This paper traces Helen Keller's life from infancy through adulthood, examining how she overcame the challenges of deafblindness with the help of her teacher and mentor Annie Sullivan. It explores Keller's intellectual and social development, her emergence as a published author and public speaker, and how Sullivan's progressive background influenced Keller's later activism against racial injustice and social inequality. Through analysis of Keller's autobiography and biographical sources, the paper demonstrates how personal adversity, dedicated mentorship, and exposure to liberal thought shaped one of the twentieth century's most remarkable public figures.
Born a normal, healthy child in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880, Helen Keller was struck by an illness when she was just nineteen months old. The illness left her deaf and blind, a terrible shock to any baby and its family. This paper details how she emerged from the darkness and silence to become a political activist, noted author, world traveler, and a role model for other blind and deaf individuals.
Imagine a baby losing hearing and sight at a very young age, yet battling through depression and countless challenges—that is a snapshot of Helen Keller's early life. In The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition, readers gain a vivid understanding of her accomplishments and world travels. Author John Albert Macy introduced Keller's book and provided important biographical background on Keller, who died in 1968.
Things certainly did not come easily for this deaf and blind person growing up in the South in the nineteenth century. However, Keller had a wonderful mentor, tutor, and friend in Annie Sullivan, who brought out her best talents and skills. As Macy writes, "Her life became legend. Deaf and blind, she had learned language...so well that she graduated cum laude...with a Bachelor's Degree in English from Radcliffe" (Macy 2004). She went on to write fourteen books, and once she found her footing—thanks in large part to Sullivan's contributions—she became "extraordinarily happy, kind, and generous, a being on the boundary of divinity" (Macy).
Many important and prestigious Americans came into contact with Keller and praised the person she became. Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, called her "the most remarkable woman since Joan of Arc." Alexander Graham Bell said he saw in Keller "more of the divine than has been manifest in anyone I ever met before" (Macy). Ironically, Keller's remarkable ability to learn languages earned her both praise and criticism. Macy notes that she was seen as "fraudulent" and as a "plagiarist"—a person who used the words of others. Blind psychologist Thomas Cutsworth commented that "Her own experience and her own world were neglected...It is a birthright sold for a mass of verbiage" (Macy xxii).
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world...I had neither will nor intellect," Keller wrote (Einhorn 1998). She called herself a "phantom," and in Lois Einhorn's book Helen Keller, Public Speaker: Sightless But Seen, Deaf But Heard, Keller described her sense of desperation and isolation before Sullivan's arrival:
"Ours is not the stillness which soothes the weary senses; it is an inhuman silence where severs and estranges. It is a silence not to be broken by a word of greeting, or the song of birds, or the sigh of a breeze. It is a silence which isolates, cruelly, completely" (Einhorn 11).
That silence was broken when Keller's life took a positive turn on March 3, 1887, just before her seventh birthday. That was when Sullivan arrived. The first thing Sullivan did was teach Keller to use the manual alphabet, having her spell words into Sullivan's hand. Soon, Keller was spelling many words, but Einhorn notes that Keller "had no idea that she was communicating. To her the spelling was at first a game and language was something she still was oblivious to." However, one month into Sullivan's arrival, Keller stood by the family's water well and "for the first time she understood that words were names that represented objects" (Einhorn 12).
Keller's education continued with the goal of learning to speak. She attended Horace Mann School in Boston, learning under the tutelage of Miss Sarah Fuller. Her first words were stammered, but they came out: "It is warm" (Einhorn 14).
Keller was ebullient about learning to identify things with names, and her joy shines through her narrative in The Story of My Life. She and Sullivan "spent many happy hours and played at learning geography. I built dams of pebbles, made islands and lakes, and dug riverbeds, all for fun, and never dreamed that I was learning a lesson" (Keller 31). When Sullivan taught Keller about geography, she made "raised maps in clay, so that I could feel the mountain ridges and valleys, and follow with my fingers the devious course of rivers" (Keller 31).
Her narrative is full of enthusiastic wonderment at all the discoveries waiting to be made once Sullivan arrived in her life. Keller wrote that she learned from Sullivan, and also, "I learned from life itself. At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher who unfolded and developed them...it was my teacher's genius, her quick sympathy, her loving tact which made the first years of my education so beautiful" (Keller 33).
Always fond of metaphors, Keller wrote that a child's mind is like "a shallow brook which ripples and dances merrily over the stony course of its education"—but it took someone like Sullivan to make it real for Keller. When she arrived at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, another world opened up for her. She met other blind young people and learned to read books with her fingers (Keller 37).
Twenty-one-year-old Annie Sullivan was from the East Coast, politically and socially far removed from Alabama. Because of Keller's disability and the close association with Sullivan that resulted from it, this bonding with a progressive person gave Keller opportunities to question racial bigotry. In time, Sullivan opened the door to Keller's understanding of the world from a liberal perspective, shaping what Keller wrote and which movements she chose to support.
Keller's father, Captain Arthur Keller, and her mother, Kate, considered putting Helen into an educational institution for the blind but resisted because of "the linkage between educational reformers and abolitionism" (Nielsen 2007). In time, though, they brought Sullivan into the home to help their daughter, not realizing that Sullivan's progressive views conflicted sharply with Southern views on race. Sullivan had great admiration for several sworn enemies of slavery and the Confederacy. Nielsen writes that Sullivan "hesitated to even accept employment" with the Keller family for fear that the family "had once owned slaves" (788). Indeed, Sullivan was shocked to arrive in a segregated town, but her devotion to Helen kept her focused on her mission.
Covering certain passages from Helen Keller's books gives an alert reader a window into the brilliance of Keller's narrative. Justin Leiber quotes Keller in his scholarly piece, asserting that Keller was a "cognitive scientist" (Leiber 1996). Explaining the difference between sighted people and those who rely on touch to research and learn, Keller wrote: "My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women" (Leiber).
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