The Story of My Life Published 1903

I

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Captain Arthur Keller, a former Confederate officer, and his second wife, Kate Adams Keller. She lived as a normal, healthy child for the first eighteen months of her life. In February 1882, however, she became ill with what doctors called 'acute congestion of the stomach and brain.' A conclusive diagnosis of the exact disease has never been made, but her family discovered shortly after her recovery that she had lost both her sight and her hearing. She spent the next five years unable to communicate by using language but showing a lively intelligence in her use of signs to make her wishes known. Her parents refused to institutionalize her, as many of their friends recommended, and instead kept her as an active member of the household. But their pity for Helen caused them to spoil her badly, and by the time she was seven she was becoming a formidable adversary. Realizing that something must be done before she grew absolutely uncontrollable, her parents consulted eye and ear specialists in the hope of finding a cure. None of the doctors could heal the damage the illness had caused, but Dr. Alexander Graham Bell suggested that the Kellers contact the Perkins Institution for the Blind to see if Helen could be educated. The director of the institute, Mr. Michael Anagnos, offered one of its recent graduates as a teacher for the child, and Helen Keller's life and success are linked inextricably to the life of her famous teacher. Anne Mansfield Sullivan was born in 1866 into an Irish-American family that lived in extreme poverty, and after her mother's early death, her father abandoned his three children. Anne, already partially blinded by an eye disease that thrived in the poor living conditions of her family's home, was sent with her younger brother, Jimmie, to the Massachusetts State Infirmary. Her brother died shortly afterwards, but Anne remained in the infirmary for four years, her eyes growing worse until she was almost completely blind. Finally, during a state investigation of the infirmary, she begged one of the commissioners to send her to a school for the blind. Soon after, in October 1880, at age fourteen, she was transferred to Perkins Institution for the Blind. Anne had a difficult time at Perkins, for she had received almost no formal education until then, and she had an ungovernable temper that almost got her expelled from the school several times. But she was keen to learn and made good academic progress. After two eye operations, she recovered her sight, although it remained weak for the rest of her life. So when she arrived in Tuscumbia, on March 3, 1887, 'Teacher' (as Helen would later call her) had poor eyesight and only six years of formal education behind her. In spite of her handicaps, Sullivan possessed qualities that helped her relate to Helen. She knew what it was like to be blind. At Perkins she had known Laura Bridgman, the only deaf-blind person who had ever been taught to communicate, and she had studied the notes of Bridgman's teacher. Sullivan's infinite drive, determination, and a passion for excellence also contributed to her success. During her first month, she instilled the discipline Helen needed to enable her to learn, and on April 5, 1887, Helen finally made the connection between the words that Sullivan had been teaching her to finger spell and the objects that they named. Once she broke through this barrier to communication, Sullivan based her teaching on the principle that Helen should acquire language and knowledge like any hearing and seeing child, and she turned all Helen's experiences into opportunities for learning. Helen Keller's success was largely a result of Anne Sullivan's unflagging teaching. Both were eager for Helen to interact and compete with seeing and hearing children. Interacting with other

children required speech, and the greatest ambition of teacher and pupil was for Helen to learn to speak aloud properly. She began taking speech lessons when she was ten, and although she learned how to talk, her vocal chords had never been properly developed, and her speech was almost unintelligible to those who did not know her well. As an adult, her speech improved, but she needed an interpreter when speaking to strangers. After studying for two years at Perkins, four years at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, and two more years at the Wright Humason School for the Deaf, sixteen-year-old Helen entered a regular preparatory school for college: the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. Here and at Radcliffe College, which Helen entered four years later, Sullivan kept up the herculean effort of spelling all the lectures and much of the required reading into her student's hand. It was while she was attending Radcliffe that Keller wrote The Story of My Life. She graduated cum laude in 1904. For several years after her graduation, Keller tried to support herself and Sullivan through her writing. Unfortunately, the public most wanted to hear Keller talk about herself, a subject that she felt she had exhausted. Instead, she wrote essays expressing Socialist views on issues that many people felt were not proper for her to discuss, such as the need for doctors to put nitrate of silver in the eyes of newborns to prevent the blindness that venereal disease often caused. Some people even accused Sullivan and her husband, John Macy, of being the originators of Keller's ideas. Unable to earn enough money by writing, Keller turned to lecturing in 1913 and continued on the lecture circuit for three years. Still plagued by a lack of money, Keller began working in vaudeville, presenting a short act with Teacher on how she had been taught and advocating the right of the handicapped to a normal life. This drew a storm of criticism that she was exhibiting her handicap for profit, but Keller was finally earning enough to support herself and Sullivan. She worked on and off in vaudeville for several years until she finally found her real vocation in 1923 as a spokesperson for the American Foundation for the Blind. For the rest of her life Keller campaigned for the foundation, crisscrossing the country and eventually the world, making speeches and visiting the blind. Her efforts on behalf of the blind, deaf, mute, and handicapped people in general heavily influenced reforms that improved social and educational opportunities for the physically disabled. Sullivan's death on October 20, 1936, was a great blow to Helen, but she continued her speechmaking with the interpretation of Polly Thomson, the indispensable secretary and friend who had lived with Keller and Sullivan since 1914. Keller wrote two more books, Helen Keller's Journal (1938), a diary she had kept for the first six months following Teacher's death, and Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955). She actually had to write Teacher twice, for the first manuscript was burned, along with all her letters from Anne and her notes, in a fire that destroyed her home in 1946. Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's leading humanitarians. She is buried beside Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

