Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller - Softcover

Kleege, Georgina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1563682958 ISBN 13: 9781563682957

Publisher: Gallaudet University Press, 2006

Synopsis

As a young blind girl, Georgina Kleege repeatedly heard the refrain, “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” Kleege’s resentment culminates in her book Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, an ingenious examination of the life of this renowned international figure using 21st-century sensibilities. Kleege’s absorption with Keller originated as an angry response to the ideal of a secular saint, which no real blind or deaf person could ever emulate. However, her investigation into the genuine person revealed that a much more complex set of characters and circumstances shaped Keller’s life.

Blind Rage employs an adroit form of creative nonfiction to review the critical junctures in Keller’s life. The simple facts about Helen Keller are well-known: how Anne Sullivan taught her deaf-blind pupil to communicate and learn; her impressive career as a Radcliffe graduate and author; her countless public appearances in various venues, from cinema to vaudeville, to campaigns for the American Foundation for the Blind. But Kleege delves below the surface to question the perfection of this image. Through the device of her letters, she challenges Keller to reveal her actual emotions, the real nature of her long relationship with Sullivan, with Sullivan’s husband, and her brief engagement to Peter Fagan. Kleege’s imaginative dramatization, distinguished by her depiction of Keller’s command of abstract sensations, gradually shifts in perspective from anger to admiration. Blind Rage criticizes the Helen Keller myth for prolonging an unrealistic model for blind people, yet it appreciates the individual who found a practical way to live despite the restrictions of her myth.

About this title

About the Author:

Georgina Kleege is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, CA.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

from Part One:
Consciousness on Trial

February 3

Dear Helen Keller:

     Allow me to introduce myself. I am a writer and part-time English professor. I am American, married, middle-aged, middle class. Like you, I am blind, though not deaf. But the most important thing you need to know about me, and the reason for my letter, is that I grew up hating you. Sorry to be so blunt, especially on such short acquaintance, but one of the advantages of writing to a dead person is there’s no need to stand on ceremony. And you should know the truth from the start. I hated you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity. “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” people always said to me. Or that’s what it felt like whenever your name came up. “Count your blessings,” they told me. “Yes, you’re blind, but poor little Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and no one ever heard her complain.”

     I am not alone in this. Many disabled people think you did our cause a lot of harm. Your life story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual’s fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions, affecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action. Lately, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, my feelings about you have mellowed. It occurred to me that I should not hold you responsible for the use others made of your life story. This led me to dip into your autobiographical writing for the first time. Even more surprising, it led me to take a road trip to visit your childhood home, Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. And I thought you’d like to know what I found there.

     I went with my husband Nick who is almost always up for a road trip. We took the house tour, which was standard fare for a local-hero museum. The guide was a woman pushing sixty, probably a volunteer, apparently reciting a script. She rattled off a number of facts about the town, the region, and antebellum architecture—all the predictable stuff.

     Then, in one of the downstairs rooms, she pointed out a carpet on the floor that had been woven especially for you by I forget whom. She explained all this, then said, “Isn’t it lovely?” We murmured agreement. Then she said, “Too bad Helen Keller never saw it.” Her voice had a throaty throb as she delivered the line. I realized that the statement was supposed to catch us up short, jar us out of our complacency, remind us that you were deaf and blind. We were supposed to feel grateful and lucky, and intone a private prayer of gratitude: “I wake each day and thank the Lord I was not born Helen Keller.”

     I should have expected nothing less. Where better to deliver the “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller” message than in your childhood home? I should have steeled myself against it, but the resentment I feel about the message is so old and deep, it’s like a knee-jerk reflex. And on this occasion, I turned my resentment on the woman pointing out the carpet that poor little you never saw. I said, “But she could touch it.”

     “What?” the guide said. “She what?”

“She could touch it,” I said. “She had the sense of touch. One of the pleasures of a nice carpet is texture. She could feel it. She could walk on it barefoot. She had an imagination. Someone could describe it to her, and she could imagine it.”

     I was talking like a crank. There’s a certain vibration that comes into a person’s voice when they’re going off the deep end, and I had it. I could feel the guide eyeing me askance. Was this how I was going to be? I was spoiling her spiel. I could feel the rest of the tour group—a van load of Baptists from Tennessee—looking away.

