Generation BAM

Study Guide

for

The Miracle Worker

Written by
Julia Miele Rodas

Edited by
Suzanne Youngerman

The Miracle Worker will be screened as part of

Generation BAM’s Screening Reel Heroes series
on November 6 & 7, 2003

With commentator James Berger

Brooklyn Academy of Music ▫ Department of Education and Humanities

30 Lafayette Avenue ▫ Brooklyn, New York 11217-1486
718-636-4130
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The Miracle Worker

Study Guide
By Julia Miele Rodas

Preface
Credits
Plot Synopsis

1. The Miracle Worker: A Wealth of Narratives

Palimpsest: Different Versions of Helen Keller’s Story
Helen Keller and William Gibson: In writing, on stage, in the movies, on television
Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Detangling Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller
Making The Miracle Worker (1962)
Critics Look at The Miracle Worker
Close Up: Break-throughs

2. Contexts
A Brief History of Institutional Care
Learning to Communicate through Deaf-Blindness: Laura Bridgman and Samuel Howe
The Perkins Institute, raised print, braille, finger-spelling, American Sign Language
(ASL)
The Historical Moment: A Brief Look at Alabama, the United States, and the World
in the 1880s
About Anne Sullivan: Disability and Social Activism
About Helen Keller: American Icon
Life before Teacher, education, writing, famous friends, an ambassador
The Disability Rights Movement Today

3. Creator’s Biographies
Arthur Penn (Director)
William Gibson (Screenwriter)
Helen Keller (Writer, autobiography)
Anne Sullivan (Writer, letters on Keller’s education)
Laurence Rosenthal (Composer)
Anne Bancroft (Actor, role of Annie Sullivan)
Patty Duke (Actor, role of Helen Keller)
Victor Jory (Actor, role of Captain Arthur Keller, Helen’s father)
Inga Swenson (Actor, role of Kate Keller, Helen’s mother)
Andrew Prine (Actor, role of James Keller, Helen’s brother)
Kathleen Comegys (Actor, role of Aunt Ev)

4. Bibliography
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5. Curriculum Materials
for grades 3-6
Questions for before the Screening
Questions for during the Screening
Questions for after the Screening
Class Exercises
Writing Assignments

for grades 7-9

Questions for before the Screening
Questions for during the Screening
Questions for after the Screening
Class Exercises
Writing Assignments

for grades 10-12

Questions for before the Screening
Questions for during the Screening
Questions for after the Screening
Class Exercises
Writing Assignments

6. Commentator
James Berger

7. Appendix
The Manual Alphabet and Numbers One through Ten
The Braille Alphabet and Numbers
A Chronology of the Disabililty Rights Movement
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PREFACE

The Miracle Worker dramatizes certain key events in the life of history’s most famous deaf-
blind person, Helen Keller. Most notably, the climax of the film depicts young Keller’s
breakthrough into the world of language. Though most viewers regard it as being “about”
Helen Keller, screenwriter William Gibson always intended The Miracle Worker as a tribute to
Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, and to her personal struggles in effecting a “miracle” with
this extraordinary student.

The film begins with Helen’s parents on the verge of giving up hope of Helen’s ever
becoming truly a part of the human family. When Annie Sullivan comes as Helen’s live-in
teacher, the relationship—between herself and Helen and between Annie and the rest of the
Kellers—is initially rocky. But as Annie perseveres with Helen’s education, making diligent
efforts to penetrate her young student’s world and taking some drastic measures to control
her wildness, Helen becomes more disciplined, arriving, ultimately, at the “miracle” of the
film’s title, the breakthrough moment when Helen finally grasps the concept of the language
which Annie has been using.

The film bears on the idea of Keller’s emergence, both literally and figuratively, from a place
of darkness and isolation into a place of light and community. Though it provides a useful
and interesting context for considering a range of issues and topics—the realities and
representations of disability, the uses (and varieties) of language, the life of Helen Keller, and
approaches to pedagogy, among others—the grand theme of The Miracle Worker invites the
audience to explore the place and identity of the individual in relation to the greater social
body: Is an individual living in isolation truly human? And how much is each of us cut off
from the rest of the world by the limitations which are a part of our ordinary lives?

A Note on the Use of Names

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan were both well-educated, hard-working, intelligent women
whose enormous social contribution should not be belittled by refering to them in
inappropriately familiar terms. For this reason, Keller and Sullivan are referred to as
“Keller” and “Sullivan” throughout this guide wherever it has been practicable. Because the
people in The Miracle Worker, however, are “Annie” and “Helen,” it would be inaccurate to
refer to these characters in any other way. So, this guide sometimes makes use of these
informal names. The writer would like to urge teachers, however, to maintain this
distinction in the classroom, thus reinforcing for students the fact that the characters
portrayed in the film, while based on historical figures, are still, ultimately, the combined
creations of writer, director, and actors. It is also important to know that during the course
of their relationship, Keller always addressed Sullivan simply as “Teacher.”
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CREDITS AND FILM FACTS

Title The Miracle Worker

Year Released 1962

Director Arthur Penn

Producer Fred Coe for Playfilm Productions

Screenwriter William Gibson, adapted from his own play of the same name, which
was based, in turn, on Helen Keller’s early autobiography, The Story
of My Life (1903) and supplemental materials written by Keller’s
teacher, Anne Sullivan

Cinematography Ernesto Caparros

Editor Avram Avakian

Music Laurence Rosenthal

Principal Cast Actors Characters

Anne Bancroft Annie Sullivan
Patty Duke Helen Keller
Victor Jory Captain Arthur Keller
Inga Swenson Kate Keller
Andrew Prine James Keller
Kathleen Comegys Aunt Ev

Opening July 28, 1962; released by United Artists

Awards Academy Awards 1963

Best actress in a leading role: Anne Bancroft
Best actress in a supporting role: Patty Duke

Academy Award nominations 1963

Best director: Arthur Penn
Best writing, screenplay based on material from another medium:
William Gibson
Best costume design, black-and-white: Ruth Morley

Golden Globe Awards 1963

Most promising newcomer—female: Patty Duke
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Golden Globe nominations 1963

Best motion picture—drama
Best motion picture actress—drama: Anne Bancroft
Best supporting actress: Patty Duke

Laurel Awards 1963

Top female supporting performance: Patty Duke

BAFTA Awards 1963

(British Academy of Film and Television Awards)
Best foreign actress: Anne Bancroft

Writers Guild of America 1963

Best written American drama: William Gibson

National Board of Review 1962

Best actress: Anne Bancroft

Photoplay Awards 1962

Gold Medal

San Sebastián International Film Festival 1962

OCIC Award: Arthur Penn
Prize San Sebastián, Best actress; Anne Bancroft
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PLOT SYNOPSIS
The film opens with Helen still in infancy. A doctor reassures her parents that their
daughter will survive what has apparently been a life-threatening illness. As Captain Keller
accompanies the doctor off the premises, however, a scream recalls the father to the sick-
room, where his wife cries out to him that Helen is both deaf and blind. The two parents
despair at Helen’s cribside.

Opening credits run through the next series of scenes which offer illustrations of the extent
of Helen’s ignorance and isolation: Helen groping her way along the stairs, wandering lostly
into clean laundry hung out to dry, breaking a glass ornament from a Christmas tree,
lurching with hands outstretched along a hilltop with her mother following along behind,
sitting astride one of the young black servant girls, cutting off chunks of her hair with a
scissors. This montage is supported by eerie and dissonant-sounding music, underscoring
Helen’s apparent isolation and strangeness.

Following this opening, we find all the Kellers—Helen’s father (the Captain), her mother
Kate, her grown half-brother Jimmy, her aunt Ev, and her infant sister—in the drawing
room of the Keller home. As the adults attempt to discuss the possibility of Helen’s
education, deaf-blind Helen is busy scattering her father’s business papers, tearing her aunt’s
clothing, and knocking the baby from its cradle. Debate rages amongst the adults as they
each ineffectually try to soothe her, to manage or control her destructive conduct. The two
men seem to favor putting the girl in an institution. The two women hold out hope that
Helen can be educated, Aunt Ev suggesting that the Captain write to the Perkins School for
advice. One element of Helen’s behavior seems to vindicate the mother’s faith in her child’s
intelligence: Helen’s wild frustration is alleviated by her finally successfully communicating
to her aunt that she wishes her rag doll to be improved by the addition of button eyes. The
scene ends with Captain Keller reluctantly agreeing to contact Perkins.

