Beautiful Reflection

Beautiful Reflection

  • Submitted By: zstimpert
  • Date Submitted: 02/14/2009 11:26 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 634
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 610

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the phrase we have heard over and over throughout our lives, is described through a detailed account given by Alice Walker in this short story entitled “When the Other Dancer Is the Self”. In this story she recalls from the beginning of her life how everyone, including herself, saw her as a “the cutest thing”. Later in the story, everything changes, her brother, whom she had become playmates with, accidently shot her in the eye with a BB gun, forever changing her self-imposed “beauty”. The remainder of her personal account describes how she struggled with the incident that changed her self-image.
After first reading this story, I had a hard time relating to the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Afterwards I thought for a while came up with a slightly different angle of the same concept, we are given certain situations and that the end result is what we make it out to be. In Walkers situation, she was scarred by the visual appearance of herself. Later in the story she writes, “…I might have missed seeing the desert! The shock of that possibility – and gratitude for over twenty-five years of sight – sends me literally to my knees.” coming to the realization that her visual appearance was not as big of a deal as she made it out to be. She also realizes that she is lucky to be able to see, which to her, after this realization, is much more important. To reinforce her new changed view on the bad hand she had been dealt, Walker writes of an experience she had with her daughter. She mentions her fear of her daughter realizing that her mother’s eyes are much different than others, “Will she be embarrassed? I think. What will she say?”. Her daughter, after being put down for her nap, focused intently on Walkers eye, and Walker prepares herself for the worst. Contrary to Walkers expectations her daughter says, “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” After these two experiences Walker writes, “…I saw that it was possible...

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