A Troubling New Take on an American Heroine

Helen Keller’s life story can be called, without irony, “inspiring,” and Dorothy Herrmann’s new biography is a competent explication of that story. But in “Helen Keller: A Life,” Herrmann attempts something more than a conventional biography; instead, she embarks on a psychological excavation of Keller. In the course of her research, Herrmann claims, “I was to discover the real Helen Keller”--a more complex person than the “plaster saint” we presumably know--and she promises to share her discoveries with us.

It is hard to think of a subject less suited to this type of analysis than Keller, who died in 1968 at the age of 87. By Herrmann’s own account, virtually everything Keller wrote--including autobiographies, speeches and personal letters--was censored, edited or rewritten by those around her (such as her equally famous, equally fascinating teacher, Annie Sullivan). Most important, of course, Keller was deaf and blind and could not speak intelligibly. This meant that she was extraordinarily dependent on others--either through tactile lip-reading or, more often, palm-to-palm alphabet spelling--to explain the world to her. As Herrmann writes, “For her entire life, Helen attained the majority of her knowledge about the outside world literally secondhand.” It is almost impossible to imagine a more mediated existence.

Not that Herrmann is wrong to suspect that there is something fishy about Sullivan’s “miraculous”--and extraordinarily quick--transformation of a 6-year-old Helen from a wild, obstinate, savage child into an eager but compliant bookworm with “the guise of an angel” who would come to represent “the epitome of Victorian piety and virtue.” It was Sullivan, of course, who liberated Keller from her isolation by offering the gift of language, and Herrmann suggests that, in exchange for this gift, Helen sold her soul, aping Sullivan’s ideas, attitudes and feelings rather than developing her own. The two created a complex symbiosis, but one in which Sullivan ultimately held the power: “Annie, by stilling her hand, could instantly cast her [Helen] back into solitary confinement until she behaved, condemning her once more to her dark and silent--and very lonely--tomb.” Herrmann claims that Keller “always . . . feared that if she did not reflect her teacher’s and society’s standards, people would shun and abandon her and she would be helpless.”

Herrmann cites the work of psychologist Dorothy Burlingham and seems to be influenced by psychoanalysts such as Alice Miller, who has written so incisively on the false self that children unconsciously adopt in return for parental love and protection. But the very obvious problem with Herrmann’s book is that in Keller’s case her extreme dependence on those around her was not a neurosis but a physical and linguistic necessity; Keller’s sense of helplessness was not a regressive holdover from her childhood, but a very real condition. And Herrmann presents us with an insoluble riddle: How can we know the “real” self of a person for whom language and experience are so contingent on others? Herrmann has embarked on an odd exercise; the wonder is not that she fails, but that she attempted it at all.

To support her first, almost inherently unprovable thesis--that Keller developed an inauthentic self, and that Herrmann will reveal the true one--the author develops another. Herrmann repeatedly makes the point that Keller’s “monumental childhood rage had not been dampened--it had simply been channeled into a political and social activism.” Indeed, Keller was a socialist. She supported the Wobblies, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Loyalists, the NAACP, access to contraception and women’s suffrage. She opposed child labor, the Dies Committee, segregation (particularly admirable for someone born and raised in the deep South), injustice, inequality and poverty. This is documented; what remains unclear is why Herrmann regards Keller’s activism as a pathology, a manifestation of repressed “negative emotions” such as “sadness and rage.” Would sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan or obliviousness to the poor be considered signs of mental health?

Even within Herrmann’s own terms, her depiction of Keller often makes little sense. She refers to Helen as “malleable,” “[c]ompletely helpless, a true victim,” “the eternal pawn in other people’s schemes and ambitions,” “a hostage.” Yet Keller became an author, a lecturer, a political activist, a Radcliffe graduate, a vaudeville performer (!), a world traveler, an advocate for the blind and--most significant--a woman who in Herrmann’s own estimation was “strong, resilient . . . more than capable of dealing with life’s inevitable traumas and losses.” Yet despite Herrmann’s often muddled treatment, Keller’s spirited glory shines through. “Life is a daring adventure or nothing,” Keller once said; how can we resist her?