Symbol
One symbol found in this short story is the quilt (Whitsitt). The quilt itself is a very meaningful item in the sense that it has history on it; it includes clothes that Dee's great grandma used to wear and pieces of uniforms that Dee's great grandpa wore during the Civil War (Walker 856). However, it also symbolizes value in Negro-American experience (Whitsitt). Because Walker includes the fact of the Civil War gives a sense of history to the African American history. The quilt additionally adds to the idea of creative activities women came up with to pass down history from generation to generation.
Read more about this topic: Everyday Use
Famous quotes containing the word symbol:
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Whether he admits it or not, a man has been brought up to look at money as a sign of his virility, a symbol of his power, a bigger phallic symbol than a Porsche.”
—Victoria Billings (b. 1945)