1. Critical evaluation of the play The Miracle Worker. 2.

The play s main emphasizing issue: the importance of language in the construction of the individual. 3. Language is dignified as the miracle maker of The Miracle Worker, the potential means of salvation for a knowledge-starved deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller. One word and I can put the world in your hand, Helen s teacher tells her with fervor. 4. The miracle worker, was first a telecast, then Broadway play, and, at this date, two 5.

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Hollywood movie versions and Bollywood also adapted it to movie named Black. Its a story about a blind and deaf girl Helen Keller and her teacher Annie sulvian. In The miracle worker, Helens teacher again and again says, All I have to teach is one word . Gibson's Keller is presented as imitating some of Sullivan's finger-spellings but as not understanding that these signs stand for, or mean, things. Then, in the climactic scene, Sullivan pumps water over Keller's hand while finger spelling "w-a-t-e-r" to her: the inner light dawns, little Keller's mouth creaks out "wahwah", and she excitedly asks for the name of many other things, including "m-o-t-h-e-r", "f-a-t-h-e-r", etc., even going so far as yanking on a cord to ring a large bell! The miracle has occurred. Jacques Lacan proposes that with his entery into language the child becomes a full subject and the child who refuses to learn the language is sick, unable to become a full member of the family and society. In The Miracle Worker we see Helen behaving wildly from the very first Act of the play. She is blind and deaf, cannot speak and is unaware of language. It is language which offers the meanings to ones existence. It is language through which one communicates his or her feelings and thoughts. It is the medium through which a child becomes socialize when he becomes aware of his position in the society by confirming his speech to the system of differences. In the play Helens blindness and her deafness is not the major triggering force behind her wild behavior. It is her urge to communicate, to find a medium through which she could assert her subjectivity and we know through Belseys discussion about the Individual that the subject is the function of language. Helens teacher writes in one of her letters, At first my pupils mind was all but vacant. She had been living in a world she could not realize. So, we see in this play how Helen becomes a full subject through her entry into language. The importance of language is first emphasized in the play in an early scene between Kate and Annie, shortly after Annies arrival. Kate begins by asking Annie what she plans to teach Helen and Annie answers, First, last and- in between language. . .Language is to the mind more than as light to the eye. It is obvious that she has realized the significance of it because she was once blind herself (as the play tells), and benefited from the language that she has learned.

The question for Annie is how and whether it is possible to teach Helen language and its meaning. 11. In the beginning, the work that Annie does with Helen is simply a matter of discipline and repetition. y Annie must first struggle to control Helen's extremely strong will, which had never been challenged prior to Annie's arrival. y As saussurs theory says that language is a system of signs so, Annie after succeeding in disciplining Helen becomes able to begin teaching her hand symbols for different objects. y The hand symbols, at first, are just a repetition game to Helen, who does not make any connection between symbol and object; Annie hopes that through this repetition Helen will eventually start to connect the symbols with actual objects in her world. y Annie's doubts about whether this method will work, however, strong and eventually Annie realizes that it is necessary for Helen to depend on her for everything; only then will Helen be motivated to use the symbols that Annie teaches her. y Annie convinces the Kellers to give her complete control over Helen and she then uses every method from repetition to force to resentment to keep Helen interested in learning. 12. Annie's methods hold Helen's interest, but Annie expresses her realization of their inadequacy when she tells Helen: "Now all I have to teach you isone word. Everything." y In the second act of the play she says about Helen to Miss Kate, She has to learn that everything has its name! that words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words!. 13. The final connection between language and meaning does come, but not until it seems that all the work that Annie has been in vain. y After living isolated in the garden house for two weeks with Helen and Percy, Annie has no choice but to let Helen go back to the Kellers. y In a short scene at the dinner table, Helen begins to recede back into her old ways. Annie will have none of it, and in a final battle of wills with Helen over spilled water, she involuntarily helps Helen make that huge leap of connecting language to the world around her. It is then the miracle happens. y Annie says, I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used as a medium for communication of thoughts. 14. Emile Benvenist argues, It is language which provides the possibility of subjectivity because it is language which enables the speaker to posit himself or herself as I as the subject of a sentence. y In The Story of My Life, Helen Keller writes, When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. It was the awakening of my soul through language that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. (Keller). 15. So, if a person profoundly and pre-lingualy deaf and blind can develop thoughtful language and make her way as a force in the narrative, intellectual, social, and political world. y This suggests that there may be something profoundly mistaken in an empiricism that sees thoughts as "faint copies" of sensory impressions.
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Equally it suggests a subject cognitive/linguistic apparatus that can be realized within language.