Looking at literary conflicts and characters, what connections can you make between "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker and "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid?

Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" and Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" make for an interesting pairing. We notice a few surface similarities right away: there's a conflict between the mother and daughter, with one character believing the other is utterly helpless and utterly wrong about how to approach life. Each of the mothers is struggling, perhaps unsuccessfully, to teach the daughter how to live correctly and how to skillfully adapt to everyday life and culture.

But there are some important differences between those conflicts. 

Notice how Mrs. Johnson from "Everyday Use" allows her daughter Dee to speak freely and to express herself. "You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It's really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you'd never know it," Dee says, as her mother is practically silent. But the daughter from "Girl" barely gets in a few words of protest in the endless stream of instructions from her mother. Mrs. Johnson just wants Dee to appreciate the value of quilts as a useful everyday object: "God knows I been saving 'em for long enough with nobody using 'em. I hope she will [put them to everyday use]!"

But the mother from "Girl" seems bent on forcing her daughter to follow every rule for effective cooking, cleaning, and proper social behavior: "this is how you set a table; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest," etc.

The chief worry of the mothers seems to be the kind of person that her daughter is turning out to be--but Mrs. Johnson worries that Dee doesn't appreciate where she came from, while the mother from "Girl" worries that her daughter will behave disgracefully ("try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming").

Ultimately, Mrs. Johnson succeeds perhaps too well in making Dee a strong girl who asserts herself in social situations, while the mother from "Girl" is still worried that she's raising the kind of daughter who can't even stand her ground with a baker so that she can squeeze the bread before purchasing it.