In the next scene, we are introduced to Annie Sullivan as she sits aboard a train in Boston
speaking with George Anagnos, her mentor, who cautions her to curb her temper and her
stubborn disposition if she is to get along in her new post. The conversation establishes that
Sullivan may only be questionably designated as a “lady,” and her appearance, physically
robust, but with her seemingly delicate eyes protected by dark glasses functions to align
Sullivan thematically with Helen. As Sullivan proceeds on her long journey alone, her
disturbed dreams (which continue throughout the film) offer the audience additional
evidence as to her character and background. Prominent in her dreamlife is the figure of a
young boy, Jimmy, who calls out to for help and companionship, but Sullivan’s reaction to
these pleas is mixed. These dreams foreshadow Sullivan’s future contentious relationship
with Helen, the teacher’s desire on the one hand to bring the deaf-blind girl out of her
“prison,” and on the other hand to protect or to fortify her own sense of autonomy. This
tension is played out at the end of the scene where Sullivan appears overly protective of her
person and her luggage, rudely spurning assistance from her hosts, while averring her
disappointment that her young charge was not one of the party to meet the train.

In the first encounter between Helen and Annie, as the next scene opens, we find that the
teacher immediately begins her attempt to communicate with her new student. Approaching
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Helen, Annie uses her suitcase to gain Helen’s interest, putting herself at Helen’s physical
level and allowing the girl to use all her available senses to explore her new acquaintance.
During this “hands on” session, the other Kellers remain in the background. Helen and
Annie proceed upstairs where they exchange primitive signs (nodding, etc.) to communicate
with one another. While Helen’s brother Jimmy looks on, Sullivan produces a doll for
Helen, signing into her hand the word “d-o-l-l” and explaining to the Jimmy in response to
his query that the signs are “an alphabet for the deaf.” But while Helen is quick to imitate
her teacher’s movements, the lesson quickly degenerates into violence as Sullivan attempts to
create associations between words and things by removing objects that Helen desires.
Losing patience, Helen hits Annie in the face with the new doll, dislodging one of her teeth.
She then locks Sullivan in her room and absconds with the key. The scene is very rough, but
clearly demonstrates the willfulness, passion, and native intelligence existing within both
teacher and student.

Outside the house, Helen’s parents wonder what has become of Annie. When Jimmy
reveals that Helen has locked the teacher in her room, the Captain rouses the staff of black
servants, the Keller men help Sullivan exit from her window, while Kate Keller fruitlessly
searches her daughter for the missing key. As all this activity quiets and the actors disperse,
Annie and Helen are left alone and the teacher secretly watches as Helen (who believes she is
alone) removes the missing key from her mouth and drops it down the well beneath the
water pump. Sullivan appears bemused.

As the next scene begins, Sullivan seems to have settled in to working with her new student
and the relationship seems much more peaceful. Helen gropes around, disruptive, but is
interested rather than violent. She spills ink over Sullivan’s desk, but does so accidentally
rather than maliciously. Sullivan patiently spells “i-n-k” into her hand. Setting Helen up
with a sewing card, Sullivan returns to writing, but is immediately called away again when
Helen pricks herself with the sewing needle and begins abusing her doll in consequence.
Using the event as an opportunity to teach Helen “good girl” and “bad girl,” Sullivan herself
treats the doll nicely, then abusively, spelling each phrase into Helen’s hand, then letting her
feel the teacher’s exaggerated facial expressions. Helen catches on quickly, and realizing that
she should be nice to the doll, she breaks Sullivan’s water pitcher instead. During all this
activity, Kate Keller appears in Sullivan’s doorway, and asks the teacher if all of her efforts to
communicate aren’t like “spelling to a fence post,” but Sullivan insists that all of the spelling
is like talking to a baby, offering her faith that eventually Helen will come to understand.
But the scene degenerates from this point, Sullivan’s attempts to discipline Helen being met
with increasing violence; after Helen stabs Sullivan in the hand, Mrs. Keller soothes the child
by offering her cake and the teacher becomes seriously angry, asking why the mother is
rewarding such behavior. Kate Keller argues that sometimes her daughter “simply cannot be
compelled” and Sullivan responds: “I’m the same way myself.”

Next is the great dining-room battle scene. Sitting at the breakfast table, Captain Keller and
his son argue about the Civil War. Helen gropes her way around the table stuffing her
mouth with tid-bits from each person’s plate. When she arrives at Annie’s place, the teacher
refuses to allow Helen to take any of her food. Though the parents argue that she should
have pity, this enrages Annie who insists that Helen is a “badly spoiled child.” Insisting that
it is essential to Helen’s education, Annie insists that everyone but she and Helen leave the
room immediately. Locking the doors, Annie enters into a violent struggle with Helen to get
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her to sit at her own place and to eat her own food, with a spoon. The struggle includes
kicking, slapping, grabbing, and tackling but the teacher eventually emerges victorious, telling
Kate Keller that the cowed Helen had eventually eaten properly and even folded her napkin.
This report fills the mother’s heart with hope.

That night, Captain Keller wants to fire Annie, but is forestalled, first by his wife’s pleas,
then by Annie’s brazen agreement that she will never be able to teach Helen anything as long
as everyone stays in the same house together. Told that the Kellers had thought about
putting their daughter in an asylum, Sullivan is quietly outraged, describing for them the
horrifying conditions of the poor house where she grew up. She proposes removing her
charge to one of the Keller out-buildings so that Helen will feel totally dependent on her. It
is agreed that she will have two weeks in this setting to see what she can do with Helen
without any interference.

After a long carriage ride, Helen is fooled into believing that the cottage where she is
brought to live with Sullivan is far from her parents’ home. Initially, she rejects Sullivan
completely, but the teacher uses a young serving boy as a model, “playing” finger-spelling
games with him to get Helen interested. Over the days that follow, we see Helen growing
increasingly well-behaved. She allows Annie to dress her neatly and to arrange her hair. She
follows basic manners for eating. She strings beads. The Kellers are thrilled when they peek
in and see the change, but Annie is disappointed that Helen still doesn’t understand her
finger-spelling as more than a game. She spends almost all her time spelling to Helen as the
teacher shows the student various things in nature and in their household, repeating again
and again: “It has a name.” Annie is successful in getting Helen interested in finger-spelling;
the student even spells in her sleep and tries to teach the dog how to spell things. But the
final break-through toward which Sullivan is working fails to materialize before the teacher’s
exclusive time with her student is up. The parents come to reclaim their daughter,
thoroughly satisfied, but the teacher regards her work as a failure, comparing the change in
Helen to the house-breaking of a dog. She looks around the empty house with aching eyes.

As the family gathers for a celebratory welcome-home dinner, Helen check to make sure that
the dining-room doors cannot be locked. Before dinner, Helen’s brother Jimmy recites the
Bible passage about Jacob struggling with an angel, a grace that the family finds strange, but
which is clearly intended as a compliment to what the others regard as Annie’s success with
Helen. As the dinner gets underway, however, Helen clearly begins challenging her teacher’s
authority, at first dropping her napkin on the floor, then going on with more obvious and
deliberate provocations. Helen’s parents advise Annie to overlook these peccadilloes,
arguing that the dinner is supposed to be a celebration, but when Helen’s behavior
degenerates into outright tantrum, Annie forces her student outdoors to refill the water
pitcher.

At the pump, Sullivan lets the water flow over Helen’s hand as she spells “w-a-t-e-r” into the
girl’s open palm, a word we have seen Annie try to teach Helen repeatedly. This time, the
word and the idea click. Helen’s face is illuminated as she drops the pitcher in wonder and
delight, croaking out “wah-wah.” Immediately, she is asking Annie to spell words for all the
objects around her, including “t-e-a-c-h-e-r.” The resounding of the house-bell calls the rest
of the family outdoors to witness the “miracle.” Helen takes the dining-room door keys
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from her mother’s pocket and goes to bring them to Annie, an acknowledgment, finally, of
her submission to the teacher’s guidance.

