In critical readings the largest trend around the story has been to criticize Dee and the way she goes about reasserting her personal culture. Matthew Mullins argues in his essay, "Antagonized by the Text, Or, It Takes Two to Read Alice Walker’s 'Everyday Use' however, that this perspective isn’t necessarily fair. In reading and teaching the text, he found the character Dee was universally a disliked character, saying that in an epiphany he found in his defense of Dee rather a pitying attitude and concluding that "it was impossible to see how anyone could truly 'like' Dee". This, however, he goes on to point out as not being a direct result of Dee’s actions alone, but rather the framing of her actions in the story. He argues that the text itself is what antagonizes the reader to grow this dislike of Dee: "The first-person narrative voice, the fact that Mrs. Johnson [Mama] is both narrator and character, has an immediate and forceful effect upon our perception of Dee." Mullins backs this up by quoting another scholar, Wayne Booth, who said in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction, "No narrator ... is simply convincing: he is convincingly decent or mean, brilliant or stupid, informed, intelligent, or muddled. ... we usually find our emotional and intellectual reactions to him as a character affects our reactions to the events he relates." Mullins points out that if Dee herself, or even Maggie, were the narrators of the story, we would come away with a completely different perspective on probably all of the characters. "The text actively prevents us from identifying with Dee," and this perspective has shaped the scholarly resources on this text since it came out.[19]
Joe Sarnowski, in his article "Destroying to Save: Idealism and Pragmatism in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'", also points out this discrepancy but taking it one step further, arguing that even though it would be naïve to claim Dee does not have faults, she, "more than any other character in the story, identifies and pursues corrective measures against the oppression of African-American society and culture." Her fault, Sarnowski says, is in not realizing how idealism and pragmatism are "intertwined" and how "privileging one undermines both".[20]
In "Quilt as a Metaphor in 'Everyday Use'" by Elaine Showalter, Mama explains that because Maggie can recreate the quilts made by her mother and grandmother, that she is the one that understands the culture and will keep it alive.
