The experience of childhood, of love, the connections of friendship and of the trauma suffered by the inconsistency of these connections is something which is an almost universal experience and which has been the subject of vast amount of writing and thinking throughout history. Each time childhood is thought, it is necessary to skip across what seems to be a vast amount of time in order to re-enter a world which it is usually assumed that the writer, now an adult, is unable to actually re-enter. Alice Walker’s essay ‘Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self’ is an example of a piece of writing on the nature of childhood and experience which foregrounds this experience of a constantly shifting relationship with one’s past and present self hood. The central thesis of the essay is that the self of a person should be seen as being capable of seeing beauty in themselves and that the experience of understanding this able to overcome the traumas and difficulties suffered which may scar the physical body of that self. I will seek to complement this by drawing to the fact that, perhaps against its own intentions, Walker’s essay does not manage to avoid the arbitrary assignation of meaning to particular events which her own essay draws attention to.
Walker constructs her essay as a series of recollections from childhood, focused around an accident which she endured when, at the age eight, her brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun and partly blinded her. The incident is preceded by descriptions of an early childhood which is largely care free and self -assured. Walker writes of herself a two and half year old child who is able to command attention from those around her and to act in a confident and forceful way. The scene of the essay then switches to a time in which she is eight years and no longer considers herself to be pretty, but instead is a tom-boy and is out playing with her brothers. By performing this switch, through a simple sentence and by making no apologies for the time which she has left out, Walker draws attention to the fact that any act of autobiography will always be in and of itself selective.
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"Critical Response to Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self".
Despite this, however, the moment in which she suffers the accident is evidently described as a foundational and formative moment for her character. Walker describes the feeling of the shot in her eye and later describes her horror and fear at being scarred for life and at the unkind of words of the doctor who treats her. That Walker considers this experience to formative for her character is emphasised as she recalls later in the essay that she would ask her parents whether her character changed as a result of the accident. While they reply incredulously, it is evident that she believes the event to have been one of the most important in her life.
However, the incredulity of her parents is important as it manifests the fact that the perspective which Walker adopts is only one of several. For her parents, perhaps her character did not change in a particularly strong way, although it is obvious that the accident for her was a formative experience. The essay ends with an act of self-acceptance which again affirms that the accident as integral, although this time this integral nature is defined negatively as Walker finds peace through dreaming that she is dancing with her self, a self which is unscarred. While this certainly leads to a profound moment of self-acceptance and recovery, it nonetheless continues to maintain a structure of meaning which is counter-intuitive with regard to other aspects of the essay.
In conclusion, this paper has claimed that Alice Walker presents a contradictory situation. Her essay moves stylistically by drawing attention to the fact that any view of childhood and autobiography will be selective. However, she then proceeds to place a huge amount of emphasis on one event, which although it may have been major, is nonetheless viewed from her own perspective. It is possible to conclude by stating that perhaps this is a necessary contradiction. It is impossible to write of one’s own life without constructing a narrative, and the very process of telling this narrative will both affirm it and actively demonstrate its constructed and selective nature.
