Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Alice Walker, the author of “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self”, writes a short story concerning beauty and its importance. In the excerpt, Walker tells a story written about herself and how she came to be. As a child, she was perceived as the most beautiful little girl besides her seven other siblings and of all the children in her community. At the age of eight years old, Ms. Walker had been involved in an accident caused by playing Cowboys and Indians with her older brothers. This accident caused the little girl to go blind in one eye with scar tissue on the eye ball. This broke Walker’s self confidence and took a toll on her life in the future. Throughout this piece, Walker demonstrates the reality of one’s outer beauty through evoking the senses of sight, using repetition, and an overall theme in order to prove that beauty comes from the heart.
What does evoking the senses mean? Writers use specific vocabulary and verbs to explain in detail a specific event or scene. In this passage, Walker puts a highlighter on evoking the sense of sight. She does this in order to get the reader to visualize the text how she saw it when the events happened. An example of this is shown when Walker goes for a doctor visit at age 14 in hopes of getting the “glob”, the scar tissue, removed from her blind eye. The surgery is a success but walker proceeds to say “There is still a small bluish crater where the scar tissue was, but the ugly white stuff is gone.” (Walker 26).
In use of this quote, the reader is able to imagine what that may look like. The words used are significant because they themselves prove Walkers main point of the excerpt. In this happy event, Walker continues to put herself down when she refers to mark on her eye as a small bluish crater. Three words that add up to something bigger. The thing that she fixates on is small; which questions why it’s such a big deal. The words bluish indicates there is a shade of blue color in her eye, bringing more unwanted attention to it. And to top it off, she refers to the whole thing as a crater. A word used to signify something big and circle or rock shaped. Walker then goes to say what stands out to her.
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That the ugly white stuff is finally gone. She calls is ugly right off the bat. A word she is not used to being affiliated with. Now that the “ugly” part has been removed, she feels a little better about herself. After the visit, Walker is able to pick her head up and move forward through school and becomes popular again, leaving highschool as valedictorian. Without the surgery, Walker still has the same brain and will that would allow her to succeed but she couldn’t fathom the idea until her outer beauty was reframed. Walker let her insecurities get the best of her for six years. A feeling no child should have to endure or put themselves through.
Repetition, repetition, repetition; a pattern used to trick the mind into not forgetting a specific idea. Walker uses this tactic in her piece very frequently to get her point across that “But it is really how I look that bothers me the most.” (Walker 24). This idea is shown throughout the text numerous times. The quote speaks for itself here. Ever since the accident walker repeatedly questions whether she has changed or not. She asks her family this question, starting with her mother and sister. They answer saying no that she has not changed. And she definitely has not. Walker is still struggling with accepting herself. All she cares for is looking as beautiful as she once was in order to live her desired life.
The reader knows this because Walker states her feelings about it so many times. She can’t get past this obstacle she put in front of herself which was said to be “Now when I stare at people – a favorite past time, up to now – they will stare back. Not at the “cute” little girl, but at her scar.” (Walker 24). This was her ideology for the six years she decided to never look up again. She lost herself because of it. Walker no longer spoke up in class, she didn’t talk to boys, and she gave up on having friends. This repeating theme helps the reader retain the intended material.
Now that the background and or history of Walkers life has been displayed, one can now see that her overall theme of the text was to illustrate that outer beauty is important to the self and others but is really in the eye of the beholder. This can be found at the end of text when Walkers baby daughter examines Walker’s face. Prior to this act, she says “Since her birth I have worried about her discovery that her mother’s eyes are different from other people’s. (Walker 27). Here she still brings self doubt to herself concerning her outer beauty.
When Walker says ever since her birth, she had already pre judged what her baby daughter would have thought about her. She is so concerned with this that her baby’s discovery of the eye scared her extremely. Specifically because her child is a baby, she would take more offence to her observation because babies don’t have a filter yet. Her baby’s response was something she was not expecting at all. Her baby girl adored Ms. Walker and told her she had a world in her eye. The word world holds a high significance because to Walker this reminds her of home; a place where her grandmother lived and everytime she thinks of it, she weeps with love. The world is a complex and beautiful planet.
Her daughter compares this to the crater and or cataract in her eye that Walker thought of as ugly. But when her daughter discovers this on her eye, she sees a beautiful world that is bluish white like her mommy’s eye and with great interest. Not until now can Ms. Walker accept herself. Now that the person she loves most tells her she is beautiful despite the ugly eye, she can go on with life feeling better about herself. She now does not need to suffer with self punishment because someone loves her for who she is and not what she looks like. Her daughter is a great example for expressing how beauty is really in the eye of the beholder.
In conclusion, Walker demonstrates the realness of how one’s outer beauty can impact their life tremendously. And during her journey she was finally able to change. Walker transformed into a strong woman that she could call beautiful once again. Her will to go on and that strength is what was beautiful about her; not her outer appearances. Walker translates this through her story by evoking the sense of sight, using repetition, and through her overall theme of beauty.
