Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller - Softcover

Kleege, Georgina

 
9781563682957: Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1563682958 ISBN 13: 9781563682957
Verlag: Gallaudet University Press,U.S., 2006

Inhaltsangabe

<div><p>As a young blind girl, Georgina Kleege repeatedly heard the refrain, &#8220;Why can&#8217;t you be more like Helen Keller?&#8221; Kleege&#8217;s resentment culminates in her book <i>Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller</i>, an ingenious examination of the life of this renowned international figure using 21st-century sensibilities. Kleege&#8217;s absorption with Keller originated as an angry response to the ideal of a secular saint, which no real blind or deaf person could ever emulate. However, her investigation into the genuine person revealed that a much more complex set of characters and circumstances shaped Keller&#8217;s life.<br><br><i>Blind Rage</i> employs an adroit form of creative nonfiction to review the critical junctures in Keller&#8217;s life. The simple facts about Helen Keller are well-known: how Anne Sullivan taught her deaf-blind pupil to communicate and learn; her impressive career as a Radcliffe graduate and author; her countless public appearances in various venues, from cinema to vaudeville, to campaigns for the American Foundation for the Blind. But Kleege delves below the surface to question the perfection of this image. Through the device of her letters, she challenges Keller to reveal her actual emotions, the real nature of her long relationship with Sullivan, with Sullivan&#8217;s husband, and her brief engagement to Peter Fagan. Kleege&#8217;s imaginative dramatization, distinguished by her depiction of Keller&#8217;s command of abstract sensations, gradually shifts in perspective from anger to admiration. <i>Blind Rage</i> criticizes the Helen Keller myth for prolonging an unrealistic model for blind people, yet it appreciates the individual who found a practical way to live despite the restrictions of her myth.</p></div>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<p><b>Georgina Kleege</b> is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, CA.</p>

