Postcolonial and Psychoanalytic Literary Perspectives
Postcolonial Analysis of Everyday Use
A postcolonial reading of Everyday Use reveals a story shaped by cultural hierarchy, identity negotiation, and the tension between reclaiming heritage and reproducing domination. Although the story is not set in a literal colony, postcolonial theory applies because it studies how histories of racial oppression, cultural displacement, and identity reconstruction continue to affect marginalized groups. Walker’s story dramatizes how postcolonial subjects navigate cultural loss, hybrid identities, and the pressure to define themselves after generational domination.
Othering and Cultural Authority
The clearest postcolonial dynamic is Othering, a concept from literary theory. Dee treats her own family as exotic subjects, photographing Mama and Maggie as if documenting a foreign culture. Her claim—“You don’t understand your heritage”—positions herself as a cultural authority and casts her family as “primitive.” This mirrors Edward Said’s idea that dominant groups construct the “Other” to define themselves as modern or enlightened. Dee sees herself as accessing a more “authentic” African identity, but in doing so, she reproduces the same distancing gaze that once stereotyped Black rural life.
Cultural Hegemony and Neo-Colonial Ideology
The story also critiques cultural hegemony. Dee’s education and the cultural movements that shape her worldview act like ideological state apparatuses, teaching her that “real” heritage is aesthetic and performative. Her rejection of her birth name—“the name of the oppressors”—shows a desire to escape imposed identity, yet she adopts an externally constructed African culture filtered through Western discourse. In this way, she participates in neo-colonial ideology, exchanging one imposed identity for another produced by institutions rooted in colonial history.
Hybridity and the Symbolism of the Quilts
Hybridity, another key concept, appears in the contrast between everyday heritage (Mama and Maggie) and symbolic heritage (Dee). Dee’s bright dress, African jewelry, and new name represent a hybrid identity formed by Black nationalism, Western education, and consumer culture. Maggie’s identity—shaped by domestic tradition, memory, and trauma—reflects a different hybrid formed through generational survival. Neither sister can access a “pure” African past, confirming the theoretical reminder that pre-colonial identity can no longer be recovered untouched.
The quilts serve as the story’s strongest postcolonial symbol. Made from “scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn” and pieces of “Grandpa Ezra’s” uniforms, they embody cultural mixing, survival, and creativity born from fragments. For Mama and Maggie, they are a living archive of endurance. For Dee, they are artifacts of an “authentic” culture she wants to reclaim. But postcolonial theory shows why this is flawed: the desire to recover a pure heritage is an illusion. The quilts reveal that culture emerges from remnants shaped by oppression, not from an unbroken past.
The Resolution and Individual Subjectivities
The resolution challenges colonial-style authority. When Mama takes the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, she rejects the cultural superiority Dee assumes. Power returns to those whose identities grow from lived experience rather than ideological performance. This matches Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial shift from institutional narratives to “individual subjectivities.” Maggie’s quiet ability to quilt, remember, and live heritage represents the survival of a culture colonialism tried to erase.
Thus, Everyday Use becomes a postcolonial narrative about identity, resistance, and cultural memory. It shows that postcolonial subjects struggle not only against external domination but also against internalized ideologies that reshape identity long after formal oppression ends. The story reveals that while the past cannot be recovered whole, new identities can be created through survival, creativity, and lived experience.
Psychoanalytic Analysis of Second Best
A psychoanalytic reading of Second Best sees Frances’s behavior as shaped by unconscious fears, emotional wounds, and repressed desires. Psychoanalytic theory explains that characters often act from “hidden desires, fears, and memories” and that trauma appears indirectly through symbols and repeated images. Frances’s quiet distress, her sensitivity to nature, and her conflicting emotions reveal unresolved psychological conflict beneath the story’s romantic surface.
Repression and Emotional Trauma
Frances’s emotional life is marked by repression, a major Freudian defense mechanism. She denies her pain over Jimmy’s engagement—“I should think I’m not, seeing that he’s engaged”—but her “thin brown hand plucked nervously” at her dress. Repression does not erase feelings; it forces them into gestures and slips. Her body expresses the heartbreak and abandonment she refuses to admit.
The story also shows signs of trauma, defined in literary theory as a “deep emotional wound” that returns through intrusive feelings or symbolic images. Frances feels that “something had died in her,” and beauty appears “trifling,” showing emotional numbness similar to dissociation. Her psyche withdraws from feeling to avoid pain.
The Mole as a Symbol of the Unconscious
The mole symbolizes Frances’s unconscious fears—especially helplessness and exposure. It moves “flat, and dark as a shadow,” with “frantic rowing” hands, embodying the blind, frightened part of her psyche. Frances cries out in “fear and pity,” revealing unconscious identification: the mole represents her wounded emotional self after losing Jimmy. Psychoanalytic theory holds that symbols often express “repressed fears or conflicts,” and the mole mirrors threats she cannot verbalize.
Anne’s killing of the mole triggers a shock that works like intrusive memory. When it becomes “a little bag, inert and black,” Frances reacts with horror, as if a symbolic part of her has been harmed. The scene functions as a psychological rupture that overwhelms her fragile defenses, leading to further numbness.
Displacement and the Repetition of Trauma
Frances’s acceptance of Tom shows displacement—redirecting emotional energy from one object to another. Unable to have Jimmy, she shifts her longing to Tom: “If she could not have the best—Jimmy… she would have the second best, Tom.” This is emotional substitution, used to manage loss.
But her feelings toward Tom are full of contradiction, reflecting conflict between the id, ego, and superego. Her id seeks comfort, her superego judges her for settling, and her ego negotiates between them. This clash appears in the ending: she answers Tom “in a dead voice” yet feels “a little thrill of pleasure.” Such opposing reactions reveal unconscious desires and guilt interacting beneath awareness.
The second mole’s death symbolizes Frances reenacting her trauma. By killing the mole herself, she repeats the earlier scene—consistent with Freud’s idea that trauma leads to repetition as the psyche tries to regain control. Her “dead voice” shows that the act deepens her repression rather than healing it. Accepting Tom becomes another form of burying her true desires.
Through its symbols, gestures, ruptures, and contradictions, Second Best becomes a psychological portrait of a young woman coping with heartbreak through repression, displacement, and the repetition of trauma. The story illustrates the psychoanalytic claim that behavior and meaning emerge from conflicts the characters barely understand.