That night, for the first time, Helen seeks out her teacher and willing bestows affectionate
caresses upon her. Annie spells to her student: “I love Helen.”
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THE MIRACLE WORKER: A WEALTH OF NARRATIVES

Palimpsest: Different Versions of Helen Keller’s Story

The Helen Keller story, while dramatic and inspiring, is one that is particularly difficult
to authenticate, because Keller herself could never publicly communicate without
mediation. Whether in private conversation or as a public speaker, she always required
an interpreter. And those who served as Keller’s interpreters often acted as censors and
editors, helping to shape and control her public image. Even her autobiographical
books—The Story of My Life (1903), The World I Live In (1908), Midstream (1929), and
Teacher (1955)—may all be considered at least somewhat collaborative efforts. For the
process of transcribing one of Keller’s texts necessarily entailed an unknown degree of
self-censorship as well being subject to the strong editorial influence of Keller’s regular
companions and interpreters.

In fact, Keller’s sense of her own life, especially the early years described in The Story of
My Life, which was the primary basis of Gibson’s drama, is based largely not on her own
personal memories, but rather on stories related to her by Sullivan and others. The
“miracle” breakthrough moment described first in one of Sullivan’s letters, then in
Keller’s text, and depicted finally as the dramatic climax of The Miracle Worker, is not
actually a moment that Keller personally recollected, but was included in her early
autobiography since it had become a part of her repertoire, one of the many stories from
her teacher that lent meaning and context, that offered a pattern to the course of her life.

For these reasons, we ought to remember, when we consider any representation of

Keller’s life, that the boundary between the “real” and the fictional is often difficult to
determine. Gibson’s version of Keller’s story is certainly based in fact, but it should not
be thought of as an historical document. The same holds true, too, for other versions;
descriptions of Keller’s life, whether from Sullivan’s writings, from biographies of Keller,
or even from Keller’s autobiographies ought each to be regarded as a kind of palimpsest,
a document written, erased, and re-written so that there must always remain some
question as to the nature of the original.

Helen Keller and William Gibson: In writing, on stage, in the movies, on television

William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, which provided the basis for Arthur Penn’s 1962
film, was inspired by Helen Keller’s first autobiography, The Story of My Life, and by
letters and reports written by Anne Sullivan early in the process of Keller’s education. In
a sense, then, both Keller and Sullivan ought to be credited for first writing the story that
Gibson has made so famous. Keller writes of meeting Sullivan:
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher,
Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the
immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of
March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.
On the afternoon of that eventful day, I stood on the porch, dumb,
expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother’s signs and from the hurrying to and
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fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door
and waited on the steps. …
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a
doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it and Laura
Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward. When I had played
with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I
was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. … In the days that
followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words … but
my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has
a name.
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag
doll into my lap also, spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand that “d-o-l-l”
applied to both. … (Berger 17-18)
In this way, Keller goes on, essentially outlining the story which Gibson follows in his
play. It is essential to note, however, that the pivotal scene in Gibson’s play, the
“miracle” moment at the pump in which Helen discovers the meaning of “w-a-t-e-r,”
and which essentially terminates his drama, is addressed very early on in Keller’s text. In
fact, the entirety of Gibson’s play stems from a single short chapter of her
autobiography. We ought thus to remember that the dramatic story told by Gibson
considers only a fragment of Keller’s active and remarkable life. So too, the profound
struggle between teacher and student which is so important to Gibson’s text, plays only a
small part in Keller’s story. Gibson’s source for this information was letters and reports
written by Anne Sullivan during the earliest days and weeks of her work with young
Keller. He also relied in part on Nella Braddy’s biography, Anne Sullivan Macy.

Inspired by these sources and encouraged by director Arthur Penn, Gibson wrote his
play originally as a script for television. The Miracle Worker was first produced on
February 7, 1957 on “Playhouse 90,” CBS, and featured Teresa Wright as Annie and
Patty McCormack as Helen. This first version of the drama was also directed by Penn.
Penn and Gibson continued to work together as the play was revised for production on
Broadway. Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke were cast in the two lead roles. And on
October 19, 1959, again with Penn as director, The Miracle Worker premiered at the
Playhouse Theater, meeting with enormous popular and critical success. Although
Keller herself disliked the play, the production won six Tony awards, including those for
best play and best actress.

With this Broadway success, Gibson and Penn turned to Hollywood, revising the play
again for production as a feature film. The film version of The Miracle Worker, written by
Gibson, directed by Penn, and starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in a reprisal of
their on-stage roles, was released in 1962, to great acclaim, and was nominated for
Oscars in five different categories, including best writer and best director.

In 1979, the play was once again produced for television under the direction of Paul
Aaron, this time with Patty Duke playing the role of Annie and with Melissa Gilbert as
Helen. This was followed by another television remake in 2000, directed by Nadia Tass
and with Alison Elliott as Annie and Hallie Kate Eisenberg as Helen.
12

Between Penn’s 1962 film, and these two made-for-television movies, The Miracle Worker
has been broadcast countless times, impressing generations of viewers with a version of
Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan that is, at least, highly idiosyncratic. While The Miracle
Worker dramatizes an important and exciting story, one certainly worthy of being told, it
should always be remembered that it does, in a sense, write over Keller’s own text, telling
her story in a way that she found disturbing and distasteful.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway? Detangling Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller

According to Sullivan’s biographer Nella Braddy Henney, “As long as Annie

Sullivan lived a question remained as to how much of what was called Helen Keller
was in reality Annie Sullivan” (Henney, Introduction 13). Indeed, it is not possible to
write or speak only of Anne Sullivan or only of Helen Keller; each woman creates the
other’s celebrity, even her visibility. Each one serves both to frame and to shadow
the other; Sullivan exists as medium, translator, and interpreter, giving voice to
Keller. Sullivan embodies Keller’s identity to such an extent that many were forced
to question where one woman began and where the other ended. For Samuel
Clemens, as for many of their other friends and associates, it was not possible to see
the two women as individuals; Clemens regarded Sullivan as Keller’s “other half,”
and once wrote to Keller that “it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect
whole” (qtd in Lash 450). Keller herself writes with some indignation of this
tendency of others to understand herself and Sullivan as individuals, reflecting at the
same time the resentment of her teacher, who “had heard it openly asserted that she
imposed her opinions upon my youthful mind” and who was angry at “the tyranny of
society which declared I was an automaton, a mouthpiece that echoed her thoughts
and sentiments” (Teacher 104-105). It is clear even from this passage, however, how
much the two women shared thoughts, opinions, ideas, for the resentment that Keller
here expresses is, literally, an echo of Sullivan’s displeasure—Teacher had heard it
asserted, Teacher regarded society’s opinion as tyrannical—and Keller’s unique
protest, her assertion of individuality, is thus swallowed up by her own point of
reference.

Though each woman may have existed as an individual, each a point of origin for her
own thoughts, feelings, and ideas, there is no doubt but that the two shared a
discourse from which neither could have been excluded. Even while Sullivan acted
as interpreter—reading Keller printed books, describing the visible world, and
translating the conversation of others—she was also interlocutor, Keller’s friend,
teacher, and companion, with ideas and opinions that were expressed explicitly, but
that were also, and more often, implicit in the act of interpretation. Sullivan notes one
instance when, while walking with Keller, she saw a man being taken into police
custody: “The agitation which I felt evidently produced a perceptible physical
change,” she writes, “for Helen asked, excitedly, ‘What do you see?’” (Sullivan 295).
The anecdote merely amplifies what we already know, that for Sullivan, as for every
other translator, translation is necessarily interpretive, producing a statement which is
colored and transformed by the translator’s own voice, expression, and opinion. If
Sullivan is a medium, passing the expressions of Keller outward to those who could
not otherwise converse with her and passing back to Keller the speech of others, we
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must recognize that this passing back and forth must inevitably be affected by
Sullivan.

In May 1887, when she had been working with Keller only two months, Sullivan
writes of assisting her student with language difficulties: “I supply a word here and
there, sometimes a sentence, and suggest something which she has omitted or
forgotten” (263). Though this was a thoroughly appropriate form of assistance for her
juvenile student, and while it seems highly doubtful that Sullivan would ever have
attempted such direct interference with the adult Keller, this technique is yet
suggestive. And on her deathbed, Sullivan is reported to have commented that “As
the years go on Helen’s speeches won’t be so brilliant but my guiding hand won’t be
there to take out what should be taken out” (qtd in Hermann 257). For Sullivan, the
temptation to edit Keller, and to express herself through Keller must have been nearly
overwhelming. For Keller, whose entire world of ideas was shaped and informed by
this single teacher, whose youth and young adulthood were mediated to the “outer”
world by this same figure, how would it be possible for her to express, or even to
have any thought exclusively, without it also reflecting the ideas and attitudes of
Sullivan?

