Alice Walker’s Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

In this essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” by Alice Walker, is about the realization or fulfillment of one’s own potential or abilities, and a detailed and harrowing account of how the author’s life has been affected by a childhood accident that left her disfigured and blind in one eye and that the world is what we make it to be. As a child Alice Walker has great confidence in herself, her capabilities, and her beauty or cuteness.
We see the different changes and her realizations about herself, which she goes through throughout her life. Walker gives us much more than a simple report of what happened in her early years, however. She engaged the readers in delivering a straightforward and attractive story relating to her life as a recollection by also using the accident which happened during her childhood. She shows that she is confident in her beauty at the age of two and a half when she wants to go to the fair with her father and tells him “take me daddy.
I’m the prettiest. ” She also shows she is confident in her capabilities and her beauty on Easter Sunday, 1950, when she is all dressed up in a green, flocked, scalloped-hem dress that had a smooth, satin petticoat and hot pink roses. She feels everyone is admiring her beautiful dress. Alice also states that it was not her dress they admired, but it was her spirit they adored. She thanks them to this day for saying things like “isn’t she the cutest thing” or “and got so much sense”. (259)