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

The essay,” Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” by Alice Walker is about self-realization, and that world is about the choices we make, as well as what we make it to be. The essay takes us from the external world where looks are everything, to the internal world, where looks are only a part of her real self.

At the age of two and a half, Alice Walker shows that she is very confident in her beauty, when she wants to go to the fair with her father, and she says to him, “Take me daddy. I’m the prettiest”. She also shows that she is not only completely aware of her looks, but that she is very confident of her abilities, Easter Sunday,1950.On that particular morning, she felt that “everyone was admiring her beautiful dress”, Alice also states “that it is not her dress they admire ,but it is her spirit they adored”.
The incident leaves a cute and very bright and outgoing girl, with a destroyed sense of self beauty. She no longer sees that she’s bright, or that she has a charming personality, all she now sees is the disfigurement to her eye. Where she was doing well in school, she is now doing poorly. Her peers make her feel ashamed when they ask “what is wrong with your eye”. She then becomes “the girl who does not raise her head. She does not pray for sight, instead she prays for