Helen Keller’s The Story of My life
They Story of My Life is an autobiography written by Helen Keller, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor’s degree in arts. Her educational achievement is even more notorious considering that at the beginning of the twentieth century women had limited educational and work opportunities. At 22 and while still a student at Radcliffe College she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which had appeared the year before in installment form in the Ladies Home Journal magazine.1 Helen Keller opened the doors to education and opportunity to many blind and disabled people not only in the United States but also around the world. The title of the book is misleading because the autobiography focuses on Helen Keller’s early education, emphasizing the milestones she reached in her struggle to break away from the silent and dark world in which she lived before her teacher and lifetime companion, Anne Sullivan came to her life. As it turned out, she lived a long and productive life. Born on June 27, 1880, she died on June, 1968 only a few weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday. She became an accomplished author, writing many essays and books among which are The World I Live in, My Later Life, and Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy. She was politically active, campaigning for such social causes as labor rights, women’s suffrage and birth control. 2 She raised funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she worked for forty years, becoming an advocate for the education of the blind worldwide. When visiting veteran hospitals, she gave encouragement and moral support to injured soldiers returning from World War II. 3
The Story of My Life is made up of three parts: Part 1 is the autobiographical narrative with which most readers are familiar. Part 2 consists of a series of letters written by Helen Keller to family and friends. These letters follow the same chronology as the narrative. What is interesting about these letters is that readers can trace Helen Keller’s language development from short often grammatically incorrect sentences to more mature and well structure letters as her language skill develop from her avid reading and from conversations with numerous friends including famous people such as Mark Twain and Alexander Bell. Part 3 of the book consists of supplementary writings about Helen’s education, including excerpts from reports written by Anne Sullivan. John Albert Macy, the editor, is responsible for this section.
In The Story of My Life Helen Keller focuses primarily on her formative years. She describes how she sensed she was different from others and how she longed to communicate with the people around her. It is remarkable that so much of the book is devoted to aspects of language acquisition, be it spoken or written. She narrates how she learned the finger alphabet; readers will forever remember the memorable episode where she finally understands that the fresh liquid flowing into her hands from the water pump is represented by the word w a t e r, which Anne Sullivan spells into her hand. From this moment on, she realizes that everything has a name and demands to know the names of all objects driving Anne Sullivan to exhaustion. Another interesting episode is the one where she illustrates the enormous difficulty to grasp abstract concepts such as love: “what is love?’ I asked. She drew me closer to her and said, “It is here,” pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.”4
At the age of ten she began the grueling task of learning to speak. Unfortunately her speech was only intelligible to close friends and Helen was never quite satisfied with her progress. An unhappy experience with written language came with the Frost King affair when she was twelve years old. She had intended to write a story as a birthday present for Mr. Michael Anagnos, the principal at Perkins School for the Blind, who was a dear friend of hers. Unfortunately, it was discovered that Helen had committed involuntary plagiarism by writing almost word for word a story she had previously read. Upon reflecting on the incident which greatly upset her she states that appropriating someone else’s words is only the first step in becoming an accomplished author:
“The young writer, as Stevenson has said, instinctively tries to copy whatever seems most admirable, and he shifts his admiration with astonishing versatility. It is only after years of this sort of practice that even great men have learned to marshal the legion of words which come thronging through every byway of the mind.”5
Had it not been for the constant encouragement of Anne Sullivan, Helen might not have become an author, as this experience proved to be quite traumatic for her.
At Radcliffe College Helen’s educational curriculum reflected the education ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the institution was an all-female school for upper class girls similar to what Harvard was for men at that time; the program of study was largely humanistic in content. She studied geometry, algebra, and philosophy. She learned Greek, Latin, French and German and read great works of literature by Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille and Moliere among many other German, British, French and American authors. While language study was compulsory, it is also true that Helen had a genuine interest in foreign languages, especially in German. Studying these authors was a daunting task because most of the books were not available in braille and Anne Sullivan had to read them to her finger spelling in her hand. Anne also attended Helen’s classes so she could hand spell the class lectures. .Helen relates that she was unable to take class notes because she was busy listening with her hands and she had to write what she remembered about the lectures after returning home.
