Family Traditions 7 Cultural Legacies Essay

Family Traditions

The traditions of a family serve to help create the collective identity of that family. For some people, this is a benefit because it helps them find their own sense of morals and ethics and allows them to enter the larger world with some of the basic questions of life already answered. To some people however, the pressures of the familial culture can be an inhibitor of their individuality as their own inner sense of what is appropriate is counter to the rules put to them by their family's traditions. The influence that the family has on the individual seems to be up to the individual; they have the option of living up to the customs and traditions of their family or in rejecting those customs and accepting an identity altogether different. The two types of traditional influence can be seen in various short stories from American literature including Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," Margaret Walker's poem "Lineage," and Seamus Heaney's "Digging."

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," two sisters exhibit the difference between family tradition and the intrusion of other cultural influences into a family dynamic. The two sisters at the heart of the story are very different; one, Maggie, is a traditional girl who has stayed with her mother throughout her life and has only an ambition of marrying and beginning her own family. The other sister, Dee, is the complete opposite. Her world is much larger and so her personality is different. She has been influenced by an education and with the ideas of the new set of people, so much so that there is very little left of her that indicates her upbringing.Dee has never been comfortable with the values of her family members and has spent her life trying to divorce herself from their principles and live in a way that she believes to be better than her kin. When she arrives home, she and her male friend have both embraced an identity for themselves where they take on attributes of what they perceive is traditional Africanism. The conflict comes to a head when Dee attempts to take some quilts which have belonged in the family for generations. Dee sees them as artworks; as pieces to examine as further proof of her new identity but Maggie and her mother use the quilts for blankets. The girls' values are entirely different and it is evident from the text that mother and Dee will never be as close as mother and Maggie because their values are too different. When a person breaks away from the perspective of the family unit, it can be difficult to communicate functionally ever again. That does not say that Dee is right in breaking away but that her view of the world is simply different and that this is a consequence of separation from familial tradition. In Walker's story there is either accepting of family and all its positives and negatives, or a total breaking away from those values and a formulation of a unique identity that it not necessarily for the better. She does not seem to allow for a middle ground.

The narrator of….....