[accessbangla] Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
- From: "vashkar vattacharya" <vashkar79@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <accessbangla@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 12:52:45 +0600
Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
By David Rapp
Caption: Helen Keller when she was seven. (Bettmann/Corbis)
As you may remember from William Gibson's 1959 play The Miracle Worker and the
movie based on it, Helen Keller was an Alabama girl who was struck blind
and deaf by illness in her infancy but learned to communicate when she was only
six, with the help of her devoted teacher Annie Sullivan. In the play's
climactic scene, the little girl makes a connection between water running from
a pump and the word water spelled out in sign language on her palm. The
remarkable events of that day, April 5, 1887-120 years ago today-end most
people's knowledge of Helen Keller's life. The rest of her story, however, is
hardly less inspiring.
In The Miracle Worker Keller vocalizes what sounds like "wah-wah." Actually she
probably didn't speak right then, and she never fully mastered understandable
speech, but her recognition at that moment of the connection between words and
objects was a huge breakthrough. "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness
as of something forgotten-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the
mystery of language was revealed to me," she later wrote.
In fact, according to a letter Annie Sullivan wrote, the same day she learned
the word water she "added thirty new words to her vocabulary," including door,
open, shut, give, go, and come. "She has learned that everything has a name,"
Sullivan wrote. She learned at a breakneck pace. Within a week she was
understanding
simple sentences, and within a month she knew about 100 words. Within a year,
she was familiar with plays by Shakespeare and poetry by Homer and Longfellow.
It was an astounding achievement for a small child who had been imprisoned by
her lack of both vision and hearing.
Fame quickly followed, particularly after a glowing report about her in 1888 by
Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in
Massachusetts, where the visually impaired Sullivan had been both a student and
a teacher. Around that time, Helen Keller met Alexander Graham Bell, whose
own mother and wife were deaf and who had invented the telephone partly to
serve as a hearing aid. Bell and Keller became lifelong friends, and they wrote
each other often over the years.
Soon she was writing more than letters. A fairy tale she wrote in 1891, when
she was 11, "The Frost King," was published in numerous publications before
it was discovered to be an unconscious retelling of a story she had read in a
children's book. The humiliating error nearly kept her from writing again,
but she eventually reconsidered. By the end of her life she had written 14
books and dozens of magazine articles.
In her teens she became friends with Mark Twain, and they wrote many droll
letters to each other. He admired her enormously, even comparing her to Joan
of Arc. Once he offered to teach her billiards, a favorite pastime of his. "Oh,
Mr. Clemens," she responded. "It takes sight to play billiards." "Not the
kind of billiards we play around here," he said.
She attended a number of schools, studying French, German, literature,
philosophy, and a host of other subjects, until she was admitted to Radcliffe in
1900, when she was 20. She paid for college with money raised by Twain's
personal appeal to the Standard Oil magnate Henry Huddleston Rogers. While at
Radcliffe, she wrote her bestselling autobiography, The Story of My Life,
though she was barely in her third decade. She graduated magna cum laude in
1904,
the first blind and deaf person ever to graduate from any college.
Around that time, Sullivan married a Harvard instructor named John Macy, who
had helped edit Keller's autobiography. He was a dedicated socialist, and Keller
took up the cause enthusiastically and publicly. "I am the determined foe of
the capitalist system, which denies the workers the rights of human beings,"
she wrote in 1912. "I consider it fundamentally wrong, radically unjust and
cruel." She supported the Socialist party candidate Eugene V. Debs in his
presidential
campaigns. She also avidly supported the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, writing the nascent organization a $100 check and
an impassioned letter of support in 1916. Both these stances angered her
conservative Southern family, as well as many others across the nation who had
previously seen her as simply a saintly handicapped girl.
She often flouted expectations in a time when few women, disabled or not,
ventured far outside the home. Throughout her life, with the assistance of
Sullivan,
she traveled to promote causes she believed in, and she visited 39 countries in
all. She supported woman suffrage, better health care for women and children,
and especially increased opportunities for people with disabilities. For 40
years she raised funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She met with
13 Presidents, and in 1964, when she was 84, President Lyndon Johnson awarded
her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the highest honors an American
civilian can receive. She died in 1968 at 87, more than 80 years after the day
she learned the word water.
Without question, that day in April 1887 was an extraordinary one. But Helen
Keller's whole life was impressive.
-David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review,
and Out.
http://www.americanheritage.com/people/articles/web/20070405-helen-keller-annie-sullivan-socialists-feminism.shtml
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