Alice Walker “Beauty: When the other Dancer is the self”. Is about Walker’s childhood accident that left her disfigured and blind in one eye. Beauty meant everything for walker when she was younger. Walker loved wearing dresses and looking her best she felt beautiful. It was mostly based on physical appearance and how she had a spirit that light up the room.
Walker enjoyed when people admired her beauty she had such huge spirit. However, Walker’s way of defining beauty changed when the accident accorded. Sadly enough one of her brothers shot her in the eye with a BB gun and left her disfigured with a blind eye. Which left Walker seeing herself a little different as well as others. Walker viewed herself like she wasn’t good enough because people looked at her a little different after her accident. Not to mention when she was younger kids made fun of her because her eye was scarred. In addition, “I am eight and for the first time doing poorly in school since I was four” (610). In other words she was so
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As a matter of fact, “Understanding my feelings of shame and ugliness he and his wife take me to a local hospital where the glob is removed by a doctor named O. Henry. There is still a small bluish crater where the scare tissue was but the ugly white stuff is gone” (612). After Walker’s brother look her to remove the glob that’s when she realized looks don’t matter it was just her thinking it did. Everybody has something beautiful to offer in his or her own unique way. Indeed, after all these years Walker had to hid her face and be critical to herself. But all she needed is some confidence in herself and believed she was beautiful. Until, she realized looks weren't everything “Mommy there’s world that in your eye” (613). However, there was an angel that found something so ugly become so beautiful. Walker had something special all she needed was a little
It was from all this extraordinary strength that Alice found her strength,her mother handed down respect for the possibilities as she prepares the art that is her gift. She wrote about how our mother and grandmothers were been enslaved and were put to work so hard that they didn 't get the time to search for their inner gift. Alice advocated that women should use their mind and thought than been a baby bearer. That African American women then have gone through a lot of abuse and its time to wake up from what the society think of them and use their artistic talent that they were born
Laurie Halse Anderson is trying to tell us that personal appearance doesn’t matter, be beautiful on the inside. It doesn’t really matter what you look like, it’s what you do. If a scientist invented a fertilizer that would solve world hunger, nobody would care what they look like. Melinda is like a seed, doesn’t look like much but something beautiful is inside. Melinda gave up on personal appearance the night of the party; she used to dress nice but after the rape she didn’t. Andy used the “you were asking for it” card a lot, I feel that Melinda tried to make herself look “trashy and ratty” so she wouldn’t be so “vulnerable” (but really Andy is just a pig). Onto the Martha Clan, they thought they had to be perfect, but that made them into monsters
Alice Walker is woman of class, diversity, and feminism. More importantly, she is a civil rights activist, novelist, poet, and essayist. Growing up poor, I would like to think motivated her, and crafted her to the woman she is at this time in her life. Her works is a tasteful gratification of what it was like fighting for equality for all African Americans, affirming the possibility to love and forgive amongst black and white people, and just writing impeccable wisdom. While attending Spelman College, she turned down a scholarship to study abroad in Paris, and instead she went to Mississippi to pursue civil rights.
Moreover, the woman in the ?eye of the Beholder? not only wanted beauty but she felt the need for acceptance. She was denied this when she was taken to a disability camp. It?s amazing how in the movie, people were separated and treated unequally because of their physical appearances, and as result, they could not share the same society. This is in fact is a metaphor for how discrimination was once in extreme existence in this society. For example, African Americans once had to use: different bathrooms, water fountains, and were even segregated to non-white school. They were even isolated to the worse parts of the cities.
• Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was born into a poor sharecropper family, and the last of eight children.
Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999
In her passage, “Mirrors”, Grealy discusses her struggle with appearance and beauty as a whole. Winning her battle with childhood cancer has its consequences. This aggressive cancer left her face extremely disfigured. Due to this result, many people gawked at Grealy and treated her differently than one would towards a beautiful woman. This drove her into a sense of shame and depression based on her appearance alone. Since Grealy was a young woman at the time, many cases of bullying and name calling came from grown men. At points in her life, Grealy was so embarrassed of her facial construction, that she refused to look at herself in any form of reflection. Later on in the passage, Grealy states, “To keep myself thinking objectively, I became an obsessive reader and an obsessive TV watcher…”. (38). Lucy Grealy explains that she made these mental escapes to distract herself from obsessing over her gruesome appearance. She also desired to escape from the pain she was experiencing from multiple facial surgeries, in order to make herself, too, physically beautiful. She stated, “I was given these moments of grace and insight, only to be invariably followed by a clumsy tumble into narcissism.” (37). This short passage embodies the struggles that many women come across. This is so because the iconic image of a beautiful woman is deeply engraved in our thoughts. A large portion of younger
Eatonton is a small city in Georgia that is known for many things. Along with gold having the most gold medalist, it’s known for being the birthplace of Alice Walker. Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 and was the last of eight children. Her parents, Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker were sharecroppers. They were poor and struggled to provide for the family. This was the inspiration of many of Walker’s works. As if being born into a world full of segregation and poverty wasn’t bad enough, at the age of eight Walker was shot in eye by her own brother with a BB gun. She lost use of her right eye. She became self conscious about how her eye looked after the accident. She isolate herself from the world. She found
In the essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self,” Alice Walker writes about how she lost her eyesight in one eye due to a childhood accident. Alice communicates to the reader how, when losing an eye, she cared much less about the loss of her eyesight and more about how she appeared to others. In the story, Alice recalls different points where the accident affected her life. To her, the loss of her eye was not just a physical impediment, but a mental one as well. Once she had a surgery to remove the “glob of whitish scar tissue,” she felt like a new person, even though she still could not see. Alice says, “Now that I’ve raised my head,” and can stop holding herself back from being the greatest she can be. Just as Alice is affected by
1. “He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it. But I don't never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook.” (Pg 11)
Dee's physical beauty can be defined as one of her biggest assets. The fact that Maggie sees Dee "with a mixture of envy and awe" (409) cues the reader to Dee's favorable appearance. The simplistic way in which Walker states that "Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure" (410) gives the reader the idea that Dee's beauty has made it easier for her to be accepted outside her family in society. We are left with the impression that Dee's appearance is above average. Walker plays on Dee's physical beauty to contrast the homeliness of Maggie and her mother. Walker goes so far as to describe her feet as "always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style" (411). In describing Dee's feet, Walker is giving the impression of perfection from head to toe. Dee's outward beauty has "made her transition from poor farm girl to that of an educated, middle-class black woman possible" (Allen-Polley 11). Needless to say, Dee doesn't seem comfortable with her past and therefore has a difficult time accepting her future. It is as though she is not really connected with her family anymore. She simply needs them to fulfill their positions in her recreated past.
Sadly, appearance plays a massive part in the way we as a modern society perceive someone. Being such an enormous part of the perception that we receive from our peers, the idea that physical appearance shapes identity falls inward onto us. For example, in “Mirrorings” up until Lucy Grealy moves to London for reconstructive surgery, her entire identity is her illness (Grealy). While it is easy to do, she let other people’s nasty opinions of her change the way she felt about herself (Grealy). She outright believed that she
Born February 09, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia and the last child of eight, from sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Grant Walker, Alice Walker was one of the bestselling African American authors of all time. At eight years old, Walker experienced a terrible incident that caused her to be blinded in one eye. Her brother shot a BB gun at her, praying and pleading to not mention to her parents the truth of what was done. She lied, just so that he could not receive a beating, but the worse of it all, she became blind with a white surface covering her eye that caused her to be picked on in school. Walker’s grades plummeted and she hated the way that she looked. She moved in with her brother and his wife at 14 years old in Boston to care for his family. They paid the doctor for her eye to be fixed, removing the white cataract so that her eye can have a normal look. She fell in love with herself and she finally felt beautiful (Blooms, 11).
Alice Walker uses a determined voice, determined to be an artist and prove to the whole world how great black women are. Also, this comes amid knowing that being a black woman and at the same time an artist does not earn one respect in the society.
“But you promised” she cried. “I will never trust you again.” Alice Walker sobbed as she looked dejectedly at the man who she once called father. The man who stood before her was not her father, he might have had the same name as her father, but that was about it. Standing before Alice was someone with dusty grey eyes, which looked as if they had seen everything cruel and wrong in the world. Her father’s were a vibrant azure which rivaled the color of the sky, eyes which had watched her develop from a young babe into a mature woman. Hidden in the lines of this man’s forehead were unfamiliar stories and hidden truths, unlike the father who she once knew, his were an open book, not hidden by his insecurities or secrets.