To this day, I cannot ‘command the uses of my soul’ or stir my mind to action without the memory of the quasi-electric touch of Teacher’s fingers upon my palm.
Helen Keller, 1955, 19 years after Anne Sullivan Macy’s death

What would it be like to live in darkness and silence, in a void that was unarticulated and unordered? What if you experienced smell, taste, touch—very powerfully and sensuously—and could never create any meaning or order from them? What if you experienced the presence of other beings and could form no concept of their relationship to you? What if there was warmth and cold, wind and rain, but no connection to the world as a whole? What if a raging intelligence steadily grew inside you, urging you to explore, to know, to create order and there was nothing but chaos to do it with?

Funny thing. This is the beginning of Genesis. And here again is our old friend, playwright and avowed atheist, William Gibson, once more immersing us in the most profound religious questions told through the lives of ordinary humans.

In this play the question is: What is it that creates the world?
Answer: It’s the word. (Or, if you like, the Word.)

The God of Genesis breathes words across the unarticulated void and it begins to separate out into discrete reality—you know, land and sea, day and night, and so forth. And all of that leads to being—to plants and trees, birds, fish, animals and, finally, mankind. God actually makes Adam human by teaching him to name things, to put words to what he experiences. A comprehensible world, a human world, requires language. Ultimately, John the Apostle will simply say that God and The Word are the same thing.

The word is what is missing from little Helen Keller’s feral existence when Anne Sullivan arrives in her life in Gibson’s most famous and popular play, The Miracle Worker. In Keller’s own recollection that “still, dark world in which I lived” held “no strong sentiment or tenderness.” That is, no relationship or obligation to other human beings. By insisting on human order, the markers of a culture—table manners, sitting in her own chair, tying her own shoes—Sullivan instills a primitive sense of self-discipline and obligation in the child that makes Helen receptive to associating words with things experienced. But for such a long time the act of spelling into her hand and spelling back is just a monkey-mimic game for the little girl, the act of a smart animal. It is the loving relationship with another intelligence that somehow breaks through the chaos to associate a word with a meaning.

It is so tempting, isn’t it, to read the spelling of “w-a-t-e-r” scene symbolically? Could any other word be as powerful a metaphor, with its associations with baptism, birth, renewal? But in one of life’s lovely ironies, the water incident is simply true. “I knew then,” Keller writes of this moment in her autobiography, “that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”

The “living word” sets Helen Keller free to become human. But what a remarkable human she turned into when released from her still, dark world! Would she have been as inspiring to us had she lived out a cheerful life, happy in some benign institution, making ceramics or potholders? No, the Helen who had been so imprisoned came bursting forth, hungry for knowledge, opinionated and ambitious to have impact on society, desperate to educate others. All that anger and frustrated energy was re-channeled into a long life of activism.

Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968) was born in Alabama to a genteel post-Confederate family in reduced circumstances. At 19 months she became virulently ill with the “brain fever” (scarlet fever? meningitis?) that left her blind and deaf. After the breakthrough with Anne Sullivan that forms the meat of The Miracle Worker, Keller—with Sullivan as her teacher and companion—attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the Wright-Humson School for the Deaf, the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and ultimately Radcliffe College, from which she graduated magna cum laude, as the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. (Her tuition was paid by the head of Standard Oil, who was talked into it by Helen’s great friend, Mark Twain.) She knew Braille and used it to learn to read widely in English, French, German, Greek, and Latin.

Most of us remember, of course, that Keller became a prolific author (12 books and many articles), an international traveler, a huge fundraiser and advocate for the disabled, a renowned public speaker (interpreted by Sullivan and those who succeeded her), and the friend of the famous—Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Alexander Graham Bell, and every US President from Cleveland to LBJ. But glossed over in our cultural memory is Keller’s role as a political radical. She was fierce for freedom in many progressive causes, supporting socialism, pacifism, and the woman’s suffrage movement, campaigning for birth control and against prostitution. She helped found the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate in his several runs for President, and joined the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW). Her life was interpreted many times in film, of which Gibson’s The Miracle Worker is easily the most famous. The play was, first, a 1957 Playhouse 90 teleplay, then the 1959 Broadway play, then the 1962 Oscar-winning feature film, which was remade for television in 1969 and 2000.

But the play isn’t called Helen Keller or anything about a blind-deaf girl, is it? It’s The Miracle Worker, a title that references the determined labor of Anne Sullivan (1866-1936), a truly fascinating character in her own right. Anne’s understanding of Helen’s sensory and intellectual deprivation, her recognition of what Helen could become, and her relentless patience in reaching the girl, were all drawn out of her own immense trials in childhood, of which she wrote: “A fire of hatred blazed up in me which burned for many years.” Born the eldest in a family of completely destitute Irish immigrants, she was partially blind from the age of 5. She grew up rebellious, uneducated, constantly angry, and deeply anti-authority. Her father was a lugubrious drunk who beat her, her mother was a cripple who bore five sickly children before lying in a pauper’s grave when Annie was 8. Anne and her tubercular little brother Jimmie were consigned for 6 years to the workhouse at Tewksbury, a place of truly nightmarish cruelty, abuse and grotesque episodes. Jimmy died there. Anne had to be dragged off his coffin. A year later Anne threw herself in front of a visiting Boston commissioner of charity and begged to be sent to school.

But when she was enrolled, at age 14, at the renowned Perkins Institute for the Blind, she suffered the shame of being impoverished, ill-clad, and completely illiterate. The young woman who would sign “w-a-t-e-r” into Helen Keller’s hand could not spell or read. She was scorned by the other girls, angry and ashamed of herself. She hid behind a fierce temper, proud isolation, and the use of scorching sarcasm. Far from the “miracle worker” that Mark Twain would title her later, Anne Sullivan was called by her teachers and headmaster “the Irish hellion” and “little Miss Spitfire.” Yet, with two operations that partially restored her sight and the patient application of several teachers, Anne bloomed. She took the position offered through Perkins School to be tutor to little Helen Keller. Having come through her own pain, ignorance, and anger, she knew how to help this lost child. She remained with Helen--through a marriage, through international travel and renown, through thick and thin--until her own death in 1936.

The question that remains is how much of Helen, with her hunger for knowledge and her radical political beliefs, was really Annie Sullivan? And how much of Annie, searching for a way to make a difference in the world, was Helen Keller? The answer probably doesn’t matter. They were such a creative partnership and a force for good that which one gave the word and which one received it is surely beside the point.

© 2008 by Eileen Warburton

Suggestions for further reading:
Lash, Joseph P. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. New York: Addison Wesley, 1980, current publisher, Perseus Publishing, Reading, MA. Keller, Helen and John Albert Macy. The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday, 1903.


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.