Experience as Beauty: Analyzing Alice Walker's Autobiographical Essay

Introduction: Walker's Voice and the Shape of Identity

Alice Walker is one of America's greatest twentieth-century authors — not simply, or even mostly, because her voice as an African-American woman makes her unique as a member of a formerly underprivileged class that has experienced heavy discrimination, but because the depth of her understanding of the human condition and her skill in expressing fundamentally inexpressible concepts are the hallmarks of all great writers. Her experiences growing up in a highly racist South have necessarily colored her worldview and her conception of herself, as have other incidents of her childhood, but in a way these experiences enabled her — through her literature — to arrive at a more honest and poignant expression of her true inner self. Rather than limiting her internal sense of identity, the external realities of her life helped to shape and clarify that identity into a boundless and open spirit.

Perhaps in none of Walker's works is this creation and formation of the self as clearly exemplified as in her essay Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self. Not only is this work entirely autobiographical, but it also deals directly and explicitly with her changing sense of self across different periods of her life. This sense of self is based almost entirely on external appearances, yet the author/narrator undergoes many changes in her internal interpretations of and attitudes toward those external appearances — and it is these transitions that make up the conflict, action, and resolution of the story. The essay specifically addresses the concepts of beauty — both inner beauty and external prettiness — and the way these relate to perception and reality. As Walker makes clear, beauty is not just in the eye but also the mind of the beholder.

The Confident Child: Beauty as Inner Certainty

The story opens with what is undoubtedly one of the author's earliest memories: she is two-and-a-half years old and waiting for her father to choose which three of the eight children in the family will get to go to the fair. Hair brushed, shoes shined, and ribbons bouncing, the toddler approaches her father: "Take me, Daddy," I say with assurance: "I'm the prettiest!" The connection between a sense of outer beauty and an internal sense of confidence is instantly apparent in the author's description of her young self. At two-and-a-half, the narrator's conception of her inner self was based entirely on her own — and others' — perception of her outer self. In a way, then, Walker experienced outer beauty as an inner phenomenon, and because she knows she is pretty, she notes that "it does not surprise me to find myself" on the way to the fair, "sharing the back seat with the other lucky ones."

At this very early stage in her life, Walker's external reality is largely consistent with her perceptions of appearances, especially her own. Her inner and outer senses of beauty are also closely aligned. As the above incident clearly shows, the narrator knew — not merely felt or guessed, but truly knew — that she was the prettiest, and therefore knew that she would be allowed to go to the fair. Her inner sense of confidence matched, and indeed was created by, her outer beauty, and her perception of the way the world worked accurately matched the realities of its workings. Of course, at this point the narrator was only two-and-a-half years old, and though her worldview proved correct in this instance, it lacked the wisdom of experience.

The Eye Injury and the Collapse of Self

Walker would be granted the beginnings of that experience about four years later, when, according to the essay, her right eye was shot with a BB by one of her brothers, causing it to go blind and to scar horribly. Instantly, the narrator's sense of her own beauty was destroyed. She later notes that the day her eye was shot was "the last time my father, with his sweet home remedy of cool lily leaves, chose me […] I suffered and raged inside because of this." With her beauty destroyed, the now six-year-old Walker gave up hope that the world would still prove as open and bountiful as it had been for her up to that point, and her inner sense of worth and beauty crumbled away just as her exterior beauty was eroded by the sudden injury and the slow buildup of scar tissue.

This created, of course, a literal change in perception that was mirrored by the narrator's reduced engagement with the outside world. She keeps her head down in school and everywhere else, convinced that the world will reject her for her appearance just as she now rejects herself. The collapse of her self-concept is total: the confident child who declared herself the prettiest has been replaced by a girl who no longer dares to look up.

Conclusion: Perception, Beauty, and the Dancing Self

In this essay, Walker implicitly describes the relationship between inner and outer beauty as an intertwined phenomenon based entirely on perception. Throughout the narrative, what Walker perceived as the truth — about her beauty and about the outside world — made itself true through her perception. Even her final realization that her eye could be loved, and that her inner self could also "dance with" her outer self, was effected by a change in perception. Had she continued to believe and perceive differently, she would have continued to live and be treated differently.

Instead, Walker allowed her eye and her experiences to create a strong and yet immensely compassionate voice. That voice — shaped by confidence, then shattered by injury, then painstakingly rebuilt through the loving gaze of a child — is the voice that readers encounter across her work. It is a voice made richer, not poorer, by everything it has seen. As one study of African-American women's autobiographical writing might note, the journey from self-rejection to self-acceptance is rarely linear, but Walker's essay maps that journey with unusual clarity and grace.