Alice Walker's Beauty... Experience As Essay

..] 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 for her life up to that point, and her inner sense of worth and beauty crumbled away just as her exterior beauty was eroded away by the sudden entrance of the BB and the slow buildup of scar tissue. This created, of course, a literal change in perception that was mirrored by the author/narrators reduced perception of and 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.

In a strange way, the external reality surrounding the author/narrator continues to mirror her perception of its appearance, and her outer beauty continues to match her inner beauty. A scar noticeably changes one's appearance, usually for the worse when speaking in terms of traditional beauty, and a scar on an eye is sure to be an especially gruesome thing. This causes Walker to internalize the same feelings of ugliness, and her inner confidence and beauty shrink to match her outer beauty. This in turn changes her perception of the way the world relates to her, and so she changes the way she relates to the world by withdrawing and refusing to engage in reality the way she used to. This has the ironic yet expected result of fulfilling her perspective; the world begins to ignore and reject her precisely because she has decided that it will do so and withdrawn from it in a preemptive measure that has a causal effect.

Things continue to change for Walker as she grows, has the scare tissue removed from her eye, and becomes a parent as well as a respected author.The culmination of her journey to align her inner and outer concepts of beauty and self comes when her baby daughter recognizes the difference in her mother's right eye but does not turn away. Instead, the child finds it beautiful, asking, "Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?'." In this moment, the author/narrators realization of how she has perceived herself and how she has perceived the world causes a massive epiphany, and she begins crying and laughing at once. She runs to the bathroom mirror and stares at her eye: "There was a world in my eye. And I saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, I did love it." Not only did Walker realize that her eye could be seen as beautiful, and could be loved regardless, she realized that the ways in which her damaged eye changed her -- both the good and the bad changes they effected -- were priceless and something to be grateful for.

In this story, Walker implicitly describes the relationship between inner and outer beauty as an intertwined phenomenon-based entirely on perception. Throughout the story, what Walker perceived as the truth -- about her beauty and bout the outside world -- made itself true y 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 her perception. If she continued to believe and perceive differently, she would continue to live and be treated differently. Instead, she has let her eye and her beauty create strong and yet immensely compassionate voice that any reader is privileged to encounter......