Inspiration
The potency and inspiration of the less-than fortunate never ceases to amaze me. Against physical conditions that would enslave even the strongest of women, Helen Keller challenged her multiple disabilities and became an educated young women in spite of them. Blind and deaf at two, Helen Keller''s story of bravery and fortitude and her remarkable relationship with her beloved teacher Ann Sullivan, is a delicate lesson in the ability of the extraordinary few to triumph over adversity.
As a young girl, Keller was powerless to express herself. Until at the age of 7, an event happened that she declares, "the most important day I remember in all my life." The event she describes is the day Anne Sullivan became her teacher. In one passage, Keller writes of the day "Teacher" led her to a stream and repeatedly spelled out the letters w-a-t-e-r on one of her hands while pouring water over the other. I am reminded in this particular section of the narrative about the great difficulties my profoundly deaf sister faced in learning not only the sign and label of an object, but the many different concepts it included as well. These precious edifications about the differences in a “mug” and “water” were only some of what would be many opportunities for Helen to develop senses and feelings that I believe she portrays helped her to begin to live.
These lessons were taught to Helen at every available opportunity. During walks in nature, in every story Ms. Sullivan lovingly spelled, every occasion to enrich Helens mind was seized. Each concept contributed to wealth of information and insight she possessed. Ms. Keller’s deftly woven tales of discovering a flower bloom, her rich interpretations of experiencing new literature, or her vivid use of details to describe the natural wonders of the world that she felt so connected too, are all nothing short of brilliant. Even more astonishing is that these descriptions pour through the typewriter of a woman whose only vision was through her fingertips.
Clearly The Story of My Life is one of victory over many obstacles. I was able to formulate a time line using the textbook and had Helen been born fifty years earlier then she was, she wouldn’t have benefited from the revolutionary techniques that taught her reading (several languages), writing, and eventually to speak. The Braille Literary code, the same code Helen so rigorously manipulated in her literary explorations, was only fully perfected in 1834.
For those who are not familiar with the story of Helen Keller or the play 'The Miracle Worker', it recalls the life of a girl born in 1880 who falls tragically ill at the young age of two years old, consequently losing her ability to hear, speak, and see. Helen's frustration grew along side with her age; the older she got the more it became apparent to her parents that she was living in more of an invisible box, than the real world. Her imparities trapped her in life that seemed unlivable. Unable to subject themselves to the torment which enveloped them; watching, hearing and feeling the angst which Helen projected by throwing plates and screaming was enough for them to regret being blessed with their own senses. The Kellers, in hopes of a solution, hired Anne Sullivan, an educated blind woman, experienced in the field of educating sensory disabilities arrived at the Alabama home of the Kellers in 1887. There she worked with Helen for only a little over a month attempting to teach her to spell and understand the meaning of words v. the feeling of objects before she guided Helen to the water pump and a miracle unfolded. Helen understood the juxtaposition of the touch of water and the actual word 'water' Anne spelled out on her hand . Helen suddenly began to formulate the word 'wa...
The misfortunes Jane was given early in life didn’t alter her passionate thinking. As a child she ...
In an Article titled The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller published July 12 of 2012 Peter Dreier walks through his own views on the life, and the greatness of the conspicuous Helen Keller. He shows this in her early life, when she lets her voice be heard, and
One of the things I found to be the most astounding about Helen Keller was how many organizations she had a hand in founding. To start, her own organization, Helen Keller International, was founded by Keller and George Kessler in 1915. This organization was focused on Keller's yearning to help others with vision problems, as well as other health issues. (Keller, My Later Life 123)Scarlet fever is now thought to be the culprit that took the young girl's sight and hearing at only 19 months of age (Keller, The Story of My Life 16). In her later years, Keller became a strong political activist, an author, and a lecturer. After overcoming her own impairment, she sought to help others with similar disabilities, concocting speeches and presentations to aid them in their own travels.
Early in P. L. Travers’s life, she moved with her mother to her aunt’s house. Mr. Goff wrote letters to them from Maryborough, where he was still working. The Goff parents decided to remain detached from their children, despite the difficulty of their lives, thus allowing Helen to develop a very meditative mind.
Helen Keller has had an influence on society by becoming a role model for the deaf and blind. When she was 19 months she came down with an illness called “scarlet fever”. As a result of the illness, Helen Keller became blind and deaf, leaving her not able to see and hear. Many people didn’t believe in Helen Keller being able to learn, but she ended up proving everyone wrong. Later on in her life with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, Helen learned to read, write and speak. Helen Keller once said “While they were saying it couldn’t be done, it was done” (Keller). Helen was born June 27, 1880 from a family of southern landowners with two older sisters in Tuscumbia Alabama. Kate and Arthur Keller found a young woman at the Perkins Institution to teach Helen how to communicate. A month later after Anne Sullivan’s arrival, she had already taught Helen at the age of six the word water and that words have a meaning. Once Helen learned to communicate with others by using ...
