Synopses & Reviews
As a young blind girl, Georgina Kleege repeatedly heard the refrain, “Why cant you be more like Helen Keller?” Kleeges resentment culminates in her book Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, an ingenious examination of the life of this renowned international figure using 21st-century sensibilities. Kleeges 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 Kellers life.
Blind Rage employs an adroit form of creative nonfiction to review the critical junctures in Kellers 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 Sullivans husband, and her brief engagement to Peter Fagan. Kleeges imaginative dramatization, distinguished by her depiction of Kellers command of abstract sensations, gradually shifts in perspective from anger to admiration. Blind Rage 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.
Synopsis
Kleege, a blind professor from UC Berkeley, reexamines the life of Helen Keller from a contemporary point of view with startling, refreshing results.
About the Author
Georgina Kleege is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, CA.
Table of Contents
Contents
A Note to Readers ix
Acknowledgments xi
part one
Consciousness on Trial 1
part two
Full Body Contact 45
part three
Working the Pump 93
part four
The Hand's Memory 157
A Note on Sources 209