Erasure + Misrepresentation in the Narrative of Helen Keller

In retrospect I am now able to see the erasure that functioned in my learning of Helen Keller. In elementary school I learned about Helen Keller through the narrative of “The Miracle Worker”, this narrative has been the main vehicle through which a lot of children learn of her. The various adaptations of “The Miracle Worker” were based on Keller’s autobiography but they focus on Anne Sullivan, the teacher who taught her how to communicate. Keller is just her pupil and despite the fact that this is the way in which her story is told, she is not the main focus. I did not learn about Helen Keller as a person, but as a subject.The narrative as transcribed to me was cut short when she began to talk. This woman who was already disabled by her physicality also faced the suppression of her thoughts and personhood.

I had no idea she was such a radical figure that strived to make change and difference in the world. Radical-Socialist-Feminist Helen Keller! Who knew? I heard nothing of the texts she had written as an adult. Over 200 various texts, that’s incredible. (George 340) I had no idea that she wrote her own memoirs! Wouldn’t the impact of Keller’s story through her own experience be much more powerful? Wouldn’t that only just make more sense?? Not only would the story of Helen Keller be more powerful but it could also function as inspiration for people faced with similar disabilities. Helen Keller did not allow her disabilities to suppress her ideas, she overcame them and used them in a sense to become a public advocate. This is a story that can actually be appreciated on a universal level, Keller is an inspiration to all who want to make progress for a better world. It’s wrongful that her narrative misrepresents her by stifling her as this “miracle-child” figure forever and not a politically conscious adult.  

I can only hypothesize that Helen Keller’s narrative as an adult was suppressed because perhaps it did not conform to society’s thought, or as how Ann George’s “Mr. Burker, Meet Helen Keller” surmises, “Keller’s audiences were often disconcerted by the fact that she wrote as if she were a sighted, hearing person…”verbalism.”” (George 344) This mode of thinking (perhaps verbalism could be considered a type of terministic screen for sighted/hearing people) is short-sighted, for lack of a better word. One needs to consider how all of our perceptions are molded and influenced by the words of others, Keller is not alone in this regard. 

In the George reading it is pointed out that Keller’s learning acquisition is really not that different from ours. We learn from the world around us, we learn mainly from other people. We are constantly bombarded (especially in this digital age) with new information, people telling us how to think or what to think. This is how parents raise their children, language and ideas that a child internalizes and filters into their own personal experience. Also, how else is Keller supposed to speak? How else can she speak in a world that is dominated by the sighted and hearing people? She had no choice but to conform to this particular worldview because otherwise people may have felt alienated which is particularly absurd. Abled people ask the disabled to conform to their world, it never appears to be the other way around. This case study I feel also reflects how we must transcend above the dialectic and be open-minded. It’s important to understand that our world is multi-faceted and there are many ways of looking at the universe around us.