Necrophilia, phonies, and butter churns

I dedicate this blog entry to the Google tech support team. They answered my questions and basically rose my blog from a peculiar doom. That's why it's been oddly empty for the past while. This shan't happen again, or so say the Google people.



"A Rose for Emily" is the only literature I have come across that makes me pity a possible necrophiliac. I enjoyed the writing style of William Faulkner in this story, and now I'm excited to read The Sound and the Fury. Some sentences in "A Rose for Emily" really struck me as beautiful, almost poetic, such as, "She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen." (33) The reader pities her as they see the world around her evolve, and she stays the same. Emily never learns to really let go. Even though her father died, Emily could never shake off his strong influence on her. And, as the reader discovers at the end of the story, she never parts with Homer Barron. Her unwillingness to release drives her to madness, murder, and bizarre motives.

While many writers compose positive stories regarding social activists, Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" shows the dark side of heritage pride. Dee, who grew up ashamed of her family, returns to her home to treat it as a relic. She embraces a past she once tried to deny. However, though she is accepting her past as a reminder of her African heritage, she does not embrace the people of her past: Mama and Maggie. While Dee's attitude toward her past and family has changed, it has not necessarily changed for the better. Dee is an insecure person trying to prove her cultural authentic past. With Dee's advance college education, she sees herself as better than her family because she has more advanced academic knowledge. However, despite her higher education, she has not acquired the knowledge of manners and kindness known to Maggie and Mama.

What I found interesting is that Dee, or Wanegro, scorned her immediate roots, the ones she grew up with. But she embraces roots she is not very familiar with, a native African identity. Her family has been in America for many generations—even Mama is not familiar with anything from their native Africa except bits and pieces of the African culture still remaining. When she arrives at the house, she starts to snap photos of her house and her family, as if they are relics of a life she never knew, not the people and place she grew up with.

Also, when Dee asks to take the butter churn, Maggie is slightly distressed, but passively accepts this. Maggie loves the butter churn, and knows its history. This is almost ironic because Dee has been trying to find out her history beyond her generations in America, and Maggie is knowledgeable of the family's history many generations before her, as shown with the butter churn. Which history is more relevant to their present lives? In my opinion, Maggie's understanding of her past generations is not only more pertinent but also more authentic than Dee's attempt to seek her African identity.

It's really fascinating to see two siblings be completely opposite of each other. Growing up in a family of five kids, all of us different from each other, I can see how you can still grow up to be very different people even though you come from the same family or roots. However, with Dee and Maggie, they are beyond opposites. There is really nothing that remotely connects the two other than their shared genes. Dee wants material happiness, things she can flaunt in her house that will impress others. Maggie can't even understand material happiness. She has such a one-track mind, so different from her sister. She can appreciate the true meaning of her grandmother's possessions because she isn't really capable of knowing other possible meanings.

I was really turned off by Dee when she was patronizing her mother and sister one moment and bullying them the next. She claimed her family knew nothing of her heritage, which is silly, because it's their heritage too. If anything, Mama is more knowledgeable about their heritage simply because she's older. I found it interesting that Alice Walker, a social activist herself, wrote such a negative image of someone involved in the civil rights movement. However, I see know that she did so almost to warn readers about phonies who say they are deeply involved in new social movements but who really participate as ways to cover their insecurities and gain material success.

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