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Theme Of Adversity In Alice Walker's Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self

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Recommended: Essays in overcoming adversity

At some point in everyone’s life they face some form of adversity, it is how they deal with this adversity that defines them as human beings and the paths that their lives will take. Everybody deals with the adversity thats faces them in several different ways, this may be due to their up-bringing, their outlook on life or their perception of the world and what they believe their role is within the game of life.

Within the essay ‘Beauty: when the other dancer is the self’ author Alice Walker refers to the fact that after the incident which resulted in her blindness she refers to the fact that people began to judge her not for her innocence nor youth, but for her injury for example when she writes that they will stare at her ‘Not at the cute little girl, but at her scar’ (24). A sense of judgement is apparent in both essays because within the essay ‘ The clan of one breasted women’ Terry Tempest Williams writes about how ‘fatty diets, childlessness or becoming pregnant after thirty’ was to blame for their families problems with cancer, even though it is was apparent that the family was mormon and by religion would not consume : ‘ No coffee, no tea, tobacco or alcohol’ (317). …show more content…

This uncontrollable variable was referred to as ‘ The Years we Bombed Utah’ (318) and was caused by the ‘Above ground atomic testing in Nevada’ (318) which unfortunately exposed the author’s family to radiation. The sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is also apparent within ‘Beauty’ due to to the fact that Alice Walker’s injury was inflicted due to a freak accident, which is her brother accidentally shooting her with a ‘BB pellet gun’

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