But if Sullivan occupied Keller, feeding her ideas, even language itself, in a sense
authoring the text which was Keller, Keller also occupied Sullivan, literally, kept her
occupied, day after day, year after year, until Sullivan was no longer herself without
the Keller. This mutual entanglement is evident from Keller’s childhood
“memories,” discussed above. In fact, many of the early “memories” which Keller
recounts in The Story of My Life were stories told to her by Sullivan, thus suggesting
the possibility that this text is not an autobiography, but is rather a biography written
in the first person. And so the difficulty of recognizing Sullivan and Keller as distinct
individuals is not limited to those outside, but extends itself even into the relationship
between the two women: Just as Keller often had difficulty distinguishing her
original writing from writing which had been read to her (see the section on Keller’s
writings, below), it seems she also had some difficulty distinguishing her own
memories from those of others. The difficulty of Keller’s developing unique
memories was problematized, too, by the fact that her entire conscious experience
was shared with Sullivan, from whom she was rarely parted for more than an hour or
two. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the memories and the life Keller relates in
The Story of My Life do in some way belong to Sullivan; without a life apart from
Keller, Sullivan’s experiences were also Keller’s. On some level, then, Keller and
Sullivan shared memory as they shared language and conversation; their individual
remembrances must have undergone substantial mutual influence as they continually
discussed their lives and experiences with and through one another.

Making The Miracle Worker (1962)

The Miracle Worker began life as the brainchild of writer William Gibson, who brought his
idea to television producer Arthur Penn. Encouraged by Penn’s enthusiasm, Gibson
turned out a script which was originally produced on CBS’s “Playhouse 90” in 1957.
Gibson and Penn continued to work The Miracle Worker together, creating a very
14

successful Broadway production of the play which premiered in 1959 and won six Tony
awards. Gibson and Penn continued their partnership with the 1962 film of The Miracle
Worker in which Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke reprise their stage roles as Annie and
Helen.

Critics Look at The Miracle Worker

When it was released in 1962, The Miracle Worker met immediately with great success; it
was recognized by audiences, by critics, and by the Motion Picture Academy as offering
an extraordinary viewing experience. The performances of Anne Bancroft as Annie
Sullivan and of Patty Duke as Helen Keller won almost universal acclaim; reviewers
lauded these as “virtuoso” performances, “marvelously selfless,” “stirring,” and as
revealing “rare artistry” (Walsh 389, Gill 79, Scanlon 72). Hollis Alpert, in the Saturday
Review, commented that in her role as Annie, Bancroft “emerges as one of our most
important film actresses” (23). The film was noted, too, for its technical merit, various
critics observing that the black-and-white photography was artfully done, that Gibson’s
script was finely crafted, and that Penn’s direction deserved great credit for eliciting such
fine performances from his principal actresses.
Even reviewers who regarded the film unfavorably pointed to the richness and
importance of its content. Dwight MacDonald, who reviewed The Miracle Worker for
Esquire thoroughly disliked the movie, but found that it inspired him to turn to Gibson’s
source material: “Let me not be ungrateful to The Miracle Worker,” he observed. “It
stimulated me to read [Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, her memoir of Anne
Sullivan called Teacher, and Nella Braddy’s Anne Sullivan Macy] and to find that the
story of Helen Keller, and even more of Anne Sullivan, is one of the great ones”
(MacDonald 114). In a similar vein, a number of critics praised the film for its value as a
message about teaching and learning, admiring its “tough-minded idealism” (Walsh 390).
One reviewer noted that the movie “will no doubt hearten teachers and parents
everywhere” (Hartung 259). Another proposed that “seeing the film ought to be an
integral part of the preparation of every prospective teacher” (Scanlon 72).
But while the film was widely acclaimed, reviews were by no means entirely
uncritical. Some felt that Gibson and Penn were responsible for sentimentalizing
Sullivan and Keller’s stories and for turning the two women into caricatures. Others felt
that the movie was “clumsy” or “disjointed” (Kauffmann 28, Alpert 23). And many
lamented what were felt to be weak performances by Inga Swenson and Victor Jory, the
actors who portray Keller’s parents. The most widely criticized element of the film,
however, was its use of violence, reviewers noting almost universally how disturbing
were the “bruising encounters” and “furious protean struggles” between teacher and
student (Crowther 2, Alpert 23). New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther commented
that the close-ups used in the film “dump the passion and violence right in your lap” (2).
Another critic noted that Penn’s camera technique “makes us feel as if we were in these
fights ourselves” (Kauffmann 28). Yet another wrote that there were “passages in the
film [he] resented being obliged to observe” (Gill 79). Perhaps most telling, Crother also
pointed out that Patty Duke had grown and aged considerably since her stage
perfomance (she was fifteen during the time of filming—little Helen Keller was seven
when she first met Sullivan) and that she was now “a shade too uncomfortably
formidable as an adversary for the nurse” (2).
 15

Close Up: Break-throughs

Next to the incident at the pump, perhaps the best-remembered scene from The Miracle
Worker is the great dining-room battle. In this scene, little Helen gropes her way around
the breakfast table, snatching bits of food from the plate of each diner, and shoving each
handful most indecorously in her mouth. As the rest of the Kellers carry on the
ordinary, placid tenor of their conversation, the Captain and his son arguing about Civil
War battles and the comparative skills and management of Northern and Southern
generals, Annie looks on with increasing disgust and rising anger over Helen’s behavior.
When Helen arrives at Annie’s plate, she is prepared, defending her food and refusing to
allow Helen access to her dish. Annie grips Helen’s wrists tightly, causing her to struggle
and offer loud, wordless complaints which rouse the rest of the family, who urge Annie
to give over the fight and let Helen have her way. But Annie will not relent. She
dismisses the remainder of the family from the dining room, their breakfast half-eaten,
and locks the doors so that Helen cannot escape. What ensues is the most graphically
violent scene in the film. In the course of Annie’s great effort to get Helen to eat
properly, the two descend into a pitched battle which is characterized by wrestling, face-
slapping, the spitting of food, and the throwing about and general destruction of
household objects. When Helen emerges, terrified, hours later, she comes moaning
piteously to her mother; Annie, exhausted and disheveled, but triumphant, follows close
behind (Helen scampers to keep out of her way), reporting in a tired voice to Mrs. Keller
that Helen has eaten with a spoon from her own dish and has folded her own napkin, a
feat that fills Helen’s mother with wonder and hope.

Although everything in the film seems to hinge on the scene at the pump, the dining-
room battle is ultimately more informative and more characteristic. Like the early scene
in Annie’s bedroom wherein Helen smashes Annie’s face with a doll, causing her to lose
a tooth, and like the struggle which immediately preceeds Helen’s revelation at the
pump, the scene in the dining room is replete with violent exchanges and with highly-
charged visual images.

After Annie has scolded Helen’s father for his “pity,” arguing angrily that it won’t do
Helen any good and that his pity serves merely to make himself feel better, she goes on
to show just how pitiless she is. She shoves food into Helen’s mouth, she tempts the
blind girl with the smell of food that she then removes from out of her reach; Annie
pulls Helen’s hair, then smacks her hand; when Helen slaps Annie’s face in exchange,,
the older woman doesn’t hesitate to return the blow. When Helen tries to run away,
Annie grabs her and shoves her into her seat; when Helen won’t let go of the seat, Annie
picks her up, chair and all, and moves her roughly to the spot she desires. Altogether,
the physicality of the scene is such that it makes most viewers uncomfortable; for
teachers, who are impressed with the need to demonstrate appropriate respect for and
physical distance from their students, the scene is one that must be deeply disturbing.

