A Salient Theme of Body Hate at Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self by Alice Walker - Essay Example

The middle part of the essay describes the genesis of the fading beauty that Alice Walker started to experience. She attributes her lost beauty to her brother’s accidental toy gunshot that hit her face. She gets some consolation and restores her self-esteem when Bill, her brother matched her to the hospital to have her situation corrected; something that does not allow her to visually be active. Towards the end even at old age, the author reports having had down moments especially when she is asked for a photo by a journalist.

She gets overwhelmed by the fact that someone would notice the scar she had on the face. Her child even creates more miseries when the baby notices the scar she had on her face something that gets her so much worry. In the end, she finds relief in Steve Wonder’s song that comforts her fully on her traumatizing situation.The scientific context in which the story has been written is phenomenal. Gun in itself is a scientific product. The small daughter to the narrator visualizes the globe as a big object reflected on her mother’s eye.

Consequently, the cultural framework in which the story is developed tells a lot. Having been brought up in an American society that was full of racial segregation, the author clearly brings out the real encounters she had in this regard. A case where a White man causes an accident and escapes probably because it was a girl child or a black person reveals a lot about the sociocultural standards of that time. Blacks and women had a narrow space in the society. However, the difference between the America of the past and the contemporary one today is really big in terms of sociocultural standards and perceptions (Donnelley 107-108).

A salient theme of body hate comes out more clearly. The amount of time and energy that people take in trying to hate and hide some of their body parts that the perceptually deem faulty is surprising. It is possible to have a profound psychological turmoil when hit by a flaw on a conspicuous body part. Moreover, the media’s ‘campaign’ for perfection in their advertisements is the reason that makes people worry about very petty and insignificant problems. They tend to promote businesses by portraying a world of perfection and everyone would want to join their non-flawed worlds (Donnelley 109).

Evidently, the author’s intent to practically explore and expose the real-life problems that a girl child of that time went through has bee achieved. From the genesis of her problems to its progression until its end, the story is well developed by Alice Walker.