Dai Sijie's Creation of Beauty Jennifer Zhou 9th Grade

Beauty - in its physical embodiments - is one of the most important overarching themes of Dai Sijie's novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Dai creates a sense of beauty in the novel by highlighting the beauty of the characters, the place and the natural scenery. In exploring beauty in a truly multi-faceted manner, he is exceptional in his use of literary techniques such as attention to detail, juxtaposition, connotation, and metaphor, techniques that together indicate the human desire for beauty.

Firstly, Dai creates a sense of beauty through his portrayal of specific characters; most obvious embodiment of this approach is the Seamstress. In the third chapter of the novel, when Luo and Ma arrive at the tailor's shop and are first introduced to the Seamstress, she is described with extraordinarily close attention to detail. Instead of talking about her appearance as a whole, Dai instead chooses to write about specific qualities such as the ‘sparkle in her eyes’, the ‘sturdy and supple’ appearance of her shoes, and the way that her pigtail falls from the ‘nape of her neck down to the small of her back’. The smallness of these details, combined with the vulnerability suggested through connotation by words such as ‘...