Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self by: Alice Walker

I really enjoyed this story because I admire the way Walker writes. She is extremely descriptive and always takes the reader under her wing to go into lots of detail so you get the full picture. This is also exemplified in her epic novel The Color Purple. You see that in this story the question of beauty comes up. What defines true beauty? Walker is shot in the eye with a BB gun by one of her brothers. Automatically, it is evident that she is the victim. However, Walker now must face the world no longer the cute girl but the girl with the bloody eye. This is very traumatic for her seeing how she has always been admired in the past. It is a challenge for her to accept this change of people always staring at her.

When she gets older and has a daughter she worries that her daughter will be embarrassed by her for her eye being different. Nevertheless, to Walker's surprise her daughter notices this difference as being a mark of her mother's beauty and individuality. She tells her, "Mommy, there's a world in your eye" (310). This line makes Walker finally realize she can live with this mark in her eye it is a mark of survival. In the end we see that she realizes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (No pun intended.) She really needs to take this mark as an enhancement to her beauty and her character. We see this transformation by her realization of this fact when she says, "The other dancer has obviously come through all right, as I have done. She is beautiful, whole, and free. And she is also me" (310). She is able to see that beauty is not perfection and that everything that we perceive to be wrong at first glance is actually a lesson to be learned.