Eyes are Sympathetic

In Alice Walker's When The Other Dancer is the Self, we take an extreme look at the theme of beauty. Alice Walker presents us with a series of vignettes from points in her life that had a significant impact on her current way of living and the idea of beauty is always an underlying theme. The story takes a drastic turn when she tells about her experience of getting shot in the eye at age 8 with a BB gun pellet which leaves her blind in one eye. The line that the doctor says, "Eyes are sympathetic," I found to be a very strange one at first because he is talking about how when one eye goes blind, the other one tends to follow, but this line seemed to have another meaning too. The whole concept of beauty is seen as one that Alice always struggled with because she was always so conscious of her eye and hideous scar that was in the middle of it. She never thought about the uniqueness or beauty of her eye until her daughter told her that she could see another world in her eye. The line, "Eyes are sympathetic" struck me at this time in the story because it is Alice's daughter's eyes which are sympathetic because they see something completely different in her mothers eyes. She sees a new world, a thing of beauty in her mother's eyes and it completely changes Alice's self consciousness about her eye. Alice, from that point, does not feel self conscious about her eye because of the compassion and sympathy that her daughter showed when looking into her mother's eyes. The idea that a child can look into a scar that is considered hideous and see something beautiful shows how that eyes really do have sympathy but in a different way. The parallelism here is what struck me the most in this story.