Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self Short Story Analysis

Fear is an emotion that every human in the world will feel at one point in their life. It is powerful to an extent that it can dictate how a person makes decisions and can influence pivotal moments in their lives. Although fear is always present, a person can learn to live with the powerful emotion as they mature and grow. In the short story Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self written by Alice Walker, the protagonist suffers an accident that changes the course of her life. After the accident that affects the look and function of her eye, she acquires a fear of what others think of her and where the course of her life is headed. The story suggests that when an individual is tested with the emotion of fear, then they learn to overcome the fear by maturing through it and becoming able to live with the fear without being controlled by it. 

When Alice Walker was a young girl, she was always the center of attention. She was the delightful, perfect little girl that loved having all the eyes on her. All of that changed the day she got hit in the eye with a BB gun pellet, changing how her eye looked. Instead of Alice being the main focus, her eye took all the attention. She states “now when I stare at people- -a favourite pastime, up to now--they will stare back. Not at the "cute" little girl, but at her scar.” It is at this moment that her eye begins to take control over her life. She fears the stares that are painted on the faces of other people and allows the fear and anxiety that comes from her eye to change who she is. A quote in the story that reveals how greatly Alice’s newfound fear affects her is demonstrated when she states, “ For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head.” This reinforces the idea that her eye is the reason she becomes the quiet girl in class instead of the bubbly confident girl she once was. As her life goes on she reflects on her incident and the experiences that came with it years later. One pivotal moment stands out when she is twenty-seven years old and her daughter is almost three years old. Until that moment the fear of what others think still lingers in the back of her head and she fears the day her daughter notices her eye. Yet when the day finally arrives, her daughter doesn’t notice the physical difference of her eye, instead, she sees the beauty and “the world” in her mother’s eyes. “That in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, I did love it.” After witnessing her daughter’s reaction, Alice realized that it is possible to love her eye while still not loving the experiences that came with it. She finally grasps the idea that her eye is a part of who she is. It is a characteristic that she learned to love about herself after maturing and gaining more life experiences. 

The feelings of fear and exposure to people’s thoughts can be a universal feeling that anyone can overcome as they mature and grow. Reflecting on my own life, I am unable to directly relate to the trauma that Alice Walker experienced, but I am able to associate the same emotions and feelings that come with fear to my own experiences. For me, those feelings begin to arise when I am faced with my fast-approaching future. As a young adult, I am beginning to close an important chapter in my life as graduation quickly approaches. The fear of change and new experiences is something that tremendously affects me and the decisions I make about my future. Day after day, I have left my house where I live with my parents and make my way to school where I see the same people I have been going to school with since I was eleven years old. Fear arises and attempts to control my life when I know that all of the familiarity I know and love changes within two short months. Soon I will be on my own, with new people, in a new city, away from everything I know. Fear of the unknown causes me to experience close to the same emotions that Alice did. One similarity between our experiences is that we both dislike change. Alice hated the new way she looked and was looked at. It caused an emergence of fear towards other people and what they would think of her. In my experience, fear emerges from an upcoming change in my everyday life. Like Alice, I know that as I settle and grow into my new life, my fear will slowly fade away and comfort will begin to set in. By taking my experience and Alices experience the point that individuals mature through fears is further developed and supported through personal experiences. 

The short story, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self, written by Alice Walker demonstrates the idea of overcoming fear while maturing through it and becoming able to live with the fear instead of being controlled by it. As she tells her astonishing story, she explains how her fear once controlled her life until one day, she realized that the thing she was afraid of doesn’t need to restrict who she is and how she lives her life. She grows through her fear of the way her eye looked and proves that she can still be happy and free while living with the thing that causes her fears. The overbearing emotion of fear will never go away, but knowing that as a person grows, their fears about a moment or aspect in their life will be eventually overshadowed by the feeling of complete happiness and acceptance as they learn to grow through the fear.