“Everything Has A Beauty, But Not Everyone Sees It:”
People allow their self-proclaimed flaws to dictate how live their lives by limiting the choices they have because they always need to factor how their flaw will affect the outcome. Characters such as the protagonists from Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac to Alice Walker’s Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self allowed themselves to become insecure because of their self-proclaimed deformity and then they understand the fact that their physical flaw was a part of who they were and thus accepted it. Looking at the bigger picture, Cyrano de Bergerac lived with his colossal nose his whole life, in contrast to Alice Walker’s character who was shot in the eye with a copper pellet at the tender age of eight.
Having dealt with something your whole life versus learning to deal with it at a vulnerable age makes all the difference pertaining to how you live your life. Although no specific examples were given in the play, the audience could infer that at an early age Cyrano would not let his nose hold him back from all that he could become. He took every insult or complaint in stride and fought back with everything he had whether it was brains or brawn. Years of ignoring the stares and laughing at glares allowed him to play up his strengths. On his deathbed was when Cyrano realized that his nose was not a burden at all, but something that made him who he was. The woman in Alice Walker’s essay Beauty: When the Dance Is the Self, was more greatly impacted because she clung to her former self, the girl that was not known for her strange looking eye. One can see how her scar affected her outlook on life. During her recollection of the accident she said, “For six years I do not stare at anyone because I do not raise my head.” This young girl lost all sense of self-confidence that she possessed before the incident happened. She did not fight to overcome her flaw, but let it control her and dictate how she lived. She had been traumatized at an early age and did not have the will power to overcome her hopelessness.
