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Research Paper - Heritage in Everyday Use

The Polaroid camera becomes another tool to distance Dee from actually connecting and being present in her family and their lifestyle. Dee will undoubtedly display pictures of the house, yard, and her mother, but not have any meaningful relationship with them. .
             In contrast with the natural and simplistic yard and home, Dee's loud dress symbolizes another way that she is disconnected from her true roots. While Mama and Maggie live quietly, Dee wears "a dress so loud it hurts [her mother's] eyes" (Walker 561). Dee is trying so hard to be a deep rooted black woman, however she misses the point that her extremely cultured home bears no resemblance to herself. Critics Houston A. Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker describe Dee as a "bursting esprit into the calm pasture that contains the Johnson's tin-roofed, three-room, windowless shack and grazing cows" (416). Dee's artificial passion to express her heritage is apparent to her mother immediately as Dee wears the trendy African style. Mama describes her daughter's appearance: .
             There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings, too, gold hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. (Walker 561).
             Critic David Cowart focuses on the image Walker is expressing in this elaborate description of Dee. Cowart feels that Dee "styles and dresses herself according to the dictates of a faddish Africanism and thereby demonstrates a cultural Catch-22: an American who attempts to become an African succeeds only in becoming a phony" (172). Critic Barbara Christian agrees and points out that there is "nothing more precious than being characteristically and spontaneously [yourself]" (1). Dee is desperately trying to wear an identity that is so far removed from her past that she almost overcompensates with obnoxiously aggressive clothing, which does nothing but call attention to her insecurity for who she really is.


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