Alice Walker's Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self

Alice feels beautiful from a very young age.. She is full of herself and wants people to admire her. When she is eight, her life changes. One of her older brothers shoot her in the eye with his BB gun. This causes her go blind in her eye and causes the look of her eye to change. She no longer feels good about herself. She feels ugly and her ugly feelings causes her to fill with angry emotions.

In Alice Walker’s essay, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self, Walker recounts personal experiences to illustrate how she finally learned where true beauty comes from. By telling of actual events that took place in her life the essay becomes immensely more credible, and persuasive. Also, just in the fact that she is a woman that understands the struggle for beauty and acceptance that the majority of women and girls must go through, and the fact that she is willing to open up about it makes the readers of the essay want to associate with her on a deeper and more intimate level. This factor also makes her essay more understandable and relatable, making a greater impact on the reader’s life. The third aspect of this essay that makes Walker’s point so strong is how it addresses social issues as well. She not only points out how people put too much weight on the features of the face, but also on the color of one’s skin. These three factors, all working together create an essay which moves and inspires the reader to

Alice was a beautiful girl. An angel at school. She had curious large blue eyes that were lined with smile lines like the ancient roots of willow tree.behind elongated blonde eyelashes, like golden thread. Alice was a polite, clear, logical and payed attention at school. Bustling corridors, cluttered classrooms, noisy chatter, bright displays rushed around her as her friend left for home one by one at the ring of the school bell.

Growing up, I was always the chubbier kid in the class. I wasn’t skilled at sports like everyone else and was considered a “loser”. It was extremely hard listening to all the mean comments and my self of steam eventually died down. At times, I couldn’t get the courage to get out of bed in the morning because I knew it would just be another day of humiliation. Life is like a roller coaster, we have times that are low and times that are high. But we would never know the feeling of a good time unless we’ve gone through the bad times.

Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self, an essay written by Alice Walker, touches the famous concept of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The popular quote is altered multitudinous times throughout the chapters of Walker's life, capturing her most vulnerable and memorable moments. Although, Walker believed she stopped being beautiful at the moment the cataract occurred in her eye, by believing in her own beauty later on, she was able to lift her head and achieve what she thought was the impossible. In other words, Walker thought that she had negatively changed greatly due to her appearance, but whom ever she asked believed otherwise. Thus, beauty does not have a definition, but is based upon each person; everyone's vision of beauty is not necessarily physical. (Whenever Walker asked if she changed, the reply was always no; whereas Walker believes she did, physically.)

The essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” written by Alice Walker demonstrates the story of Alice accepting herself despite her flaws. As a child, Alice is a pretty, outgoing, and complex girl; but that all changes in a matter of seconds. Alice loses sight in one of her eyes, changing her perspective on life for a majority of her childhood/early adult years. She went from the outgoing girl whom everybody seems to love, to the girl that doesn’t look up anymore in fear people will see her grimy eye. Growing up in 1947 with her family, she is not a rich child, in fact, almost dirt poor, so her parents can’t afford a car to take her to the hospital, contributing to her losing sight in her eye. Although she tells her parents a

The essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dance Is the Self” written by Alice Walker touches upon the image of beauty and her personal struggle with the relationships that follow the simple word. As a young child Walker sees herself as a physically attractive adolescent girl, and in her mind this wins her the affection of her father and the individuals that surround her on a recurring basis. Walker then accounts the “accident” and it begins to change how she is perceived, or rather, how she perceives herself. Walker may write the word in quotations due to her disbelief that it was actually an accident. Maybe she believed that her brothers envied her for the way she was treated due to her beauty, therefore they decided to make her ugly. Within the

To begin, I believe the word beauty is an adjective to describe those who have a positive mind and who are hard workers. Those who believe they're not beautiful but their personality shows us that they are. Beautiful is something perfect and satisfying. And of course, everyone is beautiful in their own way. When the quote mentions,

Growing in a safe environment and thinking the world is under your control when you are young can make you confident and express yourself. This comfort zone is not forever, and when something that was not expected occurs, it brings the ideal world down and can change your daily life. Going from the happiest stage of life to a drastic and dramatic tragedy can change someone’s views about how confident he or she is. Not being able to accept how different you are now because something that changed in the outside can intimidate the talented, smart person on the inside. Realizing and analyzing other people’s imperfections makes you see how you are not the only one who has something that you do not want other people to see or criticize. Analyzing the story in “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” by Alice Walker, her character explores how the theme of the story develops from the beginning, middle, and the end of the story.

