Mr. Monkey

Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is Self In the essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” by Alice Walker, is about self-realization, and that the world is what we make it to be. As a child Walker describes how she abused her beauty for her father’s approval. This kind of attitude was further encouraged by the society of which she is from. She grew up hearing praises from people such as “oh, isn’t she the cutest thing”. Walker goes through many different changes and her realizations about herself, that she goes through throughout her life. In the end Walker realizes that she has the whole world at her fingertips and can succeed whenever she wants to with beauty or without beauty. To show how big of a part beauty played in Walker’s life, she uses rhetorical strategies like tone when she shows herself as a child and then as an adult to convey what the experiences she has learned. She also uses allusion about the poems she made. She also uses mood to show the emotional attitude she has toward her beauty. Tone was of the major rhetorical strategies the author used, when she changes from her child times to her adult times. As a child, Walker looks to her family for the definition of beauty. She dresses in her Sunday best so that her father will think she’s “the prettiest” and take her to the fair. As a child beauty was the major things that gave her confidence because when giving her speech on Easter she gained confidence due to the fact that everyone sees her as “the cutest thing”. Also even an adult she worries that her own child will not see her as a beautiful person. And “be embarrassed”. However, this kind of attitude changes when she finds the inner beauty. Also even as an adult, she struggles with the definition of beauty. In the end she finds “the other dancer” within herself, which finally makes her feel “beautiful, whole, and free”. The desert was a place that Walker falls in love with. Its beauty was very “overwhelming” that she writes a poem