The disturbing nature of the scene is augmented by the technical devices employed in
the production of the film. First and foremost is the filmmaker’s unusual decision to use
black-and-white rather than color film. In 1962, when The Miracle Worker was made,
color would have been the obvious choice, so its deliberate use must serve some artistic
16

function. In general, the use of black-and-white helps to give the story a feeling of
history, setting the scene in a time gone by (the late 1880s), but perhaps more
importantly, the use of black-and-white film gives the movie a stark look and feel,
underscoring not only the limitations of the time and the environment, but underlining
also the scarcity of choices available to all those involved: For Helen, it is learn or be
sent to an institution; for Annie, succeed at teaching (and quickly) or get fired; for the
household, it is being master or servant. Everything and everyone is strictly divided,
unable or unwilling to escape established boundaries. This makes Annie’s radical
approach to “teaching” Helen seem even bolder and more shocking. In this scene,
particularly, the use of black-and-white emphasizes the contest between Annie and
Helen, each competing for mastery, rather than working together cooperatively.

Early in the scene, this sense of division, this drawing up of sides for the coming battle,
is anticipated by the deft editing. As Helen makes her way around the table, the picture
cuts back and forth between Helen’s gluttony and Annie’s enraged and disgusted face,
each shot coming in increasingly closer and previewing for the viewer the battle which is
imminent, stressing the strength and determination of each character. Once the fight is
underway, the almost seamless editing of the great struggle helps to give the viewer a
sense of prolonged siege. Although there are numerous cuts, these are edited so
carefully that the viewer is left with a sense of unbroken action and unrelieved struggle—
giving the viewer the feeling of extraordinarily extended time. So too, the director’s use
of repeated actions within the scene—Helen’s repeated attempts at escape, her hand and
foot banging, the prolonged exchange of face-slapping, the repeated throwing of spoons
and slapping of new spoons into Helen’s hand—also lends the scene a feeling of length,
the repetitions impressing the viewer with the idea that every element of the altercation
goes on and on …

But perhaps more significant than these effects is the fact that the interaction between
Annie and Helen here has nothing to do with language. Unlike the other scenes that
might disturb audiences, Annie doesn’t seem to be engaged here in teaching Helen
anything having to do with language; there are no words pounded letter-by-letter into her
hand. There is no attempt to make her understand the connection between language
and object. Indeed, there seems little self-control on the part of the teacher who herself
seems as angry with the student as with the parents who have neglected her manners.
Almost like two children, Helen and Annie duke it out, the outcome of this physical
struggle apparently to determine the place of dominance in the teacher-student
relationship. It is important that there is virtually no speech in this scene; the sounds we
hear are the drumming of the enraged Helen’s fists and boots, the slapping of hands and
faces, the thumping of furniture, the “ping” of the silver spoons as they fly across the
room, Helen’s animal grunting. And all this mingled with the eerily dissonant musical
score. The violence physicality of the scene is stressed by its dearth of language and by
the drama of its sounds.

For many, the physical nature of this scene is made more disturbing by the fact of
Helen’s disability. They, like Helen’s father, might argue that Annie ought to have more
“pity” for a “deprived child.” For others, the idea that a child with a disability might be,
like any other child, “badly spoiled” (in Annie’s words), and in need of ordinary
discipline, is refreshing and inspiring. Annie’s ability to cut through all the Keller’s
 17

objections, to take charge of Helen and humanize her despite all humanitarian
objections, speaks to a desire in all of us to “get down to business” and ignore all the
nonsensical objections in our path.

In fact, the roughness of this scene, and the apparent success of the teacher at the end of
it, raises all sorts of contrary feelings and issues. In a practical sense, the Annie depicted
by Penn and Gibson is certainly right: There can be no education without discipline.
This is what this scene (and in a larger way, the film) is really all about. Unless Helen can
be made to understand the importance of behaving in a more disciplined manner, unless
she can be made to believe in the teacher’s authority, it is unlikely that she will ever be
able to learn anything. A child who cannot ever sit still, who cannot “listen,” and who is
consisently violent and disruptive, will have an exceedingly difficult time concentrating
on problem-solving or working progressively to acquire a set of skills or understandings.
For the Annie of the film, this kind of discipline is essential to Helen’s education. Let
the student first be obedient and language will follow.

At the same time, there is something satisfying to the audience in seeing Helen treated so
savagely. After we have seen her knock Annie’s tooth out, lock her teacher in her room
(and throw away the key), toss her baby sister out of her crib, attack a servant girl with
scissors, and deliberately break numerous household objects, there is a part of us that is
longing to see this girl punished. Like Annie, the audience feels angry with Helen, and
not only because of this single instance of ill-manners, but for all the misbehaviors and
disturbances that have come before. There is some dark part of us that is glad to see this
disturber of the household peace put in her place at last. The violence of this scene
satisfies some savage and vicious thing within ourselves.

The competing “meanings” of the violence of this scene invite us to question what really
motivates the need for discipline and to question whether the use of force in this scene,
throughout the film, and in the actual education of any student (Keller included), ought
really to be sanctioned.

The question here is whether “break” is fundamental to the concept of break-through.

18

CONTEXTS
A Brief History of Institutional Care

Institutionalization refers to the practice of placing individuals to live in centers or

institutional settings developed for the dedicated care of people with special
needs. These institutions may be called hospital, nursing home, school, or prison.
While often serving what is perceived as an absolute need, and while sometimes
providing excellent care and much needed shelter, institutional care has very often
gone hand-in-hand with institutional abuse.

In 1972, a little-known local television journalist, Geraldo Rivera, did a ground-

breaking expose of conditions at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. At
the time, it was the largest institution for developmentally disabled people in the
world. Though others had visited the “school” and reported on its deplorable
conditions—notably Robert Kennedy who, ten years earlier, had described the
facility as a “disgrace”—it was Rivera, who by bringing television cameras into
Willowbrook (and thus bringing some shocking images before the public), was
able to arouse the outrage of the city and the nation. His Peabody-winning
documentary depicted the horrors of institutional life: Adults and children
warehoused like objects, lying naked in hallways and day-rooms, many of them
soiled with their own excrement; unattended children howling and moaning,
bruised, emaciated, and totally withdrawn; many patients isolated in solitary
confinement or kept in straight jackets; children playing with their own feces,
attempting to eat soup with their fingers. The documentary launched Rivera into
fame, prompted families to sue the state (successfully), sparked new legislation,
and inspired widespread institutional reform. Among the abuses not reported by
the documentary was the apparently routine rape and sexual molestation of
inmates both by other inmates and by staff. Willowbrook was closed in 1975.

While the Willowbrook expose shocked the nation, the evils of institutional life
were certainly not limited to this single facility, nor to this particular period of
time. Indeed, institutions, though apparently organized for the peculiar benefit of
people requiring specialized care and services (in many instances people with
disabilities), have very often been the setting for horrifying corruption and abuse.
Recall the scene in The Miracle Worker wherein playwright and screenwriter William
Gibson has his Annie Sullivan character react with quiet fury to the Kellers’ thoughts
of putting their daughter in an institution, offering the following description of the
place where she had grown up:
My brother Jimmie and I used to play with the rats because we didn’t have toys.
Maybe you’d like to know what Helen will find there, not on visiting days? One
ward was full of the—old women, crippled blind, most of them dying, but even
if what they had was catching there was nowhere else to move them, and that’s
where they put us. There were younger ones across the hall, prostitutes mostly,
with T.B., and epileptic fits, and a couple of the kind who—keep after other girls,
especially young ones, and some insane. Some just had the D.T.’s. The youngest
 19

were in another ward to have babies they didn’t want, they started at thirteen,
fourteen. They leave afterwards, but the babies stayed and we played with them,
too, though a lot of them had—sores all over from diseases you’re not supposed
to talk about, but not many of them lived. The first year we had eighty, seventy
died. The room Jimmie and I played in was the deadhouse, where they kept the
bodies till they could dig the graves. (Act 2, 77-78)
And this description, while horrifying, is likely a fairly accurate picture of institutional
life in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

In fact, throughout the ages, since the very inception of institutional life more than
a thousand years ago, institutional settings, in addition to offering humanitarian
care, have created a venue for cruelty and suffering. Though often initiated with
the most benevolent motives (the earliest institutions were established by religious
orders to care for the sick, the disabled, and the outcasts of society), the
vulnerability of institutionalized persons has always been exploited as an
opportunity for abusive and unscrupulous persons; and the routines and physical
arrangements made necessary within a group-care scenario virtually ensure the
spread of disease and the neglect of individual needs.

