the story of my life by helen keller autobiography

She was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, fifteen years after the Civil War, when Confederate consciousness was still inflamed. Her wants were physical, impatient, helpless, and nearly always belligerent. Having discovered the use of a key, she shut up her mother in a closet. She could fold laundry and pick out her own things. The child could mimic what she could neither see nor hear: putting on a hat before a mirror, her father reading a newspaper with his glasses on.

Whatever the cause, the consequence was ferocity-tantrums, kicking, rages-but also an invented system of sixty simple signs, intimations of intelligence.

In 1882, when she was four months short of two years, medical knowledge could assert only “acute congestion of the stomach and brain,” though later speculation proposes meningitis or scarlet fever. The illness that annihilated her sight and hearing, and left her mute, has never been diagnosed. For Helen Keller there was no ameliorating “merely” what she suffered was a totality of exclusion. The merely blind have the window of their ears, the merely deaf listen through their eyes. All this came about because she was at once liberated by language and in bondage to it, in a way few other human beings can fathom. Yet as a child she was accused of plagiarism, and in maturity of “verbalism”-substituting parroted words for firsthand perception. No one nowadays, without intending satire, would place her alongside Caesar and Napoleon and, in an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge a stone-blind, stone-deaf woman with faking her experience? “The Story of My Life,” her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly understood to be a heroine of uncommon grace and courage, a sort of worldly saint. Fifty years ago, even twenty, nearly every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was.

It has, so far, lasted more than a hundred, while steadily dimming. Mark Twain compared her to Joan of Arc, and pronounced her “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals.” Her renown, he said, would endure a thousand years. She was the butt of skeptics and the cynosure of idolaters. At least three times-at the ages of eleven, twenty-three, and fifty-two-Helen Keller was assaulted by accusation, doubt, and overt disbelief. Suspicion stalks fame incredulity stalks great fame.

The story of my life by helen keller autobiography