The reader will excuse me if I break form and begin the ultimate faux pas in formal writing: using first person narrative. I had difficulty penning an introduction to the topic of Helen Keller. The writer’s block was lifted, however, when I performed the mundane task of turning off the dryer in my basement. I did not bother turning on the lights, and was guided by the neon glow from the instrument’s panel. After I turned it off, I found myself in complete darkness. In my own basement, surely, I could find my way to the stairs. It was more of an arduous task than I had anticipated. The clutter of my basement proved a trying ground. I relied on my senses of touch, smell and hearing to find my way to the stairs. “This,” I thought, “was the world of Helen Keller.” Then I corrected myself. She was deaf as well as blind. Furthermore, I could never experience her world, even were my hearing and sight both to vanish. This world was strange to me, but was her home. One can never experience another person’s world.
       The very name “Helen Keller” immediately brings certain images to mind: a young girl in turn-of-the century dress, Patty Duke by a water pump in the film version of The Miracle Worker, a woman with hands stretched out to feel someone’s face. The emotional impact of this remarkable woman’s life must pull at the heartstrings of all but the most insensitive of people. She, however, felt no need for sympathy, as the dark, silent world was all she knew and thus she felt at no loss. To read her writings, even her autobiography written when she was young girl, lends a perspective of her life and of her efforts to communicate in a way that would be intelligible to the hearing, sighted world.
       Helen Keller was a happy, healthy infant until she suddenly came down with a life-threatening fever. When she recovered at the age of nineteen months, she was left blind and deaf. According to The Story of My Life, the outside world was a mystery to her, a mystery she wanted to solve and explore. Her friends and family had no idea of how to communicate effectively with her. She was a frustrated child, given to violent outbursts and tantrums. She wanted to be a part of the world, but was cut off from so much of it.
       There must have been some kind of communication. She makes mention of being given a rag doll that had no facial features. She tore a couple of buttons off her aunt’s dress and indicated she wanted them to be sewn on as eyes. She must have understood what a doll was, what a doll’s purpose was, what an aunt was, who this aunt was, and what her relationship to her was. She further knew how to make her aunt understand. All this information must have been communicated, albeit not in the traditional methods then taught to the blind or the deaf, as she was unfamiliar with these methods.
       Keller documents her ability to communicate with a playmate she had when she was six years old, a young girl named Martha Washington. When she would want to look for bird eggs in the grass, she would pantomime the action of this play, and the young Miss Washington would understand. She also pantomimed that she did not want her playmate to carry the eggs home for fear that she would inadvertently break them. This demonstrates that Keller had some comprehension of the world outside her darkness, and of the causes and effects that functioned in that world.
      The social rules of that world were known to her as well. She points out the juxtaposition between herself and Ms. Washington: “One was black as ebony, with little bunches of fuzzy hair tied with shoestrings sticking out all over her head like corkscrews. The other was white, with long golden curls.” (Keller 27) Keller was a product of the post-Civil War South, the daughter of a family with a strong Confederate background, whose home was in Alabama. The negative image of the fuzzy hair tied with shoelaces as compared with long, golden hair unmistakably belies the values of the time and place. There is strong evidence that Keller, in her adult years, did not share the strong prejudices against that group then termed “Negroes” around which she obviously grew up. (Her father certainly was a victim of his times in that he held such prejudices himself. He once indicated that, although he did not accept Negroes as members of the human race, he would no more deliberately hurt one than he would hurt an animal.) The words “golden,” “white,” and ebony could have had no meaning for the blind Miss Keller. A person with black-white color blindness can have no conception of the hues and tints of the world. Words dealing with color can have even less meaning for a person with no memory of sight. She echoed what she learned from those around her. One cannot understand color through touch.
       Although Keller indicates that her life began the day her teacher, Annie Sullivan (later Annie Sullivan Macy), entered it, she obviously had rich experiences beforehand. What Miss Sullivan gave her was the gift of language, a gift through which she was able to interpret the world and express that interpretation to others. Language is an amazing tool, one for which the little deaf and blind girl hungered. Miss Sullivan spelled words into the little girl’s hands to identify objects and actions. At first, Keller did not understand what the play of sensations on her hand was. However, she was a natural for the acquisition of language. The scene in the well-house where she finally understood the word “water” as spelled into the palm of her hand is famous. Afterwards, she hungered to learn new words. Once she learned the concept that the word referred to a thing, the world opened before her. As an infant, she was quick to learn new words. The child was no different.
       While Keller would continue to experience the world through smell, taste and touch, her more complete understanding of it would come through the fingers of others. She would learn to converse. This, as she points out, was no easy task. The blind person does not have the boon of observing a person’s facial expressions. The deaf person cannot hear the inflections in voice. She could do neither.