Moreover, prior to the nineteenth century, all varieties of social outcast were
routinely housed together in the same facility. While there were some sanctuaries
intended exclusively for the blind, for instance, or for lepers, most institutions
were simply secured facilities where debtors, violent criminals, mentally ill
persons, vagrants, the severely disabled, and other undesirables were housed
together in an open setting. It may be useful to remember here that the institution
in which Anne Sullivan spent the unhappiest years of her own childhood, the
State Infirmary in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, served as a home for indigents,
unwed mothers, orphans, prostitutes with late-stage STDs, and the elderly infirm.
It may be imagined that, given such diverse populations, some of these inmates
were bound to prey on others.

Again, the dangers and discomforts of such a world are horrifying to contemplate,
but it must be remembered that the institutional life itself, even in the best-
regulated facilities, where violence and neglect are rarities, creates an
environment and attitudes that are demeaning and dehumanizing. The idea that
certain members of our society—because they require exceptional medical
intervention or assistance, because they are unsightly, or even because they pose a
danger—should be shut away out of the sight and knowledge of the “normal”
population creates a sense that those who are institutionalized are less than
human, a notion that is perilous both for those within the institution and those
outside its walls

In the 1960s and 70s, with the rising political and social consciousness of the
American people, many activists began to question the benefits and the dangers of
institutional living, creating a call for generalized deinstitutionalization. And in
1970, a severely disabled Berkley student, Ed Roberts, helped to organize what
20

became a worldwide movement toward independent living for people with

disabilities.

Learning to Communicate through Deaf-Blindness:

Laura Bridgman and Samuel Howe

Until the nineteenth century, deaf-blind persons were considered unreachable and
unteachable. For it was thought that there was no way for the seeing and hearing world
to communicate with them. The education of the deaf-blind Laura Bridgman by Samuel
Gridley Howe at the Perkins Institution in Boston was thus recognized as an astonishing
achievement, and heralded a new era for people with disabilities. For once it was proved
that deaf-blind people were not, as a matter of course, mindless, once it was established
that those who could not speak, hear, or see might still participate in human
conversation and community, so too, it began to be more generally understood that
blind or deaf persons could make a contribution and that it was certainly possible to
provide education to these persons, rather than mere shelter.

In 1829, Laura Bridgman was born with both her sight and hearing intact, but she
experienced much illness during the early years of her life and by the age of four was
entirely blind and deaf in addition to having very a limited sense of taste and smell.
Before her eighth birthday, she was moved to Perkins and Howe commenced her
education. The first step was to offer her objects labeled in raised print. Bridgman
quickly learned to associate words and objects, but apparently without any understanding
of their meaning. She could recognize words as belonging to particular objects and
could form words that would be understood by others, but this was nothing more than a
superficial process. She was able to remember and to imitate, but was not actually aware
of words as meaningful symbols. After a number of weeks however, Howe observes
the truth began to flash upon her: her intellect began to work: she perceived that
here was a way by which she herself could make up a sign of anything that was in her
own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her own countenance lighted
up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog or a parrot: it was an immortal
spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix
upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her
countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and that henceforward
nothing but patient and persevering, but plain and straightforward, efforts were to be
used. (Dickens, American Notes 85)
Once Bridgman began to understand language as a symbolic device, her education
progressed quickly. She was offered a set of raised-type letters and she would take
pleasure in using these to identify objects placed before her. Once her vocabulary had
grown to a certain level, about three months after her arrival at Perkins, Bridgman was
instructed in and quickly learned to use the manual alphabet, a much faster and more
efficient mode of communication than writing with raised letters. The following year
was dedicated almost entirely to Bridgman’s practicing the manual alphabet, to
responding to her eager queries about the names of all sorts of objects, and to offering
her some greater sense of “the physical relations of things” (86). Bridgman’s enthusiasm
often led her to sign to herself, either practicing recently-learned lessons, or thinking
 21

“aloud” as it were. She was soon able to converse fluently with the other children
housed at Perkins, almost all of whom were blind, but not deaf.

In 1842, the British writer Charles Dickens visited Perkins and marveled at Bridgman’s
skill and at Howe’s remarkable talent as an educator. Dickens dedicates almost an entire
chapter to Bridgman in his travel memoir, American Notes (1842). Indeed, Bridgman
soon became one of the most celebrated people in the world. She was visited by the
great and the famous. She was written about extensively and, as Betsey Gitter observes
in her recent biography of Bridgman, “at the peak of Laura’s popularity, in the 1840s and
early 50’s, thousands of sightseers flocked to see her on exhibition days [at Perkins] and
local guidebooks listed her as a major tourist attraction.” Despite the success of her
education and her early rise to fame, Bridgman’s life may not be described as an entirely
happy one.

As she grew older, Bridgman’s popularity began to fade and she began to strain against
her highly restricted life—confined to an institution and regulated in virtually every
aspect of her behavior and existence. She died in 1889, when she was close to sixty,
discontented and lonely despite her outstanding achievement.

The Perkins Institute, raised print, braille, finger-spelling, American Sign Language
(ASL)

Begun originally as the New England Asylum for the Blind, the school which would later
become the Perkins Institution was based on the idea that any blind person could learn
to become a fully integrated, fully functional member of society. The school was first
founded in 1832, which is typically considered the first year of the Victorian age, an era
remarkable for its zealous social and institutional reform as well as for its astonishing
technological progress; and the school’s founder and principal, Samuel Gridley Howe,
may certainly be regarded as embodying the spirit and philosophy of his age. Having
studied educational practices in the United States, in Britain, and in Europe, Howe
returned home to Boston with very decided views on the education of blind people and
with enormous energy for putting his methods into practice. He began the school with
six students in his father’s Boston home but before ten years had passed, the Institution
housed more than sixty students, had moved twice to larger quarters, and, through
Howe’s tireless efforts, received tens of thousands of dollars for the pursuit of its highly
successful educational mission.

Among Howe’s most important accomplishments was the production and distribution
of a wide variety of raised-print books for the blind. While thwarted in his most
ambitious goal, to arrange for raised-print editions of every book in print, Howe’s
determination did succeed to the extent the Perkins printed more books for the blind
than any other school in the world, distributing volumes throughout the United States as
well as in England, Ireland, Holland, and India. Moreover, Howe contributed important
innovations to the production of raised-print books, developing a new typeface and
using thinner paper to create smaller, cheaper volumes that were also easier to read.

But despite Howe’s important contributions, he ought not to be considered with an

altogether uncritical eye. His desire to educate the blind (and the deaf), for instance, may
22

be admirable, and his great work in opening up education and opportunity for blind
people should be lauded, but at the same time, Howe shared a common weakness of his
time, failing to see blind people (and deaf people especially) as having real rights of self-
determination. Although he undoubtedly improved the lives of those he educated, he
may also be seen as oppressing and exploiting his students by his rigid institutional
system and through his regularly exhibiting them to the public as part of his fund-raising
efforts.

In addition, Howe’s work both as an educator and as a publisher of books for the blind
would have been of greater value had he adopted language systems better suited to the
minds he so desired to serve. The use of raised-print texts for blind people and of the
manual alphabet for the deaf were extraordinary innovations at a time when blind and
deaf people were generally considered uneducable, but braille and sign are ultimately
more more accessible tools and endow their users with much greater speed and
flexibility.

Developed by Louis Braille, a student at the Paris Institute for the Young Blind, in 1824,
braille is a system of printing that uses combinations of six raised dots to correspond to
printed letters, numbers, and notations. It was not approved for official use by that
institution until 1847, but during the interval, students secretly taught the code to one
another and privately adopted its use, it being the only form of writing that blind
students could use to communicate with each other without an intermediary. Though in
its simplest form, braille corresponds letter-for-letter with printed matter, advanced
braille readers and writers use a higher level system which employs many contractions
and shortened forms, functioning ultimately as a kind of shorthand that enables blind
people to read quickly and efficiently.

