Term paper on Analysis of "Everyday Use"

The Story "Everyday Use" is narrated by a woman who describes herself as "a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands." She has enjoyed a rugged farming life in the country and now lives in a small, tin-roofed house surrounded by a clay yard in the middle of a cow pasture. She anticipates that soon her daughter Maggie will be married and she will be living peacefully alone. The story opens as the two women …

…the answer is yes. Not only will she use the quilts, but also she will go on making more--she has learned the skill from Grandma Dee. For Dee, at least for the present, the answer is no. She would frame the quilts and hang them on the wall, distancing them from her present life and aspirations; to put them to everyday use would be to admit her status as a member of her old-fashioned family.