In American society, much preference is given to the importance of beauty. In the essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self," Alice Walker reflects on her ideas of beauty as a child. Walker's autobiographical essay presents Walker's persona as a woman who comes to value the physical imperfection of her eye, out of which she has developed a strong, wise, and sympathetic personality. Walker's text choronologically traces incidents in her persona's life in which her damaged and disfigured eye played a role, up to the point at which she can accept her eye's role in determining who Alice Walker is. This acceptance is symbolized in the persona's dance-embrace with another part of herself in a dream.
Walker, at age eight, was shot with a BB gun in the eye, causing her to lose not only her vision in her right eye, but also her self esteem as well. Before this accident, there was not a doubt in her mind that when people looked at her they saw an adorable little girl. She says: "It was great fun being cute." (p.10)
Afterwards, she believed that all they saw was
"A glob of whitish tissue, a hideous cataract." (p.18)
In reality the scar was causing her to see a distorted image of herself that nobody else could see. For six years after that incident, Walker hated her eye. There was once a time when she would stare back at those who marveled over her looks, but now it was different: she did not look up. At night before she would go to sleep she would stare in the mirror, despising what she saw. Walker prayed for beauty-not for sight.
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