       The conversation of others must have been models for her to emulate. Thus, in her writing, she makes references she could not possibly understand. She writes fondly of a white plush toy bear. Bear and soft would have made sense. White must have been unimportant to her. While describing her travels, she mentions the laughing Negroes waving at a departing train. She means to impart a sense of setting. She could neither have heard them laughing, identified their perceived race, nor seen them waving. For all she experienced on board the train, the platform was empty. Others told her what was going on around her and she understood it in her head, as when one reads a story. She relates the second-hand experiences in her writing.
       One passage in The Story of My Life relates the beauteous experience of myriad icicles dangling in the natural world. Keller compares them to sparkling diamonds. She could have no idea what “sparkling” means, and diamonds to the blind person must only be hard minerals, without the dazzling connotation they have for the sighted person. The statement that the brilliance of the icicles broke through her blindness engenders some confusion. Was she speaking metaphorically, or did she indeed have some true experience of light if it were extreme? The former seems the most probable, although the latter is a more romantic interpretation.
       Other times she mentions the blue of the sky (both blue and sky would have been out of her realm of experience, though she doubtlessly had people try to explain the concepts to her; there must have been some success, as she uses both terms correctly). In a letter posted in her later years during a trip to the British Isles, she refers to the breathtaking views of mountains shrouded in mist. Obviously, the habit of incorporating the experiences of others into her body of knowledge and understanding of her surroundings continued throughout her life.
       Despite the anomalies of The Story of My Life, this work leaves the reader feeling that he has read an honest account. An important aspect is the conveyance of the idea that this is the story of a young girl. As Keller relates the details of her life, her activities, her emotions, it becomes clear that she was a girl just like any other. Perhaps using what she could not see or hear made her feel more worthy of mainstream acceptance. Even in her later autobiography, Light in My Darkness, she uses metaphors that would be understandable to her audience. In this tribute to her religion of Swedenborgianism, she continues to refer to others’ sighted, hearing experience as her own.
       This experiential necessity explains one of the controversies that Keller experienced in her youth. Through the agency of Annie Sullivan, she met and befriended Dr. Michael Anagnos, the director of Massachusetts’ Perkins School for the Blind. As a present, she wrote him a story entitled “The Frost King.” Upon investigation, it turned out that the story bore striking, even plagiaristic, similarities to an already published story, “Frost Fairies.” Keller claimed to have forgotten that a friend had read the story to her. Critics have accused Sullivan of deliberately trying to pass off the plagiarized story as Keller’s own. It seems more likely that the situation was as she justified it: that she thought “The Frost King” was her own creation, that she did not remember having the original tale read to her. Keller’s detractors tried to use this situation to prove her and her teacher frauds. Based on Keller’s way of experiencing the world, her explanation holds water. She was used to incorporating other people’s conversation as her own understanding. Without specifically recalling the original story, she rehashed it as her own. The author of “Frost Fairies” generously supported Keller throughout this crisis, expressing joy that her story had impressed the girl enough to have caused her to inadvertently reproduce it in her own version. Sighted, hearing children often plagiarize. Teenagers have been known to cut and paste articles from the Internet, and hand in the result as their own reports. Many do not even understand that they have not completed an assignment in so doing. Keller’s “The Frost King” represents an honest attempt to create her own story. The Book of Ecclesiastes states that there in “nothing new under the sun.” All stories contain bits and pieces of what has been written before.
       Those who would criticize Keller ignore what is obvious. Even though “The Frost King” was largely sampled (to borrow a word from modern music culture) from an earlier story, it displays a wonderful control of language. Children start learning language in infancy by listening and imitating. This remarkable woman did not have that luxury. Her early letters show an attempt to overcome difficulties with the English language. As time progressed, her control of the conventions improved. For her even to paraphrase “Frost Fairies” shows amazing progress. She recycled ideas as her own (as was her wont), including visual elements. The language use is appropriate and shows extraordinary growth from her early attempts. Sadly, the accusations rampant during the controversy over “The Frost King” made her afraid to write again, a fear that she overcame.
       Keller’s writing is indicative of a woman who was amazingly gifted in the field of language. This individual, who could not see or hear, mastered English, German, French and Latin. She graduated with honors in language from Radcliffe. She even made tremendous efforts to speak. Her words were difficult to understand, and her speech was unattractive. The very effort was incredible, being as her only tools were vibration and her fingers (actually putting her fingers into other people’s mouths to note the movements of their tongues). Language was an innate part of her world, and she was not happy until she conquered it. Annie Sullivan helped this part of her to emerge and develop. Part of the effective use of language is sensory imagery. Helen Keller strove to understand all the images available to her and use them. Even though some must have been beyond her realm, she demonstrated that she could somehow incorporate them into her world experience. She demonstrated that one is not always compelled to write about what he knows to write well.

Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. New York: Dell, 1961.
 
 
"Helen Keller and Language: Visual References in a Dark World" by Allan Azouz
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