What is the point of Walker's brief narrative about seeing the desert? How does this affect the imagery of the overall narrative?
2. Stevie Wonder: a popular singer, songwriter, and producer (b. 1950) who achieved great success in music despite being blind from birth.
How does Walker's own daughter reframe the question of the beauty (or lack thereof) in her eye?
How do you interpret the title of the essay, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self"? What "dance" is Walker referring to?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
One theme of Walker's essay is the importance of accepting imperfections in ourselves and in others. Examine the paintings in this section by Vermeer and Yusksav- age as examples of this same theme—how are they similar? How are they different?
How might "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self" fit into the model of storytelling that Toni Morrison articulates in her "Nobel Lecture" (p. 217)? Compare the following two symbols: the eye in Walker's essay, and the bird in Morrison's.
How might Joseph Stiglitz (p. 594) interpret the substandard medical care that Walker received as a child in rural Georgia? Would he see this lack of care as a logical outgrowth of the economic inequality that he examines?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Write a personal essay in the style of "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self." Use present-tense constructions to narrate the way that you learned something important over various stages of your life.
Explore the function of beauty in "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self." Look at the various ways beauty is defined in different parts of the essay, and consider how Walker's race and gender influenced these definitions.
elaine scarry
from On Beauty and Being Just
[1999]
ELAINE SCARRY (B. 1946) is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in English and American literature. Her first book, The Body in Pain (1985), is a sustained meditation on torture and the political and cultural dimensions of human suffering. It has become a classic work of cultural criticism—a form of analysis that uses techniques developed to read written texts in order to understand historical and cultural events. In recent years, Scarry has applied her analytical methods to current events in the United States. Since the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, she has written three books on national defense and political decision-making.
The following selection comes from the book On Beauty and Being Just (1999), in which Scarry sets out to rehabilitate theoretical discussions of beauty in the humanities. As she argues, while academics who study such things as music, art, and literature are constantly surrounded with beautiful things, they have been prevented from focusing on beauty per se by two pervasive political arguments. First, political critics have argued that discussing beauty distracts people from social injustices. And second, many feminists have argued that focusing on something beautiful or someone's beauty objectifies the thing or person by converting it into an object of our pleasure.
In response to these criticisms, Scarry argues that beauty can help us become more just. The word "fair," she observes, can mean either "attractive" or "just"—and this is more than simply a linguistic coincidence. Both concepts rely on the idea of symmetry. Beautiful objects (and people) are usually so considered because they are evenly proportioned. Similarly, a society can be considered just when its people are treated equally and resources are distributed evenly.
On Beauty and Being Just uses two powerful rhetorical techniques. First, Scarry invokes the authority of such philosophical figures as Plato, Boethius, and Augustine in support of her position. Even more importantly, she creates a chain of deductive arguments to bolster the following assertion: when we study and learn how to appreciate beautiful objects, we train ourselves to think about the world in terms that will lead us to greater justice.
Fairness as "A Symmetry of Everyone's Relation to One Another"
One day I ran into a friend, and when he asked me what I was doing, I said I was trying to explain how beauty leads us to justice. (It happens that this friend is a philosopher and an economist who has spent many years inquiring into the relation
between famine and forms of procedural justice such as freedom of the press. He also tracked demographic figures in Asia and North Africa that revealed more than one hundred million missing women and showed a long-standing practice of neglecting the health of girls.) Without pausing, he responded that he remembered being a child in India and coming upon Aristotle's statement that justice was a perfect cube: he had been completely baffled by the statement, except he knew it had something to do with equality in all directions.
Happening to find myself sometime later walking beside another friend, and again pressed to describe what I was up to, I said I was showing that beauty assists us in getting to justice, and—perhaps because the subject seemed out of keeping with the morning's seaside glee—I for some reason added, "But you surely don't believe this." (He is a political philosopher who inquires into the nature of deliberative processes, and has established a series of alternative models for ethics; he served in British intelligence during the Second World War and in the Foreign Office during the period of the Marshall Plan.[131]) "No," he agreed, still laughing, and high above the cresting waves, for we were walking on a steep dune, he cited with delight a proclamation about beauty's inevitable descent into bohemia. "Except, of course," he added, turning suddenly serious, and holding out his two large hands, "analogically"2 by what they share: balance and the weighing of both sides."
The speed and immediacy with which Amartya Sen and Stuart Hampshire3 spoke is indicative of the almost self-evident character of the argument that will be made here: that beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of "a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another."
When we speak about beauty, attention sometimes falls on the beautiful object, at other times on the perceiver's cognitive act of beholding the beautiful thing, and at still other times on the creative act that is prompted by one's being in the presence of what is beautiful. The invitation to ethical fairness can be found at each of these three sites. . . .
When we begin at the first of the three sites—the site of the beautiful object 5 itself—it is clear that the attribute most steadily singled out over the centuries has been "symmetry." Some eras single it out almost to the exclusion of all else (remarkably, one such period is the decade of the 1990s), whereas others insist that it is not symmetry alone but symmetry companioned by departures and exceptions from itself that makes a piece of music, a face, or a landscape beautiful (as in the
Analogically: through analogy.
Amartya Sen: a Nobel Prize—winning economist (b. 1933) from India whose research focuses on social justice; Stuart Hampshire: a British moral philosopher (1914—2004). Both were colleagues of Elaine Scarry at Harvard.
nineteenth-century romantic modification of the principles of eighteenth-century neoclassicism). The feature, despite these variations in emphasis, never ceases to be, even in eras that strive to depart from it, the single most enduringly recognized attribute. But what happens when we move from the sphere of aesthetics to the sphere of justice? Here symmetry remains key, particularly in accounts of distributive justice[132] and fairness "as a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another." It was this shared feature of beauty and justice that Amartya Sen saluted in the figure of the cube, equidistant in all directions, and that Stuart Hampshire again saluted in the figure of scales, equally weighted in both directions.