The essay “Beauty, When the Other Dance Is the Self” by Alice Walker has an interesting topic that talks about the experience she had about the meaning of being beautiful internally and physically. However, she didn't know what is actually the meaning of beauty on other people’s eye. Like the phrase “ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, her story is about how the author saw herself and how she thinks people see her before and after the accident, also, the effects of how the way of thinking changed her internally.

image of Alice as a child. Another theme in the novel is Identity. Alice is confused through the

Beauty can be viewed in a variety of ways for many different people. Society has made a huge impact on the way people view and think of one another. Since the media has created a specific definition of beauty, people begin to see others in a different light. Those who are considered the “other” are those who the society and media have not deemed beautiful. Alice Walker describes in “Beauty: When the Other Dance is the Self” how her experience with her eye being noticeably damaged had caused her to forget the value of her inner beauty. Similarly, Toni Morrison’s explains in “Strangers” that the media has highlighted the importance of physical appearance instead of a person’s character upon meeting them for the first time. The subject in Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman is not conventionally beautiful but Vermeer saw something valuable in the subject that caused him to take his time to paint her. The painting Study of a Young Woman by Johannes Vermeer, challenges the idea of beauty that society has placed on the world and portrays how every human being is beautiful despite those views; although the subject of the painting is “othered” because she is not conventionally beautiful Vermeer choose her because he saw something in her worth more than physical beauty.

The essay “Beauty of a dancer” by Alice Walker describes a powerful event that happens in her life when she was a chaild that changed her. She is young bright girl who is at the top of her class and is the little spark in her family. She is the beautiful girl and she knows it. One accident changes all that and the way she feels about herself for the majority of her life. Her brother owns a new toy Pellet gun rifle. As they were playing outside she was shot in her eye. The wound left her slightly blind and a noticeable scare on her eye. She no longer felt beautiful because of the scar and how people treated her after. It had a significant effect on her actions. Alice Walker does not see the pretty girl in the

The idea of beauty is often extremely subjective. What one person thinks is beautiful could be completely meaningless to another. A person can only ever see the beauty in something if they recognize it for what it truly is. With only a surface level comprehension it’s impossible to see the inner beauty that something might have. This idea is expounded on in “The Shining Houses” by Alice Munro, where beauty is presented as something that comes from meaning and not from outward impression. The protagonist, Mary finds a distinction between physical beauty and emotional beauty in her community. Mary and her neighbours have conflicting reactions to a house in the neighbourhood owned by a woman named Mrs Fullerton. The house has absolutely no surface level appeal but has a very rich emotional significance. Through these differing opinions Munro shows how having a deeper understanding will reveal an inner beauty. The people in the neighbourhood have a definition of beauty opposing Mary’s; they think that pretense and facade are of the utmost importance and because of that they are hostile towards things with no outward beauty. In the short story “The Shining Houses” Alice Munro defines beauty as something that comes from understanding and not from seeing. She shows this using Mary’s treatment of Mrs Fullerton, her neighbour’s treatment of Mrs Fullerton and the contrast between the shining houses and Mrs Fullerton's house.

It is also important to note that beauty would not make sense without subjective meaning. The mention of beauty depends on perceivers. People like what they see as in the case a beautiful woman. We often regard other people’s taste because they see what we also see. Although we may differ in political, moral, and ethical issues, what people perceive as beautiful has a profound response.