But while his failure to employ braille may be regarded as an oversight, since the system
was not yet widely known when he opened his school in Boston, Howe’s refusal to teach
his few deaf students Sign was more deliberate and his rejection of this language system
caused lasting harm not only to his own students, but also to the cause of Deaf
education over the next century. Consolidated during the early decades of the
nineteenth century, American Sign Language (ASL) was originally developed as an
adaptation of a Sign language used in France’s most progressive school for the deaf. The
language which ultimately became ASL was brought to the United States in 1816 and
integrated into Deaf education here by legendary educator Laurent Clerc, who with
Thomas Gallaudet established an enormously successful school for the deaf, which
would go on to become Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts college for
deaf people. ASL is a rich, complex, and flexible language with its own unique grammar,
syntax, and rules of practice. Essential to Deaf culture and communication, ASL is now
recognized by scholars and linguists as fundamental to deaf education. But during the
first 150 years that followed its inception in the United States, debate raged over its use.
Viewed by many, including Howe, as a primitive kind of pantomime, Sign was often
rejected by prominent people in deaf education in favor of “oralism,” a laborious and
often unsuccessful approach that insisted that deaf people learn to use and understand
spoken and written language only. Though advantageous for its potential as a tool to
integrate deaf people into hearing culture and society, this emphasis on oralism
prevented many deaf people from ever really acquiring any language, thus effectively
 23

robbing them of an education. At the same time, this insistence on oralism to the
exclusion of Sign has functioned to exclude many deaf people from the rich and diverse
cultural world of the Deaf.

One of the long-term effects of Howe’s rejection of Sign is that Helen Keller, educated
by Perkins alumna Anne Sullivan, never learned ASL and was thus excluded from the
wealth of Deaf culture. Instead, she used finger-spelling, the use of the manual alphabet
to spell out every letter of every word she “spoke,” for all her daily interactions.
(Though Keller did learn to speak, her oral skills were never so great that strangers
would be able to understand her without an interpreter.) It is difficult to imagine how
cumbersome this must have made Keller’s everyday life, but to give some idea, it should
be noted that such a system required Keller to proofread the galleys of all her books by
having sn interpreter spell every letter of her printed texts back into her hand.

The Historical Moment: A Brief Look at Alabama, the United States, and the World
in the 1880s

Helen Keller was fortunate to have been born during an era remarkable for its
progressive inclinations and attitudes. In the United States and throughout what was
then the developed world, activists pushed successfully for political and social reform
while scientists and researchers developed new technologies to help people live safer,
longer lives; two important advances—the continuing work on railroads as well as the
advent of electric light—were particularly significant since these technologies not only
enriched the individual but also brought human communities together.

Eighteen-eighty, the year of Keller’s birth, saw the streets of New York City first lit by
electricity, a development made possible by the work of Thomas A. Edison and J. W.
Swan who, working independently, had each devised the first practical electrical lights
earlier that year. That same year, there were almost 88,000 miles of railroad in the
United States, almost 18,000 in Britain, and more than 16,000 in France. Also in 1880,
Andrew Carnegie developed the first large steel furnace, James Wimshurst developed the
electrostatic generator, Louis Pasteur discovered a vaccine for cholera, the malarial
parasite was discovered, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Pirates of Penzance,” Rodin
created his sculpture “The Thinker,” and canned fruits and meats made their first
appearance on store shelves.

In the year after Keller’s birth, American President James A. Garfield was assasinated
before he had completed a single full year in office. The population of New York City
was established at 1.2 million, London 3.3 million, Paris 2.2 million, Berlin 1.1 million,
and St. Petersburg 0.6 million. In Russia, millions of Jews suffered from extreme forms
of persecution. In Alabama, Booker T. Washington, the son of a slave and a pioneer in
American education, founded a school for blacks called the Tuskegee Institute.

The decade that followed was noteworthy for its artistic and cultural richness: In 1882,
Tchaikovsky wrote his renowned “1812 Overture”; Richard Wagner wrote “Parsifal.” In
1883, the Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York City. Other composers
producing important new music during this time included Debussy, Brahms, Mahler,
Liszt, Strauss, and Gilbert & Sullivan. Important artists active during this decade, mostly
24

in Paris, included Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Doré, Van Gogh, J.S. Sargent, and
Millais. Writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (Russia), Henry James
(England/America), Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola (France), R. L. Stevenson
(Britain), Oscar Wilde (England), and Mark Twain (America) were also publishing major
works during this period. During the same time, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” appeared
for the first time in English, “Buffalo Bill” opened his “Wild West Show,” and Barnum
and Bailey’s Circus began shows in London.

In terms of science, technology, and engineering, this decade was equally rich in
discovery and innovation. Medical advances included a method of preventive
innoculation against anthrax, the discovery of the tetanus bacillus, the development of a
rabies vaccine, the sterilization of surgical instruments, early work in psychoanalysis, and
important research into the causes of diabetes. For the first time, too, rubber gloves
were used for surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. On the industrial
front, inventors were responsible for developing an early synthetic fiber, the first electric
motor, a recoil-operated machine gun, the first practical steam turbine engine, a single-
cylinder engine for a motor car, pneumatic tires, the box camera and coated
photographic paper, and celluloid film. Engineers and builders designed the world’s first
hydroelectric plant, completed the Northern Pacific Railroad line and the Canadian
Pacific Railway, began work on the world’s first subway (the London tube), built the first
“skyscraper” (ten stories, Chicago) constructed the first entirely steel-framed building
(also in Chicago), completed work on the Brooklyn Bridge, and designed the Eiffel
Tower.

Despite Booker Washington’s founding of the Tuskegee Institute, progress in Alabama

lagged somewhat behind what is described here. Still suffering from the destruction
wrought during the Civil War (1861-65), Alabama was readmitted to the Union in 1868,
but with its economic and agricultural infrastructure devastated, and its territory under
military occupation. During the period of Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877, the
rule of radical Republican government worked to entrench many Southerners in their
anti-black and other Secessionist attitudes, helping to foment an enduring racial
bitterness. The beginning of industrialization toward the end of the century helped to
relieve some of Alabama’s economic woes, but recovery still progressed slowly and was
limited in scope. The lasting tensions between North and South, the continuing hostility
against Yankee attitudes, and especially against northern ideas of progress and reform,
may be witnessed in The Miracle Worker in Captain Keller’s bitterness toward Anne
Sullivan’s aggressive, intrusive manner. Quick to speak, quick to act, without shyness,
diffidence, or deference, the Sullivan character embodies those aspects of northern
culture that many southerners found so offensive. In a symbolic sense, the Helen Keller
character in Penn’s film may be regarded as a kind of pawn in the struggle between
northern ideas of “progress” and southern notions of quiet gentility.

In 1887, the same year that Anne Sullivan first found herself in Keller’s hometown of
Tuscumbia, L. L. Zamenhof devised the language “Esperanto,” in the hope that people
all over the world might be able to use a common language to express themselves to one
another. In 1888, shortly after the deaf-blind Helen Keller made what is acknowledged
as her first great foray into the world of language, Jack the Ripper murdered six women
in London.
 25

About Anne Sullivan: Disability and Social Activism

Anne Sullivan was born in Massachusetts in 1866, the daughter of Irish immigrants.
Sullivan’s mother died when she was eight and her drunken and abusive father soon
abandoned his three children. As a result, at age ten, Sullivan and her younger
brother Jimmie were sent to the State Infirmary at Tewksbury, Massachusetts.
Blinded early by trachoma, Sullivan suffered miserably during her time as an inmate
of the poorhouse, in part because of the scandalous conditions that prevailed there
(see “A Brief History of Institutional Care,” above), in part because of the death of
her brother, who died within three months of being sent to Tewksbury. Sullivan’s
personal experience of institutional life was to mark her for life, not only
emotionally, but intellectually as and politically as well. Her championing of the
poor, her socialism, her special interest in the disabled and in women’s rights, all
stem from her from a deeply-rooted desire to right some of the wrongs that were
elemental to her unfortunate experience at Tewksbury.
Sullivan herself only escaped the institution due to her own reckless courage.
The young blind girl apparently threw herself upon visitors to the “school” and
begged to be educated (a moment depicted in dreamy flashback at the close of the
dining-room scene in Penn’s The Miracle Worker); it was this act of daring that
resulted in Sullivan’s being sent to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston,
where she graduated as valedictorian in 1886. At Perkins, Sullivan acquired an
excellent education, including a knowledge of braille and of the manual alphabet
which were to be instrumental in her instruction of Helen Keller. She also
underwent a series of eye operations which partially restored her vision, but her eyes
were to remain delicate and sensitive throughout her life. Unfortunately, she never
acquired the mobility skills that would have made her later years much less of a trial,
for Sullivan’s re-acquired vision did eventually give out. Sullivan went directly from
Perkins to her post as Keller’s tutor and governess, where the memorable events
depicted in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker occurred.
But while Sullivan is best known for her work with Keller, the teacher also
harbored some deeply-felt political convictions. Often considered as leading Keller
into radical causes, the reverse was actually often the case. Keller became a socialist,
for instance, years before Sullivan felt comfortable identifying herself as such. So,
too, Keller’s pacifism seems to have been in advance of Sullivan’s. In many respects,
however, the politics and activism of the two women were inextricably linked, for
Sullivan was always “Teacher” to Keller and the teacher was certainly responsible for
introducing certain issues and problems to Keller’s notice and for helping in some
respects to shape her mind. It was through Sullivan, for instance, that Keller first
learned that blindness was often caused by a sexually transmitted disease acquired at
birth (a bit of knowledge which others considered improper to communicate to an
unmarried girl).
At the same time, the causes in which Keller was active were often ones in
which the women were partnered, almost by necessity. Both worked tirelessly for
the American Foundation for the Blind. And both also were fierce proponents of
social and political equity in all forms, campaigning for rights and education for the
blind, for blacks, for women, and for the poor. Sullivan also anticipated the work of
many later scholars and activists, in raising awareness regarding the essential link
26