Helen Keller was born on June 27th, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. She was a bright infant, interested in everything around her, and imitating adults at a very young age. In February of 1882, she was struck with an illness which left her deaf and blind. For several years, Helen had very little communication with the rest of the world, except for a few signs which she used with her family. When she was six, her parents wanted desperately to do something to help their strong-willed, half-wild, child. They were far from any deaf or blind schools, and doubted that anyone would come to the little town to educate their deaf and blind child. They heard of a doctor in Baltimore who had helped many seemingly hopeless cases of blindness, but when he examined Helen, there was nothing he could do for her. However, he referred them to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell who recommended Anne Sullivan to teach Helen.
Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, which is a town in Northern Alabama. Helen was part of a rich family. She was faced with a childhood illness, which made her blind and deaf, but she was able to communicate with others with many rudimentary signs. Helen was a mischief maker around the age of seven, and caused many tantrums, like she would knock or throw things around, lock her mom in a room. This would be frustrating for her parents, so they hired a private tutor/governess(a girl/woman employed to teach and train children in private household), named Anne Sullivan. Anne was visually impaired, and a recent graduate for Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. Anne became a teacher, friend, and companion to Hel...
Keller's story is also a member of the genre of disability autobiographies in which the writing of one's life story takes on the characteristics of what the philosopher J.L. Austin called "performative" utterances: The primary function of The Story of My Life, in this sense, is to let readers know that its author is capable of telling the story of her life. The point is hardly a trivial one. Helen Keller was dogged nearly all her life by the charge that she was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy--a mouthpiece for Anne Sullivan, or, later, for the original editor of The Story of My Life, the socialist literary critic John Macy, who married Sullivan in 1905. And even for those who know better than to see Helen Keller as disability's Charlie McCarthy, her education and her astonishing facility with languages nevertheless raise troubling and fascinating questions about subjectivity, individuality and language. Roger Shattuck and Dorothy Herrmann's new edition of The Story of My Life--supplemented as it is with Anne Sullivan's narrative, John Macy's accounts of the book and of Keller's life, Keller's letters and Shattuck's afterword--not only restores Keller's original text but highlights questions about originality and texts--questions that defined Keller's relation to language from the age of 12, when she published a story titled "The Frost King."
Jane had a testing childhood at the hands of her aunt Mrs Reed and her cousins. She lived with the Reed family until ten years of age and during these ten years she was bullied and unloved. Jane was then sent away to Lowood School she appeared excited to leave Gateshead, yet once at Lowood she experienced more ridicule and a hard school life. Nevertheless she did find friendship in Helen Burns, although this friendship was short lived as Helen died during a breakout of typhus, through their short friendship Helen had shown Jane that life at Lowood could be bearable; she was also the first friend Jane ever really had.
Overall, Helen Keller’s speech displays an argument that blind people are just as great as normal people and that people should care about blind people too. This speech also provides our world today with an important message. Everyone should take part in helping out other people and therefore help make the world a better and delightful place for
“It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come. I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it” (Keller 146). The ability to actually comprehend words and associate those words to thoughts and feelings rejuvenated her. Keller was reborn that day, with a new ‘vision’ and a new direction. What started that day, culminated into Keller becoming the first deaf person to earn a bachelors degree. She learnt to speak and ‘hear’ by following the movements of people’s lips. Keller was extremely hardworking and she personified willpower and diligence by patiently untangling the taboos of society to prove her critics wrong.
Helen’s early life was very much shaped by her loss and abandonment. The greatest loss Helen experienced was the death of her parents. As she was orphaned by the age of six, it left her with great grief, darkened childhood memories and bewilderment of where she truly belonged. She eventually found her position as a labourer in her uncle’s house. After working on her uncle’s farm for two years and being denied an opportunity for education, she faced the most significant abandonment in her life: being turned
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched-they must be felt with the heart,” claims Helen Keller, a blind and deaf woman since the age of 19 months when she contracted what the doctors of her era called “brain fever”, now known as scarlet fever (www.nndb.com). Throughout her life, she began as a scared child and transformed into a bold, “miracle worker”. Helen Keller transformed the lives of others with her dedication and work, involved herself in political causes and even inspired other deaf-blind children, before she went on to win numerous awards.
The next 6 years of Helen’s life were spend in tantrums, darkness and all around loneliness. “I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot it had ever been different, until she came- my teacher” (Keller 1902 Pg. 8). She had many fits, and refused any instruction. Her family was very poor, and could afford very little. The “teacher” as Helen called her; was Anne Sullivan who had contracted trachoma as a child and was as well legally blind. Annie was said to have saved Helen. Within 6 months of teaching from Sullivan Keller quickly advanced. She became well known to reading and writing in Braille, as well as writing in a manual alphabet.