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

<div><p>from Part One:<br>Consciousness on Trial<br><br>February 3<br><br>Dear Helen Keller:<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Allow me to introduce myself. I am a writer and part-time English professor. I am American, married, middle-aged, middle class. Like you, I am blind, though not deaf. But the most important thing you need to know about me, and the reason for my letter, is that I grew up hating you. Sorry to be so blunt, especially on such short acquaintance, but one of the advantages of writing to a dead person is there&#8217;s no need to stand on ceremony. And you should know the truth from the start. I hated you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity. &#8220;Why can&#8217;t you be more like Helen Keller?&#8221; people always said to me. Or that&#8217;s what it felt like whenever your name came up. &#8220;Count your blessings,&#8221; they told me. &#8220;Yes, you&#8217;re blind, but poor little Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and no one ever heard her complain.&#8221;<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; I am not alone in this. Many disabled people think you did our cause a lot of harm. Your life story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual&#8217;s fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions, affecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action. Lately, for reasons I can&#8217;t entirely explain, my feelings about you have mellowed. It occurred to me that I should not hold you responsible for the use others made of your life story. This led me to dip into your autobiographical writing for the first time. Even more surprising, it led me to take a road trip to visit your childhood home, Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. And I thought you&#8217;d like to know what I found there.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; I went with my husband Nick who is almost always up for a road trip. We took the house tour, which was standard fare for a local-hero museum. The guide was a woman pushing sixty, probably a volunteer, apparently reciting a script. She rattled off a number of facts about the town, the region, and antebellum architecture&#8212;all the predictable stuff.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Then, in one of the downstairs rooms, she pointed out a carpet on the floor that had been woven especially for you by I forget whom. She explained all this, then said, &#8220;Isn&#8217;t it lovely?&#8221; We murmured agreement. Then she said, &#8220;Too bad Helen Keller never saw it.&#8221; Her voice had a throaty throb as she delivered the line. I realized that the statement was supposed to catch us up short, jar us out of our complacency, remind us that you were deaf and blind. We were supposed to feel grateful and lucky, and intone a private prayer of gratitude: &#8220;I wake each day and thank the Lord I was not born Helen Keller.&#8221;<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; I should have expected nothing less. Where better to deliver the &#8220;Why can&#8217;t you be more like Helen Keller&#8221; message than in your childhood home? I should have steeled myself against it, but the resentment I feel about the message is so old and deep, it&#8217;s like a knee-jerk reflex. And on this occasion, I turned my resentment on the woman pointing out the carpet that poor little you never saw. I said, &#8220;But she could touch it.&#8221;<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#8220;What?&#8221; the guide said. &#8220;She what?&#8221;<br><br>&#8220;She could touch it,&#8221; I said. &#8220;She had the sense of touch. One of the pleasures of a nice carpet is texture. She could feel it. She could walk on it barefoot. She had an imagination. Someone could describe it to her, and she could imagine it.&#8221;<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; I was talking like a crank. There&#8217;s a certain vibration that comes into a person&#8217;s voice when they&#8217;re going off the deep end, and I had it. I could feel the guide eyeing me askance. Was this how I was going to be? I was spoiling her spiel. I could feel the rest of the tour group&#8212;a van load of Baptists from Tennessee&#8212;looking away.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In any case, I quieted down and we moved on. I felt the guide was leery of me. As she pointed out the pump organ in the parlor, she paused briefly. I sensed she was supposed to say something about how you never heard its beautiful music, but since she had a crank in the crowd today, she dropped the line.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; As we surveyed each room from the doorway, our guide was at pains to tell us which pieces of furniture actually belonged to your family, which were of the period, and which were merely reproductions. I&#8217;ve been on enough such house tours to know authenticity is always an issue. I wished she would let me walk around the rooms and touch something. This was not the most blind-friendly museum I&#8217;ve ever visited. At Louis Braille&#8217;s house in France, they let you put your hands on anything that&#8217;s not in a case. But perhaps fewer blind people visit your house.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; As if to confirm this, our guide spent a lot of time talking about the photographs on the walls of the central hallway. Although I have some residual vision, I don&#8217;t see photographs well. Nick told me what I was looking at and read me the labels. There was one of you at about age seven, around the time Anne Sullivan, your teacher, came into your life. The guide said, &#8220;Wasn&#8217;t she a lovely child?&#8221; Then she shook her head. To be accurate, I don&#8217;t know if she shook her head or not. But her tone was that of someone shaking her head at the waste of it all. As if it would be less tragic if you had been homely.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; I swallowed the urge to make this comment aloud. I am so used to this attitude, it hardly even registers anymore. &#8220;What a pretty girl,&#8221; people say. &#8220;Too bad she&#8217;s blind.&#8221; Apparently, beauty is wasted on us because we can&#8217;t see the reflection in the mirror, can&#8217;t see men&#8217;s heads turn when we enter a room. In this picture, you&#8217;re wearing a dress with a lot of ruffles, and your hair is an elaborate arrangement of ringlets. Do you look pretty? Nick told me that there&#8217;s a certain set to your lower lip, which makes it sound like your expression must be at odds with the prettiness of your dress and hair. He said you look posed and a bit uncertain about it. What could a photograph mean to you at that age? Later, you got the hang of it. In other photographs around the place, you&#8217;re always wearing a big smile and have your eyes aimed directly at the lens.<br><br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Next to this photo, there was one of Anne Sullivan&#8212;&#8220;Teacher,&#8221; as you always called her&#8212;taken at about the same time. The guide said, &#8220;Wasn&#8217;t she pretty?&#8221; with that same &#8220;such a pity&#8221; tone. Only the pity in her case is not that she was blind or deaf or anything else. The pity in her case is that she sacrificed her life to be your companion and helpmate, when she was pretty enough to get herself a man and have a...

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Verlag
Gallaudet University Press,U.S.
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1563682958
ISBN 13 
9781563682957
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
209
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