Analyzing Susan Farrell's "Fight vs. Flight" (Essay Sample)

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Critical Thinking

The chosen text for the essay is a peer-reviewed article by Susan Farrell titled Fight vs. Flight A Reevaluation of the Dee in Alice Walker’s “Everybody’s use”. According to Farrell’s work, Mother’s narrative provides a skewed and false portrayal of Dee’s character. She believes that Mother’s envy of Dee is to blame for her prejudice. While mother admires Dee’s bravery and self-assurance, she is quite content with Maggie’s meek and timid demeanor. As a result, mother paints Dee in a bad light, making her excellent traits appear manipulative and haughty. Similarly, Maggie’s attitude and love of her ancestry are praised by mother owing to her comfort with her. Farrell also breaks out the characters’ ties to their ancestors. She criticizes the fact that each character has a distinct perspective on their ancestors due to their own experiences. I chose the article since the author has an interesting critical analysis of the book Everybody’s Use by Alice Walker.

Criticism is the critical theory that Susan Farrell mainly relies on to review the book by Alice Walker. Her points offer a critic of the characterization and perception of the text. She asserts that one’s impression of Dee after reading the narrative is that she is shallow and materialistic. However, Mama’s perspective of the story as a whole is recounted through her eyes (Farrell 183). It is Mama’s account of what happened when her daughter came to see her. “Dee generates in Mama awe and dread more akin to a goddess’s arrival than the affection one might expect a mother to feel for a homecoming daughter” (Farrell 184). Mama may have an erroneous impression of her daughter’s ideals and motivations. Farrell feels that this is Walker’s way of demonstrating that change is not necessarily bad and that it can be accepted, despite Mama and Maggie’s dread of the unknown and things they do not comprehend throughout the narrative.