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Definition of Tone
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on. For instance... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical... read full definition
Tone
Explanation and Analysis:
The tone of “Everyday Use” is both loving and resentful. This is related to the fact that the story is told from the first-person perspective of Mama, an uneducated middle-aged Black woman in the American South, who is both excited for her adult daughter Dee’s visit home and also wary of it. She shares some backstory with the reader, helping them to understand that, while she has always loved her daughter, she has also felt consistently judged and belittled by her, given Dee’s disdain for her family’s poverty and desperation to leave home.
While Mama’s tone is primarily kind and understanding—when Dee arrives and makes all sorts of requests of her family, Mama does her best to respect them—there are moments when the tone becomes more overtly resentful. Take the following passage, for example, which comes as Mama recalls how Dee used to read to her and Maggie (Dee’s sister):
She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
Mama’s bitter and resentful tone here comes across in the specific language she chooses to use—Dee read to her family “without pity,” forcing them to “sit trapped and ignorant underneath her voice.” Mama describes how Dee “forc[ed]” “trapped,” “burned,” “pressed,” and “shove[d]” her and Maggie, and how Dee treated them “like dimwits.” Mama’s angry and bitter tone communicates that she is well aware of the harmful dynamic that can result when one person becomes more educated and privileged than another and uses that to belittle them. While Dee believes that she is the one with a better grasp of the world—because of her education and worldliness—passages like this indicate that it is actually Mama who can see the world—and Dee—more clearly.
Related Themes:
