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

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Dear Reader, I know you may be wondering why I decided to write on such a topic, but I decided to brief and consult you on some key points and connections I made in a few texts. The one that I decided to focus on is called “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self,” by Alice Walker. What stood out to me the most when reading it is how one significant incident in her childhood shaped her mindset for the rest of her life. When Walker was 8 years old, one of her brothers hit in the eye with a bb gun and injured her to the point where she had a cataract. It extremely lowered her self-esteem since she was made fun of and received frequent stares. She “ranted and raved” at her eye. As her essay went on, Walker described her negative attitude…show more content…
This ties into the ending of my text because Cooper is accepting of his parent’s standpoint on life once he lives it himself. He becomes entrenched in mazes a young boy, completing them successfully was very rewarding for him. He says, “Even when trapped in the hallways of the maze, I felt an embracing safety, as if I’d been zipped in a sleeping bag”(345). The simplicity of Cooper’s life didn’t allow any room for diverging in another direction, because that would be inconceivable; he was still very ignorant and childlike. As Cooper grew older, he began to notice his parents’ aging in regards to their daily lives. Their friends were sick and some moved away, “the creases in their skin deepened”, and life became more about generalities rather than “pungent details” (346). He began to see that life wasn’t as safe as he thought. This text struck me because it is scary when something one thought was true for a while, doesn’t turn out to be so in the end. In my life, I was forced to choose between succumbing to immature nonsense at the expense of my happiness, and simply not caring. Cooper didn’t commit to making a choice, yet once he grew to be the age his parents once were, he came to a realization that details didn’t matter so much anymore. The fatigue that comes with age was
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