     In any case, I quieted down and we moved on. I felt the guide was leery of me. As she pointed out the pump organ in the parlor, she paused briefly. I sensed she was supposed to say something about how you never heard its beautiful music, but since she had a crank in the crowd today, she dropped the line.

     As we surveyed each room from the doorway, our guide was at pains to tell us which pieces of furniture actually belonged to your family, which were of the period, and which were merely reproductions. I’ve been on enough such house tours to know authenticity is always an issue. I wished she would let me walk around the rooms and touch something. This was not the most blind-friendly museum I’ve ever visited. At Louis Braille’s house in France, they let you put your hands on anything that’s not in a case. But perhaps fewer blind people visit your house.

     As if to confirm this, our guide spent a lot of time talking about the photographs on the walls of the central hallway. Although I have some residual vision, I don’t see photographs well. Nick told me what I was looking at and read me the labels. There was one of you at about age seven, around the time Anne Sullivan, your teacher, came into your life. The guide said, “Wasn’t she a lovely child?” Then she shook her head. To be accurate, I don’t know if she shook her head or not. But her tone was that of someone shaking her head at the waste of it all. As if it would be less tragic if you had been homely.

     I swallowed the urge to make this comment aloud. I am so used to this attitude, it hardly even registers anymore. “What a pretty girl,” people say. “Too bad she’s blind.” Apparently, beauty is wasted on us because we can’t see the reflection in the mirror, can’t see men’s heads turn when we enter a room. In this picture, you’re wearing a dress with a lot of ruffles, and your hair is an elaborate arrangement of ringlets. Do you look pretty? Nick told me that there’s a certain set to your lower lip, which makes it sound like your expression must be at odds with the prettiness of your dress and hair. He said you look posed and a bit uncertain about it. What could a photograph mean to you at that age? Later, you got the hang of it. In other photographs around the place, you’re always wearing a big smile and have your eyes aimed directly at the lens.

     Next to this photo, there was one of Anne Sullivan—“Teacher,” as you always called her—taken at about the same time. The guide said, “Wasn’t she pretty?” with that same “such a pity” tone. Only the pity in her case is not that she was blind or deaf or anything else. The pity in her case is that she sacrificed her life to be your companion and helpmate, when she was pretty enough to get herself a man and have a normal life. Again, I could have argued otherwise. But I didn’t.

     “Is she pretty?” I asked Nick. He told me she was intense looking, at once frail and fiery. I have no idea what that looks like, but the description fits what I know about her personality, so I took him at his word.

     Up until this point, the house tour followed the predictable course. Yes, there was that crack about the carpet, but I admit most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. But once we got to the dining room, things got strange. The guide called it the “famous dining room” where all your “famous battles took place.” She called you “a regular little hellion,” and narrated the struggle Teacher had getting you to eat with a fork and fold your napkin. As she was talking, I realized suddenly that she took The Miracle Worker as gospel. Outside the house, we found “the famous pump house,” a sort of fenced-in gazebo around the famous pump that is the central prop in the climatic scene of that play. But the ultimate weirdness was farther back, behind some outbuildings, where there was a permanent stage set and bleachers. There, in the summer, they stage nightly performances of The Miracle Worker.

     Here is where I began to articulate something, Helen. Mind if I call you Helen? My problem with all this, Helen, is not that the play is inaccurate. The playwright William Gibson drew those scenes from the letters and journals Teacher kept during her first few weeks at Ivy Green. In fact, as the play depicts, one day at the end of March 1887, Teacher pumped water over one of your hands while spelling the word water into your other, and you suddenly, miraculously, discovered language. You dropped the mug you’d been holding, said “wa-wa,” a baby-talk word you’d retained from before the illness that left you deaf and blind. Then you went on to learn to communicate with the manual alphabet, to read, to write, to speak, and generally to triumph over adversity in all the laudable ways that made you famous.

     Part of what disturbed me was not that this event was enshrined in your home, but that it is re-enacted there. Where else in the world are events from a person’s life ritualistically recreated in this way? Jerusalem springs to mind, The Way of the Cross. And while you may find the impulse to beatify, even deify you, flattering, it comes at such a high cost, Helen, particularly for the generations of disabled people who follow you.

     But the main thing that disturbed me as I walked around the stage in your backyard was that The Miracle Worker is Teacher’s story, not yours. She was the one who worked the miracle and triumphed over adversity. You were the adversity she overcame. You were the site of miracles. And while I admire Teacher’s accomplishment, the play distorts things a little.

