A blind woman herself, Kleege fuels what could be called either creative nonfiction or a feminist critique of Helen Keller's life and autobiographic writings with the frustration and anger of a lifetime of comparisons to Keller -- the saintly example of a proper, over-achieving disabled girl famous all over the world. I learned last year that critiques of famous public figures with disabilities from a feminist/disability rights perspective are just about impossible to find, so this book is especially welcome and needed as a contribution to both feminist history and disability studies.Kleege's approach in questioning Keller's life is a distinctly feminist one. An awareness of "the gaze" exists throughout the book, and though it is primarily a nondisabled gaze upon the body and actions of a blind-deaf woman, as a disabled woman myself I find this inextricably intertwined with the familiar male gaze of feminist theory and critique. (And Michel Foucault's medical gaze, as well.) After all, the nondisabled gaze upon Keller would have been quite different were she a deaf-blind boy and man instead of a girl and woman. Ability and gender are inseparable in the complex personal interactions of disabled women within a society that privileges both male and able-bodiedness.
The book is divided into four sections: Consciousness on Trial, Full Body Contact, Working the Pump, and The Hand's Memory. Roughly, these cover Helen's childhood attainment of language, adult relationships, making a living through her famous story, and old age.
I'd read part of Consciousness on Trial a couple years ago as part of the anthology Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture which had at least one other essay that examined the power of the sighted gaze upon blind folks and intrigued me as a sort of colonization of disabled bodies. That colonization leads to assumptions about the minds of disabled people and what they are and are not capable of as the Other -- we've seen this public process recently in the case of Ashley X.
At age eleven, Keller wrote a story for the man who headed the Perkins School for the Blind, and he proudly published it as an example of the excellence of the school and his young deaf-blind prodigy. But the story turned out to be strikingly similar to a story Keller had no doubt been read at age eight, during the summer shortly after she began to understand the handsigning teacher Annie Sullivan used to communicate with her. She was learning new words, language, at an astonishing rate. Communicating exhuberantly. Absorbing new ideas like a sponge.
The school put Helen on trial for plagiarism, attempting to discern if Sullivan was honestly relaying the true achievements of her famous student or exaggerating her capabilities. Without "Teacher" at her side, young Helen faced a panel of unidentified men and women she could neither see nor hear who interrogated her about the complex concepts of knowledge and memory. Kleege imagines the details of the scene and the aftereffects it had on Keller's confidence.
Kleege also unflinchingly explores Keller's life through these nondisabled preconceptions and doubts of what a deaf-blind woman can be: So here it is. Here's what I've come to ask. Were you a hoax, Helen? A fake? There, I've typed the words. Forgive me, Helen. It's a betrayal, I know. My stomach feels tight and slimy. My flesh is pulling back from my skin. But I really need to know. Because as I'm sure you've thought from time to time, maybe every hour of every day, it's what they think. Them -- the ablebodied, the hearing and seeing majority, the Normals, as some of us call them today. They may play lip service to your achievements, may laud all you accomplished, hold you up as an example to children: "Why can't you be more like Helen Keller?" But behind all those words there's a doubt. Maybe you were a hoax, a fake, a fraud. Yes, Teacher tamed you. She cleaned you up and made you docile. She taught you how to shake hands and smile for cameras. She taught you to make your little hand gestures, and to mumble on cue. But who's to say you were really saying what she said you were? (p.31)What it would mean to be a "hoax" in this context is tenuously dependent on what the nondisabled public believes is the distance between their able-bodied expectations of who Helen was and all that she and Teacher offered about who she was. As Kleege makes clear, what they offered the public had a great deal to do with what the public was ready or willing to accept. Still, as interest in her as a Vaudeville "act" proves, Helen's very livelihood was dependent on the public's awe and borderline disbelief of everything she was. A charismatic storyteller, Helen (mostly with Sullivan) toured Vaudeville stages for years as a means of financial support. The novelty of her being considered a being of intelligence and consciousness is what made her a ticket-selling act. Or, more pessimistically stated, the continuing doubt of her consciousness and humanity are what drew the crowds.
With a lifetime of confounding expectations of the nondisabled public, fielding questions implicit and explicit about capability, Kleege understands how the pressure effects Keller:
It's the doubt, Helen. You know about the doubt. It's that nagging unease at the back of your mind whenever anything good happens. You're in school and you wonder, "Is the A on this paper a gift? Would a Normal student get an A for this?" You get a job, but you wonder, "Do they really think I'm qualified or is this just some sort of affirmative action quota?"
....Of course you know about the doubt. The plagiarism case seems to have been the precise moment in your life when the doubt first took hold. Because you must have understood that they would never have done it to a Normal child. If you'd been a Normal child, they would have said, "So someone read you the story, and you remember the story but don't remember the person reading it to you. OK. I can see how that could happen. Sounds reasonable to me." But because it was you, and because seeing and hearing had nothing to do with your experience of the world, they couldn't let it go at that. (pp. 33-4)
As a specific interrogation of the icon Helen Keller, Blind Rage is deeply compelling. Kleege speculates about Helen's adult relationships and possible romantic connections. She explores the complex power struggles undoubtedly present in her lifelong association with Sullivan, who was a recovered blind person deeply aware of the threatening abysses of poverty and dejection awaiting helpless disabled women. She questions to what degree the medium of Sullivan for so much of Helen's communication, and the enterprise of being such a famous person, affected who Helen was and who she appeared to be.On a broader level, Kleege's book works as a discussion of how history remembers those who can't always speak for themselves, those living under the shadow of monolithic stereotypes of what they can be, and those whose consciousness and humanity are relentlessly doubted.
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Visual description of photos: The three photos above came from a simple Google search for images of Helen Keller.The first is her in profile as a child, the second is of her as an adult with Annie Sullivan next to her signing into her hand. The last is a portrait of Keller as an elderly woman, looking directly into the camera. It seems by far the most honest and unstaged and, to me, interesting of the three.
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