Often The Story of My Life appears in reading lists for junior high students. This is understandable because the protagonist is a child growing up among many difficulties. Young students can identify with Helen’s joy as she establishes communication with the children of the Tuscumbia elementary school during a Christmas party and with the blind children of Perkins Institute who speak her language, that is, they can spell using the manual alphabet. Young students find many descriptions of juvenile books Helen read such as Little Women and Rip Van Winkle. Young students will find interesting description of the Alabaman countryside. However, the book is much more than a book for young readers. The last chapters where Keller discusses her college education and her many acquaintances of prominent people of the time will not appeal to young students. Above all, young students receive valuable lessons in motivation, perseverance and determination as Helen narrates how she learned to speak and to master regular school subjects such as geography and math with which they are familiar. Critics who recommend the book to young students for the reasons just mentioned are correct; however, the book is even more important as a valuable reading experience for social workers, regular and special education teachers, parents and all who must work with handicapped children. First, the book is a benchmark because it is one of many subsequent books that record the hurdles faced by a handicapped child trying to overcome a disability. Teachers and parents can draw valuable lessons on teaching language to their children. Anne Sullivan knew that children acquire language through repetition and imitation. This is why from the moment she arrives to the Keller household she constantly spells words into Helen’s hand even if she cannot yet grasp their meaning. Anne Sullivan must have had a lot of patience because her efforts seemed fruitless until the water pump experience, but in the end this patience paid off. Concerning her college education, Helen makes interesting reflections about the lack of time to think because students are so busy analyzing literary works and learning pieces of information whose relationships to each other are not always obvious. She says that students are so busy learning that they don’t have time to think.
Helen Keller writes her autobiography using a first person point of view. There are few dialogs, and while her style is simple, her language is rich in description, both sensory and visual. Since she lived in the countryside in late nineteenth century, she was in close proximity to flowers, shrubs, trees and animals. The reader wonders about her very visual descriptions of landscapes since she lost her sight at a very early age. One plausible explanation is that she acquired visual vocabulary through her vast reading experience and through the descriptions given to her by Anne Sullivan and other friends. The joy of learning is a constant theme in the narrative. Helen speaks of abandoning herself to what books have to offer without regard to style or how well they were written. 6 The themes of perseverance and determination run through the narrative. When she is ten years old she expresses her fervent desire to learn to speak and shortly thereafter she voices her desire to go to college. She manages to attend a prestigious school, but she never voices any concern as to whether her family can afford that kind of education; it is almost as if she were entitled to a high quality education regardless of her family’s economic standing. Fortunately for her, she had achieved a lot of fame for being the first deafblind person to be successfully educated and did not lack wealthy benefactors who could help her financially. The narrative follows a linear trajectory going from accomplishment to accomplishment but there are few details about her relationship with members of her family or other significant persons. She has a sister, Mildred, but Helen says little about her relationship to her. Early in the narrative Helen reveals that her mother was an important person, but this is before Anne Sullivan came into her life. While Helen had many friends, (the last chapter of the narrative is devoted to the many people that befriended her) it seems that the most significant relationship was the one she developed with Anne Sullivan. Helen writes, “My teacher is so near to me I scarcely think of myself apart from her. . . I feel that her being is inseparable from my own and that the footsteps of my life are in hers.” 7 The tone of the book is optimistic for the most part except when she discusses the Frost King affair. One senses a lot of anguish and pain not only for having appropriated another writer’s words but for losing a dear friend: Mr. Michael Anagnos, the person for whom she had written the story as a birthday present. Another passage in the book where the reader senses melancholy is when she describes the daunting task of preparing for exams. It is necessary for her to spend many more hours studying while her classmates have time to study and also to go out and have fun. However, the tone of the writing soon switches back to optimism once Helen gather strength to continue. Reading The Story of My Life is a worthwhile reading experience for readers of all ages
While there is no doubt that Helen’s success as an author, educator and political activist is due to her intelligence and perseverance, it is also true that her success is due to the particular set of circumstances which surrounded her life. She had the fortune of having Anne Sullivan at her side for almost fifty years. Anne died in 1936 and from the time she arrived to the Keller household in 1887, she became Helen’s constant interpreter about the world which Helen could neither see nor hear. Anne had been blind during her childhood, but had managed to recover some of her sight after a series of painful operations. It has been pointed out that Anne’s eyesight was greatly sacrificed to help Helen read through the many required readings in college. 8 It is s not only her eyesight, however, that was sacrificed, but her entire life. By educating Helen Anne Sullivan achieved enormous success as an educator; she had a share in Helen’s fame and income; they also traveled extensively throughout the world. Nevertheless, Anne’s professional success as an educator came at the price of sacrificing her personal life. Helen was also fortunate to have been born to a middle class family who could afford to take her to doctors and to the Perkins Institute for the Blind and above all to pay for the services of an individual teacher.