     You were, in part, responsible for this. Throughout your life, you were always quick to give Teacher the lion’s share of credit for your education. And you narrated the same events—the dining room battles, the pump scene—in your own memoirs.

     But I went to your house to find something else, another story. As we walked around the stage and back to the house, I scuffed the ground to raise a dust. I inhaled it. I guess I was hoping there might still be a few molecules of you left there, the you before language, the pre-Teacher you. I wanted to feel you there somewhere. I imagined you, age five or six, crouching in the shadows under the back steps. Your hair was a wad of tangles. Your face and hands were sticky with some sweet you filched from the pantry. Your pinafore was crumpled and stained. Your feet were shoeless, caked with mud. As I conjured your presence, I felt energy emanating from you which was both curious and hostile. But not fearful, never fearful. I knew that if I bent down to touch you, you would catch hold of my hand. Your touch would not be gentle. You would smear your hand around my face to check if I was someone you knew. You would pat my pockets, looking for candy. Finding none, you might thrust my hand away, slapping at me, kicking at my legs with your calloused heels. Then you would scramble away from me, scoot backward into the darkness.

     That was the child I went there to find, not the “lovely child” of the photographs, the paragon of cheerfulness and industry. In your adult writings when you attempted to recreate your pre-linguistic experiences, you called that child “Phantom.” I wish you’d found a different name. Phantom is too ghostly, too wispy, when my sense of that child is solidly corporeal, a dense tangle of physical needs and desires. And that child had a language of sorts. Before Teacher came, you were able to communicate with gestures and signs, some of them quite elaborate. You had signs for every member of your family, all the servants, and the regular visitors to your home. Your sign for your mother was to pat your cheek. Your sign for your favorite aunt was to tie imaginary bonnet strings under your chin. Your sign for your father was to put on imaginary eyeglasses and read an imaginary newspaper. And you had signs for things as well, typically food, since as for most young children, food loomed large in your concerns. If you wanted bread and butter, you would saw at the air with the edge of your hand then make deft buttering motions with your finger. If you wanted ice cream, you would turn the crank of an imaginary freezer, then hug yourself and shiver. The people around you understood these signs and could generally give you what you wanted. The problem was that your system was not particularly versatile or flexible. In effect, you could say, “I want . . . ,” but could not communicate anything more nuanced. And no one could use your signs to communicate back to you.

     I may be wrong to call this gestural system of yours a language. It is perhaps no more a language than the way pets communicate with their people. For instance, one of my cats is currently sitting on the floor and meowing at me because she wants to be fed. When I don’t respond, she will jump up on my desk and pace back and forth in front of my keyboard until I give in and go into the kitchen to fill her dish. Because I do this, she will repeat these actions anytime she wants to be fed. But this is not really language. I cannot use these same behaviors to communicate anything back to her. And besides, I know you never liked any comparison between your experiences and those of animals. And you were right. Such analogies coincide too neatly with ancient prejudices some seeing-hearing people still hold about us “sense cripples,” as you called people like us. Our reliance on the less elite senses—smell, taste, and touch—seems to drop us a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder.

     But my point is, you understood something about language even before Teacher came. You knew that other people communicated using their mouths. You were in the habit of touching people’s faces to feel their expressions, and you observed how their mouths moved, how their lips puckered and stretched, and how they emitted small puffs of warm breath. You imitated this, walking around the house flapping your jaws at anyone you met, occasionally making noises.

     What happened to that child? I wanted to know. In The Miracle Worker, the story you helped to inscribe on the American collective memory, Teacher came to tame that child and turn her into the “lovely child” with all the ruffles and ringlets. At the pump, she baptized you in the font of knowledge, washing away the sin of ignorance. I recognize that this formula makes for a dramatic scene, and fits already established narrative patterns, but it oversimplifies the facts. Water was not the first word you learned. You picked up on the fingerspelling trick almost from the first day. What happened at the pump was something more subtle. The pump incident served to clarify the confusion you were having about container and contents. You had been confusing mug with milk, and Teacher wanted to show you that a mug could contain other liquids—water (who knows what she would have tried next) coffee, or chicken soup. The pump moment was less a miraculous revelation than a shifting of gears, all...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1563682958
• ISBN 13: 9781563682957
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224