The vicissitudes and difficulties of childhood are some of the most common themes which writers choose for their material. It is usually considered that the experiences which we have when we are children will stay with us for out entire lives and that they will leave an indelible mark on who we are as people and how we approach life. Alongside the importance of childhood lies the difficulty in recollecting it accurately. Many people claim to be able to remember key moments from their childhood, however often these memories differ based on who is remembering and who is telling the story.
Recalling childhood experience is one which is caught between a definite sense of events which are important for the formation of the self, and the undeniable fact that such a sense is perspectival and can never completely related to the anyone other than the person who is telling the story. Alice Walker’s essay ‘Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” embodies these contradictions. It is an essay which deals with the importance of childhood events and which at the same time shows that the experience of these events is unique for the person who experiences them. It deals with the difference between the emancipated transience of early childhood and the physical reality of growing up in a vulnerable body. However, even this latter experience is shown to be open to subjective understanding. The rest of this paper will show how this is the case with regard to the content of the essay.
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"Alice Walker: When the Other Dancer is the Self".
Walker’s essay moves swiftly through key moments in her childhood and adult life and in doing so it presents a picture of the development of her character anchored around one particular moment which she considers to be the most important for her. It is clear that she believes that her character changed indelibly at one point when she was eight years old and her brother shot her eye with a BB gun, partially blinding her. This event is the most important section of the essay and Walker describes how it manifests a direct change in her character. Previously she is describes herself in care-free and extremely confident terms. She writes of herself as; ‘Whirling happily in my starchy frock, showing off my biscuit-polished patent-leather shoes and lavender socks, tossing my head in a way that makes my ribbons bounce…hands on hips, before my father’ (55). This confidence is directly related to the capacity for Walker to change her character with age. The essay moves quickly from her at the age of two and a half to her at the age of eight and in doing introduces the sense that part of the freedom of childhood is the freedom to be able to move between roles and to develop quickly, without the burden of a personal history or a real past.
This changes, however, with the accident. Walker introduces this event as something which has physically scarred her, and in this way it is something which has left an indelible mark on her body and has constituted her character as someone who has been marked. That is, the scar on her face is now irrefutable proof of some kind of consistency in Walker’s character. The freedom of mercurial change which she had previously exhibited and which the structure of the essay draws direct attention is no longer available to her. It would seem that the concrete matter-of-factness of being scarred is taken as the defining moment in Walker’s childhood. It is this moment which causes her to exist for others as the same character through time, and this is inflected in her own self image. However, it is important to note that the scar is not understood by Walker’s parents in the same was as it is understood by her. Walker recalls with surprise how she asked her parents later whether she ‘had changed as a result of the accident’ (56). She is surprised to report that they do not think that she did. Therefore, it is possible to argue that although the essay posits the physical fact of a scar as a seminal moment in Walker’s experience of growing up, even this fact is vulnerable to the subjective nature of experience.
In conclusion, this essay has argued that Alice Walkers ‘When the Other Dancer is the Self’ presents the primary experience of growing up as the coming to terms with one’s own objective circumstances as set against the transient experience of childhood. However, even this permanence, as embodied in the scar which Walker receives at the age of eight is still not presented as outside of the realm of subjective opinion.
- Walker, Alice. “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” The Norton Reader, 13th Edition. Edited by Joseph Bizup. London: Norton Publishing, 2011. pp. 55-60,
