,
but she is blind to the deeper significance of the objects she seeks to collect and to the
value of the people of her childhood. She may not be as smart as she thinks she is.
The daughters of the other stories, by contrast, may be smarter than they think. The
narrator of Amy Tan’s story reveals depth and critical thinking that supersede the
trendy knowledge that Dee demonstrates. Emily, too, may reveal self-knowledge by
choosing acting over academics. She may be brilliant, but school has hampered rather
than enhanced her potential. Dee is arguably the most ambitious of the daughters in