II

OVERVIEW Keller's ability to communicate despite her handicaps has always fascinated people. To read her autobiography is to experience that communication as closely as possible. Readers gain a sense of what it would be like to be both deaf and blind, and of how a normal human being faced extraordinary difficulties with courage and grace. It is important to remember that Keller wrote this book while still in college, when she was about twenty-two years old. Covering only her childhood and young womanhood, this 'story of her life' is an incomplete one, for she had over sixty years yet to live.

III

SETTING The story of Keller's early life takes place during the late 1800s, a time when people's understanding of the physically disabled was much more limited than it is today. Physically disabled people were routinely institutionalized and often assumed to be mentally disabled as well. Efforts to teach them to overcome their disabilities and lead normal lives were extremely limited. But Keller was fortunate enough to have parents who refused to institutionalize her, an extraordinary teacher, and a burning desire to learn. Her accomplishments led to a greater public understanding of the handicapped. Her autobiography traces her progress over the first two decades of her life, following her from her parents' home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, through a succession of schools for the handicapped, and concluding when she is a student at Radcliffe College.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERS In one sense, Keller is really the only character in The Story of My Life. The other people are secondary to her story except as their actions affect her life. Anne Sullivan, as the person who makes it possible for Helen to communicate with other people and who serves as the primary mediator between Helen and the world, is the only other character that develops somewhat in the course of the narrative. Yet even she remains shadowy. Keller interests people because she overcame great handicaps, and her fight is both the focus and theme of her autobiography. Although loosely organized and episodic in structure, the book follows Helen's gradual growth from a helpless blind and deaf girl to an intellectually independent woman, and it emphasizes her constant striving to lead as normal a life as possible. The first chapters deal with Helen's life before the arrival of Sullivan and show how the absence of language skills imprisons her alert mind. Later chapters describe how she explores the world in the months after she acquires language. They also illustrate how capable she is of participating in all the activities of other girls her age. Keller continually focuses on her abilities, not her disabilities, so that the reader shares her discoveries with joy rather than pity. Helen's excitement about learning is one of her most appealing characteristics. Coming to language later and with more difficulty than most people sharpens her conscious awareness and enjoyment of learning. Keller's narrative reveals how Sullivan uses all their daily experiences for educational purposes, and it conveys the curiosity and joy with which Helen explores her new world. Keller's account of her formal education at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies and at Radcliffe College does not make light of the difficulties she faces in competing with seeing and hearing women in regular classes, but it also communicates her enthusiasm for her studies, particularly through her critiques of the books she reads and their impact on her.

V LITERARY QUALITIES Because The Story of My Life is an autobiography, it tends to be episodic and anecdotal rather than tightly plotted; after all, an individual's life seldom takes the form of a well-plotted novel. This structure also partly results from the circumstances of its composition. Keller wrote many of the chapters as themes for the English composition course she took while attending Radcliffe. Consequently, there is little connection between chapters, although Keller's progress towards leading a normal life provides a thematic framework for her story. Modern readers may find Keller's style old-fashioned, for she describes her experiences and feelings with sentimental Victorian language. Her writing is full of literary allusions, especially biblical references. Her imagery is so vivid and extraordinarily visual that many of her contemporary readers refused to believe that she had written the book. They failed to understand

that language is inherently visual and that Keller's style was formed by reading the works of seeing authors. Furthermore, by using tactile analogies, such as heat, she could grasp visual concepts such as color and even intensities in color, so these elements in her writing are not unnatural.

