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Loyalty In The Story Of An Hour, Everyday Use, By Alice Walker

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Just one person cannot determine the concept of loyalty. Loyalty has many different aspects to different people in different settings. Some people choose loyalty over everything in difficult situations. Depending on the relationship to the person, loyalty could be more important than anything else. Through three different pieces of literature: “The Story of an Hour”, “Everyday Use”, and the play “Tiffles” the reader is able to examine how actions, time, and understanding all make for different acts of loyalty. While reading “Everyday Use”, Walker mentions Mama dreaming of Dee thanking her. It would be easy to assume Mama favored Dee in the first few paragraphs. Dee speaks of things she would like to have or inherit. She asks Mama for some quilts that Mama and Big Dee had handmade. According to Sam Whitsitt, “The quilt is a trope whose analogue provides the stitch that untropes the trope” (445). Mama remembers offering them to Dee years ago, but Dee refused to take them. “Then she told me …show more content…

“Trifles” is a play where a woman is suspect to her husband’s murder. During the play, two detectives and their wives visit John Wright’s home. The two wives “pick up on the circumstantial and physical ‘trifles’ – a stray stitch, a burst jar – that their clueless and indifferent husbands overlook entirely (Hilton 148). The wives put together what really happened. One of the wives, Mrs. Hale says, “Here, this is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing!” (Glaspell 1611). The wives figured it out and even felt sorry for Mrs. Wright. When their husbands asked if they had found anything both wives denied what they knew. The women’s pity for Mrs. Wright kept them loyal to her. This concept of loyalty comes from understanding someone’s situation. The women felt bad for Mrs. Wright and what she had been through. They decided that what she had done was fair. The wives then decided to be loyal to Mrs. Wright and not testify against

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