"Rules of the Game" and "Everyday Use": Literary Analysis and Comparison

Conflict has always been a literary tool and is sometimes used to address the writer’s thematic concerns. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan, conflicts between mother and daughter are used to address the characters’ cultural identities and how they are affected by other cultures. The mothers are the pivotal characters that give the stories direction. For both “Rules of the Game” and “Everyday Use” we will make literary analysis of stories in this essay, to devle into mothers' represebtation of their historical culture, as well as engage in conflict with their daughter’s over their rebellion against their cultural upbringing, and ultimately stand up for their lifestyles to the discontent of their daughters.

'Rules of the Game' and 'Everyday Use': Literary Analysis of Stories

The mothers and daughters in “Everyday Use” and “Rules of the Game” view their cultures differently, with the mothers sticking to their historical cultural customs and beliefs. Amy Tan writes, “’Bite back your tongue’,' scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that sold bags of salted plums. At home, she said, ‘Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind-poom!-North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.’” Her daughter felt that her teachings were to help her children rise above their circumstances. Her mother goes on to say something truly alarming in the story that speaks of her feelings toward American culture and its limited acceptance of other cultures: “’This American rules,’ she concluded at last. ‘Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, too bad, go back.’” Alice Walker writes about the physical things that the mother in her stories hold onto like, “we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t effort to buy chairs” and “you didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs had sunk into the wood.” To her, these belongings were the history of the people that had touched their lives and using them connected her to that history. History provided the platform of beliefs and values for the mothers in the two stories to raise their children upon.

As adolescents go out into the world, they tend to test their boundaries, which is what happened in “Everyday Use” and “Rules of the Game.” In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker writes a story about a daughter who believes she has engulfed herself in historical culture, but she is very disrespectful to her mother who actually experienced the history that her daughter is basing her beliefs upon. An example would be her daughter’s abandonment of her birth name in belief that it was a slave name, but her mother gave it to her because it was her sister’s name, and her grandmother’s before that. The mother in Amy Tan’s story makes many concessions to make practicing chess easy on her daughter, whom she only expects one thing from, “there was only one duty I couldn’t avoid. I had to accompany my mother on Saturday market days when I had no tournament to play. My mother would proudly walk with me, visiting many shops, buying very little. 'This my daughter Wave-ly Jong,' she said to whoever looked her way.” Her mother was proud of her daughter and Waverly feels that her mother is using her to show off instead. Neither of these situations sit well with the mothers.

Finally, the conflicts in the two stories come to a climax when the mothers stand up for their historical culture, leaving their daughters upset. Waverly runs away from her mother until she is too tired to keep running. When she goes home she finds the door locked and her mother says, 'We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us.' Her mother feels slighted by Waverly’s embarrassment of her expression of pride, so she returns the display by making it clear to her family that she expects the same treatment be extended in return. Waverly admits her defeat in the imagination of chess pieces playing a game. “Her black men advanced across the plane, slowly marching to each successive level as a single unit. My white pieces screamed as they scurried and fell off the board one by one.” The climax of Alice Walker’s story is slightly more emotional. Mother and daughter engage in an argument about why Dee wants the quilts and how she feels about her mother and sister using them until her mother snatches them out of her hand and gives them to her daughter, Maggie, whom she feels actually appreciates their historical value and the love and work that went into making them. As she storms off, Dee tells her mother that she just doesn’t understand, to which her mother replies, “’What don't I understand?’ I wanted to know.” She does not allow her daughter to make her feel bad about the way she lives; instead she enjoys it with the daughter that appreciates it.

Conclusion

As we can see in this literary analysis essay, while 'Everyday Use' and “Rules of the Game” are very different in content, they each use the mothers to guide the story through its dramatic structure. The mothers exhibit their historical culture, engage in conflict with their daughters over differences in cultural beliefs, but they teach about standing up for your beliefs and values, even when it means upsetting their daughters. This is an important characteristic to have when one is secure in their identity.