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SOCIAL SENSITIVITY Because Keller focuses on her abilities rather than on her deprivations, The Story of My Life serves as a model for what the physically disabled can accomplish. She stresses her normalcyshe enjoys the same activities that seeing and hearing people do. Her story shows readers that the physically handicapped are not 'different,' a message that was particularly relevant in her era, when people often assumed that the physically disabled were also mentally disabled. In part because of Keller's remarkable career, that attitude has decreased considerably, and modern society is more accepting of both physically and mentally disabled people. Young adults are often curious about the lives of the disabled, and The Story of My Life provides a firsthand account.

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TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Why is Helen so frustrated by her desire to communicate before Anne Sullivan arrives? 2. Helen learns that the word 'w-a-t-e-r' means what comes out of the pump in the wellhouse. Why is this such a significant discovery? 3. Why is learning to speak with her mouth important to Helen? Why does her joy in speaking make her family respond to her accomplishment in silence? 4. In her descriptions of what she has 'seen,' Helen often uses words that suggest visual images she is incapable of actually seeing, or sounds she cannot hear. Find some instances of this and explain how, as a blind or deaf person, she could use these words to describe her experience. 5. When Helen writes 'The Frost King' she genuinely believes she is making up her own story. Explain why it is not actually her story and how she plagiarizes it. What do you think about how the adults react? 6. What difficulties does Helen encounter when she goes to schools for seeing and hearing students? 7. Does the number of activities in which Helen participates surprise you? Why or why not?

VIII

IDEAS FOR REPORTS AND PAPERS 1. Keller worked to make the world more accessible to physically disabled people. What programs does your community have that carry on her work? What are their purposes and accomplishments? 2. Sullivan was as remarkable a woman as her student Helen. Read a biography about her and discuss how her background affected her work with Helen. 3. Learn the manual alphabet. Compare it with American sign language. What are their similarities and differences? What advantages and disadvantages does each one have? 4. Many editions of The Story of My Life include the letters Sullivan wrote to people at Perkins Institution for the Blind during the first years she worked with Keller. After reading these, explain her philosophy of education. What were her methods? Why were they successful? 5. Watch the film The Miracle Worker. How does it portray Helen Keller? Anne Sullivan? What are some differences between the movie account and the account Keller gives in The Story of My Life?

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ADAPTATIONS

Although several biographies had been written about Keller since her emergence into the public eye, it was not until 1953 that anyone attempted serious adaptations to other media. After reading The Story of My Life, William Gibson wrote a ballet with vocal accompaniment based on the book. Although the ballet was never produced, director Arthur Penn commissioned Gibson to use the subject matter for a television production for the drama series 'Playhouse 90.' Starring in the television production were Teresa Wright as Anne Sullivan and Patty McCormack as Helen. With public interest aroused through this production, Gibson revised the film into a Broadway drama, which opened in October 1959 as The Miracle Worker. Anne Bancroft played Anne; Patty Duke played Helen. For Duke, this was her first major appearance as an actress; for Bancroft, it was the first important role she had been given in a decade. When the play was adapted back to film in 1962, Bancroft and Duke again played the leads, winning enormous critical acclaim, as well as Oscars for their emotionally charged portrayals of teacher and student. While the book traces Keller's life through her college years, The Miracle Worker focuses only on the first month of her life after Sullivan becomes her teacher. Keller is portrayed as a spoiled terror who dominates her weak father and indulgent mother. Uncontrollable because no one knows how to communicate with her, she throws tantrums, breaks china, and fights with people. Sullivan, who is tough yet empathetic, believes that Helen must be tamed before she can be taught, and the two push each other to their limits. Finally, after Helen deliberately spills a pitcher of water at the dinner table and Anne drags her outside to the water pump to refill it, Helen makes connections between water and the letters 'w-a-t-e-r' that Anne spells out in her hand, and this breakthrough marks the beginning of Helen's new life. The 107-minute film obviously embellishes and dramatizes Keller's account, and the drama is as much Anne's story as Helen's. But for whatever liberties they take with the autobiography, the play and film galvanize the audience with the power of these women's commitments and the bonds that make it possible for Helen to escape her isolated world.

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