Assignment #1

Ann Hoang
English 1301, Assignment #1
Dr. Murray
October 21,2010
Beauty Essay

            Beauty can be seen in several ways and perspectives; something that one person may find unattractive, unpleasant, and disgusting may turn out that another person finds beauty in it. This is also why beauty is just not the outer appearance of things. Therefore in reality, beauty is really how people see things as well as how they feel the things affect themselves. Many great authors demonstrate their vision on how they interpret beauty in their own life onto their literary arts that would help show my definition of considering what is beautiful.

            A great example of an author who shows that her view in beauty was dynamic is Alice Walker, in the essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”. In the writing, Alice Walker talks about moments in her life that changed the way that she viewed the “beauty” of her self. She starts off mentioning and flaunting about her cute and attractive looks when she was a younger girl (Walker 69), but as the narration went on, Walker lost the confidence in her “beauty”. Her appearance changed, and she was no longer the little girl who used to dress in cute dresses, but is now a “tomboy” who dresses up just like her brothers (Walker70).

            One day when Alice Walker was playing by herself, she gets shot in the eye by one of her brothers’ BB guns in which changed her life dramatically (Walker 70). Not to a surprise, Walker started to feel embarrassed because of the ugly scar left in her eyes and so she started “doing poorly in school…[where she was once] a whiz” (Walker 71). As she was a little older, her older brother Bill and his wife understood her “feelings of shame and ugliness” and so they took her to a doctor where she got the white glob in her eyes removed (Walker 72); from then, she started too regain confidence.

            Later in her life, she was afraid that her baby girl was going to be ashamed of the scar that was left in her mother’s eye, but unexpectedly she found beauty in her mother’s eye, which also helped her mother to love her eyes as well.  Her baby insisted that it was a world that was in her mothers’ eye not a scar (Walker 74).

            Another author named Lars Eighner wrote “On Dumpster Diving”, an essay where he described the beauty of dumpster diving. Oddly, he was able to show that dumpster diving is not just as easy as it sounds but it required one to have a common sense and knowledge. One just cannot pick up some thing from the dumpster and eat it, because one should know if that food is edible or not. Eighner insisted that it was important to know what was good and what is bad. He also presented that dumpster scavengers are intellectual people (Eighner 21).

            Andrea Barrett, a witness of the traumatic event, on September 11 found beauty with in the devastation in order to be able to live on. In her writing, “A Hole in The Wall” she explains how when the Towers first collapsed, every things was just overwhelming, but as a result of the “hole left” it united the people to where strangers were talking to each other and pouring out their emotions. She ambiguously insisted that the result of the dramatic event, helped create a friendlier environment in which she can now call it her home because she felt that she was a part of the hole (Barrett19).

            There are much more authors who show how they define beauty in their writings although they do not point out “this is how I see beauty” or “this is beauty”. Hence, beauty is just not the outer appearance of things, but it is actually how one feels about something, or how that something affects oneself.

                                                                                                                        Word Count: 642

Work Cited

Peterson, Linda H., and John C. Brereton. "A Hole in the Wall." The Norton Reader: an            Anthology of Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 19. Print.

Peterson, Linda H., and John C. Brereton. "Beauty: When the Dancer is the Self." The Norton            Reader: an Anthology of Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 69-74. Print.

Peterson, Linda H., and John C. Brereton. "On Dumpster Diving." The Norton Reader: an            Anthology of Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 21. Print.