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Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

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Submitted By ndeshayj
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Nikki Jones
Professor French
Engl. 1301
April 3, 2013
Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

One's perception of themselves is usually influenced by their own experiences. In Alice Walker essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer self" she describes herself over coming and gaining acceptance of herself exactly the way she is. She narrates in remembrance of the event that forever changed her and perception of beauty. Walker uses superlatives, Metaphors, and tense throughout her writing to deliver her ever-changing outlook toward her own beauty. Walker describes the accident that happens to her as a child to show that one’s mindset can be altered through an intense experience and how her attitude completely transforms from a arrogant child into a newly reincarnated woman who now sees a new kind of beauty from within herself. She uses different points of her life to develop this very idea in separate comprehensible stages.

She brings the scene to life when she tells us how she manipulates her daddy into taking her to the county fair by swirling around, with her hands on her hips, in her pretty dress and biscuit polished patent leather shoes and says '“I’m the prettiest!”' As she parades around using her cuteness for her father's approval. Her attitude is further encouraged by the people of her church. She was always used to hearing “'Oh, isn’t she the cutest thing!' This makes us believe that she is satisfied with her looks and shows us that she is confident with the outer beauty in herself. Then Walker outlook suddenly change. We feel the sadness in her words when she states “It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended.” Walker now describes herself as a tomboy. She continues to make us feel her pain as she goes on to describe the day of the accident that changed her life forever. She puts the mental image in our mind of three young children running around the yard, the boys with their new BB guns and Alice with her bow and arrows. You can see her climbing on top of the makeshift garage and can almost feel the BB when she describes it hitting her in the eye. They persuade her into telling her parents a lie because “If you tell,” they say “we will get a whipping. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” So she lies for them which showed us that she was scared and loved her brothers enough to lie for them. When they finally take her to the doctor a week later, you can feel her fear when the doctor tells her “Eyes are sympathetic,” he says. “If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too.” This is when things get bad for her and she realizes how she looks with the white cataract on her eye. She hated her eye and abused it. AT this point you can tell Walker cares more about her beauty instead of her sight because at night she doesn’t pray for her sight to return but for beauty. Walker hated that people would look at her eye and not her. You can see that she was hurt and lost all self-confident she had in the way she describes how others treat her. Walker start to have a turnaround at fourteen when her brother takes her to the hospital to remove the whit glob. “Almost immediately I become a new person from the girl who does not rise her head,” She now satisfied with her looks. It was not until she was 27 years old and had her daughter is when she was truly happy with herself. She has a personal revelation when her daughter finally notices her eye. She feared that her daughter would reject her just as she had dreaded her entire lifetime that the world would push her aside. Instead, her daughter was amazed that there was a "world in her eye". She was overwhelmed with happiness and self-acceptance. She tells us about her dream where she was dancing to stevie Wonder’s song “As’ but she heard “Always”. She twirling and happy and even happier her comes along and dance with her. The metaphor in her dream is that she was dancing with her old and embracing her new self. “She is beautiful, whole, and free.” Ultimately, Alice Walker's journey was about finding acceptance. She learned to love and accept her body regardless of the flaws it contained or the imperfections. She finally realized that she was still the cute child that everyone loved, all grown up and ready to face the world with her head held high. "

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