The Mystery of Helen Keller’s Language

In this article I am looking back at two books by Helen Keller, The Story of My Life and The World I Live In.

This web site is dedicated to the subject of reading and writing. It is appropriate then that the first article to be posted to the site should be about someone whose achievements as a reader and a writer should be enough to force David Hume, the great skeptic, to reconsider his demonstration of the impossibility of miracles. 

Helen Keller (1880 — 1968) is remembered to this day for the courage and resourcefulness that she brought to her struggle to overcome her twin handicaps of total blindness and total deafness. She became a writer, a champion of the rights of the disabled, a lecturer, and a political activist — refusing ever to give in to discouragement.

But the most impressive of her many accomplishments, to my mind, was learning to write truly distingued prose — vivid, pleasing, grammatically perfect, and adequate in every way to her need for expression.  

The following paragraph is a fair specimen of her writing; it is from her autobiography, ‘’The Story of My Life’, and it describes the moment when her teacher Annie Sullivan brought her to discover the existence of language:

‘’I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. 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. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!’’

How, I would like to know, did she gain such mastery of the texture and flow of language without ever having heard it?  Where did she learn about alliteration (‘’a thrill of returning thought‘’) and asyndeton (‘’awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!’’)? How did she know that ‘’I then knew that’’ sounds better than ‘’Then I knew that’’ or ‘’I knew then that’’?  

She must have gained some sense of the pacing and vibrations of the spoken word by placing her fingers on people’s lips as they spoke  — the Tadoma method of ‘’speechreading’’.  But this method cannot have taught her much about the harmony of consonants and vowels or the hundreds of other aspects of the spoken language that are learned automatically by people who hear. 

She did a vast amount of reading in Braille, and this reading taught her vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and sentence structure.  But Braille could not make her see the speaking face or hear the speaking voice.  The expressive and aural aspects of language would forever remain a mystery to her.  She often said that the greatest disappointment of her life was not being able to learn to speak clearly enough to make herself intelligible to people who were not familiar with her harsh and eccentric enunciation.

She had been born with normal vision and hearing. She became blind and deaf as a result of a severe illness that she suffered when she was 19 months old — apparently a form of meningitis. It is possible that her experience of normal sight and vision in the first months of her life gave her something to draw on when she began the arduous task of learning to communicate with other human beings.  This is speculation.  

But there was no question that she was brilliant.  Her progress under the tutelage of Annie Sullivan at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston was spectacular. By the age of 14, she was beginning to be famous.

It was now that she met the person who, with Annie Sullivan, was to become the person whom she trusted, relied on, and loved above all others: Mark Twain.

Mark Twain had read essays that Helen Keller had written about her life as a severely disabled person and thought that while they would have been impressive merely as juvenilia, they were astounding coming from someone who could neither see nor hear.  He got himself introduced to her at a conference for supporters of greater opportunites for the disabled and told her about his admiration for her writing.  He told her that he would pay for as much education as she should care to get — a promise that he would make good.

For a young woman only recently escaped from the terrible solitude imposed on her by her handicaps, to be thus sought out and praised by the country’s most famous and popular author — was a stunning experience. She confessed that she adored him, often saying that he was one of the few people who treated her as a rational being and not as a freak.

And in spite of the great difference in their ages, their interests were converging.  With his great creative work behnd him, Mark Twain’s interests were becoming political. He wrote fierce criticisms of McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialistic projects as well as a savage lampoon of King Leopold of Belgium, whose exploitation of black workers on rubber plantations in the Congo would fit almost any definition of genocide.  He supported the attempt  by Russian revolutionists to establish a Russian republic in 1905.  

Helen Keller became a champion of underdogs of all varieties, declaring herself for women’s suffrage and finally joining the Socialist Party.  She was one of the seven founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But it was to hardships of the deaf and blind that her thoughts always returned, and one of the last of the many letters that she wrote to Mark Twain over the years was one of her most brilliant; Mark Twain declared it a classic.

‘’To know what the blind man needs, you who can see must imagine what it would be not to see, and you can imagine it more vividly if you remember that before your journey’s end you may have to go the dark way yourself. Try to realize what blindness means to those whose joyous activity is stricken to inaction.

‘’It is to live long, long days, and life is made up of days. It is to live immured, baffled, impotent. All God’s world shut out. It is to sit helpless, defrauded, while your spirit strains and tugs at its fetters, and your shoulders ache for the burden they are denied, the rightful burden of labor.

‘’The seeing man goes about his business confident and self-defendent (sic). He does his share of the work of the world in mine, in quarry, in factory, in counting room, asking of others no boon, save the opportunity to do a man’s part and to receive the laborer’s guerdon. In an instant accident blinds him. The day is blotted out. Night envelops all the visible world. The feet which once bore him to his task with firm and confident stride stumble and halt and fear the foreward (sic) step. He is forced to a new habit of idleness, which like a canker consumes the mind and destroys its beautiful faculties. Memory confronts him with his lighted past. Amid the tangible ruins of his life as it promised to be he gropes his pitiful way. You have met him on your busy thoroughfares with faltering feet and outstretched hands, patiently “dudging” the universal dark, holding out for sale his petty wares, or his cap for your pennies; and this was a man with ambitions and capabilities.

‘’It is because we know that these ambitions and capabilities can be fulfilled that we are working to improve the condition of the adult blind. You can not bring back the light of the vacant eyes; but you can give a helping hand to the sightless along their dark pilgrimage. You can teach them new skill. For work they once did with the aid of their eyes you can substitute work that they can do with their hands. They ask only opportunity, and opportunity is a torch in the darkness. They crave no charity, no pension, but the satisfaction that comes from lucrative toil, and this satisfaction is the right of every human being. . . .’’

Toward the end of his life, Mark Twain said that Helen Keller was one of the two most remarkable people produced by the nineteenth century.  The other one, he said, was Napoleon.