Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African-American
novelist and poet that is most famous for authoring the well-known story, The Color Purple. Alice Walker’s novel “Beauty:
When the Other Dancer Is the Self” she revisits her past and speaks about an
event that happened in her childhood that would shape her future. She teaches
her audience that they should accept themselves for who they are, and the only
way to truly accept one’s self is to accept yourself from the inside out. I
completely agree with this concept, even though it’s possibly one of the
hardest things someone can do. To be able to accept yourself and not be afraid
of standing out from everyone else would lead to a happiness that is unlike any
other. To stand out from the traditional standards of beauty and be completely
happy with who you are as an individual is to become truly brave.
In Alice Walker’s story, she begins writing about how as a
young girl, she was confident in herself and everything she did, but after the
BB incident with her brothers, she is left feeling lost and insecure. Her
social and academic life have been severely affected by the accident. Alice
Walker couldn’t accept herself for who she was now, and this had negative side-affects
to her mentality. Whenever her closest brother helped her out by taking her to
a doctor to remove some of what was left in her eye from the accident, she
blossomed again. She became more confident and even found a person to love and
begin a family with. She had begun the journey to finding self-acceptance, but
she hadn’t fully come to terms with who she was until one night her daughter
looked her in her bad eye and told her how she held the world in her eye. Her
daughter didn’t see a flaw, but instead she saw something wonderful and
something to be celebrated. Alice Walker’s daughter helped her come to accept herself
fully, blind eye and all. This manifested itself as a dream of Alice dancing
with herself, finally at peace with what happened to her and completely content
with her life. She has found peace with herself and has found the confidence that she had last all those years ago after the life-changing accident.
Walker's lesson about accepting yourself, your awesomesness,your uniqueness both within and without definitely applies to everyone. But the sad thing is that it is really difficult to do that.It took Walker for example over 20 years to finally accept the fact that the blob in her eye was actually what made her unique..It was what defined her.and that it is really a part of her.
ReplyDeleteBeing beautiful and also being told you are beautiful strongly correlates with confidence and a high self esteem..All her life, people referred to what she had in her eyes as a "blob" and "accident".something ugly and that really affected her mentality about who she is and what she represents but when her daughter referred to it as a "world", that made her feel at peace after so long. All this ties back to how powerful words are.Either spoken or just a thought..It goes a long way in defining who we are and what our definition of inner beauty really is.
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