Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self Freewrite
This essay was very easy to read and had a much more uplifting overall message than Mirrors. I liked how it was kind of randomly pieced together, because it makes me feel like I am more inside the author’s head than usual. My thoughts are usually random and sporadic so it was a lot more relatable. As a reader, you also feel more sympathetic towards Alice Walker because she describes the entire event so vividly, as opposed to Grealy who briefly mentions the fact that she had cancer.
Walker’s mother reminded me of the character Sofia from her book The Color Purple. Both are very strong, independent, stubborn women. There is even a part in the novel where Sofia refuses to help the Mayor’s wife even though she is white and more powerful than she is. That is strikingly similar to Walker’s mother refusing to help Miss Mey, even though she employs her husband. Walker herself also reminded me of the character Nettie because they are both very pretty and intelligent. They are also fighters and will work for what they want. Nettie refused to take abuse from her father like Celie did, so she got up the courage to leave. Walker also worked up the courage to confront the bullies who would tease her about her eye.
The entire passage seemed to be written like a poem; Grealy’s essay was much more straightforward. She takes artistic risks like asking rhetorical questions, inserting poetry, and listing memories. I did not particularly like how she put the poetry in the middle of the essay. I thought it was unnecessary because it did not tell the readers anything that they did not know. It just emphasizes how grateful she is to be able to see out of her other eye, but I think the audience could have easily assumed that without the poem. I also did not like how Walker did not tie in the title until the very end of the passage. Personally I think it is much cleverer when it is woven through the entire passage and is a running theme. The way Walker did it makes it seem as though it was an after thought and she just slapped it on at the end. I was a little confused at first about when walker asks herself “did I imagine the anguish of never looking up?” I was confused because she still technically has sight and on a literal level she can look up. I thought for a second that she might mean looking up at heaven. But most likely she felt ashamed that she always averted her eyes in shame, while her mother was such a strong woman.
Overall, I liked this one more because it was much more engaging than Mirrors. The author was much more relatable and interesting. It also was much more fast-paced and random, which works well for today’s generation. It’s also much more refreshing to see an author take risks instead of writing everything so straightforward. It was also interesting to me because I have read her novel The Color Purple, and it is always interesting to compare the different works by the same author.

Mirrors Freewrite
Needless to say, I was extremely surprised to read that the author, Lucy Grealy, was able to live for an entire year without looking into a mirror. I feel as though it is automatic to look in a mirror once you pass it. But then again, Grealy was hiding from the image that she was going to see once she looked in that mirror. Avoiding mirrors was almost like a sense of denial for her. If she could not see the deformity on her face, it would easier for her not to hate herself.
She had half of her jaw removed in order to prevent cancer from spreading, and the details of her operation are absolutely horrifying. I could not even imagine having people operating on me without my knowing exactly what was going on. At the age of 9, its even worse because it would be more difficult for her to grasp the gravity of what was going on. She was robbed of a normal childhood because of the years she spent in a hospital, and because of the isolation she felt due to her deformity. People in society are so quick to judge things they see to be different or strange, and spare no expense in being kind to people. Grealy mentions that the majority of people who were rude to her were men.
Grealy constantly mentions throughout her essay that she is disgusted by her appearance. Whether it was her baldness during her chemotherapy, or her deformed jaw, she was always ashamed of what she saw. However, when it came to an opportunity to fix her appearance, she was not comfortable with the idea of fixing it. She originally thought that people stared at her because she was bald. But when women donated wigs for her to wear, she was frightened of them. At the end of the novel, when her reconstructive surgery was effective and she was having a conversation with a man, she was in disbelief. She even described herself as “reluctant” to believe that this man was giving her positive feedback. She ends the essay with an overall positive tone because she actually wants to see herself in the mirror instead of hiding from her image. But the blurb in the beginning of the essay implies that she eventually killed herself because of her disconnection from her identity. Grealy reminds me a little bit of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Both were uncomfortable with their roles as women and suffered severe depression.
I liked how Grealy ended the passage by actually wanting to see her reflection. However, it was difficult for me as a reader to connect to Grealy and understand why she dealt with her problems the way she did. This passage definitely was the more horrifying of the two and more eye-opening. Everyone deals with pressure to look a certain way and does not always feel comfortable with their own reflection, so that was really interesting to read about. Obviously most people do not have to deal with that issue to the extreme that Grealy did. Reading this passage would make anyone more sympathetic and kinder to those who have to go through difficult obstacles such as this.