Helen’s life circumstances stand in sharp contrast to those of Laura Bridgeman, another American girl who, like Helen, was born with normal sight and hearing but who also lost her senses as a result of contracting scarlet fever. Her name was Laura Bridgman. She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1829 to a family of farmers. Shut out from the world and unable to make herself understood, she often became violent and had to be controlled by sheer force. He father was the only one who could control her. When Dr. Samuel Howe, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind, heard about Laura, he convinced her parents to allow her to travel to the school to see if she could be educated. Dr. Howe had no trouble convincing her parents to let her travel to Boston. He and other teachers began teaching Laura in a remarkably similar way Anne had taught Helen: they were successful and Laura became a world celebrity, in part because the British writer Charles Dickens visited the school, wrote about this successful education experiment and Laura became famous overnight around the world. 9 Another researcher on Laura Bridgman has said that she was “Helen Keller before Helen Keller.”10 According to this writer, Samuel Howe soon lost interest in the education of Laura; he got married and left for a long honey moon trip that lasted eighteen months.11 Sadly, Laura did not have the opportunity to go to college. Her parents had to work too hard and her mother was so busy with the farm work and tending to her other children that she stopped answering Laura’s letters. She remained at Perkins School for the rest of her life and died in obscurity at the age of 59. In her writings about Laura Bridgman, Mahoney reports that Anne Sullivan considered Laura Bridgman intellectually superior to Helen Keller. Mahoney continues to add that Helen Keller herself admitted that if Laura had had a teacher like Anne, she would have easily surpassed her. 12 In the case of severely handicapped children the stories of Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman show that intelligence alone is not sufficient to be successful as an individual.
Even without knowing about Laura Bridgman, the most important lessons educators need to draw from Keller’s autobiography is that in order for severely handicapped children to attain maximum development they must have a supportive home and school environment. In the case of deafblind children, with a regular 8-hour school schedule and with multiple tasks, teachers can hardly be expected to give the high quality education Helen Keller was fortunate to have. Herein lies the reason why many severely handicapped children may never reach their full intellectual potential. Parents and teacher should be careful not to overemphasize the life of Helen Keller as a role model for children in general.
Notes
“Helen Keller Biography,” American Foundation for the Blind, Web, 2016.
2 “ Review: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, The Project Gutenberg Project Discovering Forgotten Classics in the Public Domain, Web, 20 March, 2013.
3“Helen Keller biography”
4 Helen Keller The Story of My Life, (New York: Doubleday Page & Company, 1905) A Celebration of Women Writers, Web, 1 April, 2016.
5 Helen Keller. The Story of My Life
6 Helen Keller. The Story of My Life
7 Helen Keller. The Story of My Life
8 “Helen Keller Biography,” American Foundation for the Blind, Web, 2016.
9 “Laura Bridgman,” Perkins School for the Blind, Web, 7 April, 2016.
10 Rose Mary Mahoney, “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Web, 7 April 2016
11 Rose Mary Mahoney, “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Web, 7 April 2016
12 Rose Mary Mahoney, “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Web, 7 April 2016
Works Cited
“Helen Keller Biography,” American Foundation for the Blind, Web, 2016.
Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life, New York: Doubleday Page & Company, 1905 A Celebration of Women Writers, Web, 1 April, 2016.
“Laura Bridgman,” Perkins School for the Blind, Web, 7 April, 2016.
Mahoney, Rose Mary, “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Web, 7 April 2016
Review: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, The Project Gutenberg Project Discovering Forgotten Classics in the Public Domain, Web, 20 March, 2013.
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