between poverty and disability. She was an impatient woman and found it hard to
bear the injustices that were before her. In the Keller home, Sullivan created
disturbances over the household attitude toward black people; she also offered
feminist challenges that were difficult for Captain Keller to bear. In Keller’s
adulthood, when the two women were on their own, Sullivan was often infuriated by
the conditions of extreme economic disparity which were constantly before her,
since she and Keller moved in elite circles, but were also frequent visitors in the
homes of poor and disabled individuals.
Because of Sullivan’s interest in and enthusiasm for a variety of social causes,
Keller believed that her teacher’s focus on work and advocacy for the blind was
more limited scope than might otherwise have been natural to her, but the teacher’s
greatest social contribution and her most effective radical cause was one that was not
obviously political: Sullivan’s teaching of Keller, regarded with wonder by so many,
was actually more revolutionary than “miraculous.” For Sullivan’s pedagogical
approach and methods—teaching Keller by “speaking” to her constantly without
worrying about how much she understood, using everyday circumstances and
settings as lessons rather than confining her student to classrooms and assignments,
believing faithfully in the intelligence of a deaf-blind child sometimes supposed to be
mentally “defective”—are a legacy which continues to inform pedagogies of the
present day. Despite her weaknesses as a person and a teacher, Sullivan ultimately
contributed in a remarkably meaningful and successful way to the improvement of
life for hundreds of thousands people, both disabled and nondisabled.

About Helen Keller: American Icon

Life before Teacher. Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880.
Her father, Arthur H. Keller, the editor of a small newspaper, had been a Captain in the
Confederate Army. Kate Adams Keller, Helen’s mother, was the captain’s second wife
and was many years younger than himself. Helen had an older half-brother, James, by
her father’s first marriage, and a little sister about six years younger than herself. A
precocious child, Helen was apparently very active and very verbal before the illness that
left her deaf and blind. Kate Keller reports that she spoke her first word at six months.
At nineteen months, Helen fell ill with what was called “acute congestion of the stomach
and brain,” perhaps scarlet fever or meningitis. When she recovered, she could neither
see nor hear.

Although The Miracle Worker gives viewers the sense that Keller’s life before the coming
of Anne Sullivan was an unbroken sea of darkness and frustration, that the young girl
was entirely cut off from family and community and that she was a violent and animal-
like creature, Keller herself has a cery different description to offer of her early years.
Though certainly frustrated and given both to mischief and to tantrums, the young
Keller had also devised her own small language system, having developed a vocabulary
of more than sixty signs, and was certainly able to communicate, though in a limited way,
with the people around her. In fact, when Anne Sullivan did arrive, she considered one
of her most important tasks to be the dismantling of Keller’s sign system in favor of the
manual alphabet. Keller reports helping her mother fold laundry and describes a happy
relationship with playmate Martha Washington, a girl a little older than herself, a child of
 27

one of the family servants and herself a helper around the house. According to Keller,
the two used frequently to hunt for eggs, which was one of their favorite pastimes; and
the scene depicted early in Penn’s film, where young Keller sits astride a black servant
girl and cuts wildly at her hair with a scissors is based on an actual episode in their
friendship, though once again, Keller’s description of the event offers a much less
ominous picture of the scene. According to her account, the two had agreed to make a
game of cutting one another’s hair. First Helen cut off all of Martha’s little braids, but
when Martha began cutting Helen golden curls, adults interfered and both were
reprimanded for engaging in such a naughty form of play. Such examples give a very
different idea of Keller’s early life than The Miracle Worker.

Education. The dramatic depiction of Keller’s early education offered in Penn’s The
Miracle Worker was only the very beginning of her cognitive and academic success. For
some time after the great “breakthrough” treated in the film, Sullivan remained with
Keller at her parents’ Alabama home, tutoring her in all that she had missed during the
course of her young life. Despite her strictness in other respects and her emphatic
insistence on discipline, Sullivan did not believe in the typical strictures of an educational
setting. She thought that her student could learn as she went about her life, roaming
through nature, exploring in the garden, and enjoying ordinary, everyday occupations like
sewing or stringing beads. Sullivan used all these environments and tasks as
opportunities for Keller’s education, “speaking” into the child’s hand, conversationally,
as much as she possibly could. Using this method, Keller quickly learned much that she
had missed before—counting, sequencing, and patterns; vocabulary; natural history;
geography; and the natural flow of language. One of the most significant moments in
this part of her education was when Keller, after much effort, finally understood the use
of language to describe abstractions. “For an instant,” Keller writes in The Story of My
Life, I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have
arrange d the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided
emphasis, ‘Think.’ In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was
going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.”
During this period, Keller also learned to read braille and raised print.

When Sullivan had been with the Kellers for a year, she and Helen began sometimes to
travel together, their first trip being to Boston and including a substantial visit to the
Perkins Institution where the young girl was delighted to find comrades with whom she
could play and chat without any intermediary. Thereafter, she spent at least part of
almost every winter in Boston.

Keller’s education progressed rapidly from this point and she was an unusually gifted
student. She devoured the fiction and poetry which was read to her and sometimes
produced little stories of her own. In 1890, she began speech lessons. By 1893, she hd
read histories of Greece, Rome, and the United States, and knew enough French to read
short stories with pleasure. She began to study Latin and German. And by the time
Keller was sixteen, she was admitted to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies where
she studied English history and literature, Greek and Roman history, German, French,
Latin, Greek, algebra, and geometry. She completed her studies at the Cambridge
School in 1900 and was then admitted to Radcliffe where she took a B.A. degree in
28

English, cum laude. She is also the first woman ever to be granted an honorary degree
from Harvard.

Anne Sullivan remained with Keller throughout her school years, reading and
interpreting for her, and helping to have her study materials transliterated text that Helen
could read for herself. Indeed, Sullivan and Keller were inseparable companions,
traveling together, doing public appearances together, and always living together even
during the years of Sullivan’s troubled marriage and after as Sullivan’s health and vision
declined.

Writing. Helen Keller was always a prolific writer and is the author of fourteen books as
well as numerous essays, poems, and stories. In addition to writing about her own life,
which was always a popular subject with the public, Keller wrote about literature,
religion, and social causes. But while she was certainly a fluent and accomplished writer,
Keller was also troubled by accusations of plagiarism. One of the most difficult episodes
in her life was when, at age twelve, her friend and supporter Michael Anagnos of the
Perkins Institute (who had also been Sullivan’s teacher and mentor) discovered that a
short story, “The Frost Kings,” which Keller had written and sent to him as a gift,
included substantial passages which duplicated word-for-word a story by Margaret
Canby. Keller’s prodigious memory was to blame. A voracious reader, Keller would
consume whatever literature came to hand, often absorbing huge passages of text entire.
Especially as a child, she would hold these passages sometimes without completely
understanding or remembering them—food for future thought. As a result, she would
sometimes release bits of these texts into her own conversation or writing, unwittingly
quoting writing that had, quite literally, become a part of her. Without a reliable and
efficient method for checking her sources, and especially in her youth before she was
aware of this as a trouble spot, Keller sometimes innocently used the words of others as
her own. Though this was almost certainly the case in the “Frost King” incident,
Anagnos held a formal inquiry into the matter and it would be no exaggeration to say
that the child was traumatized by the incident. The failure of trust—both of her friends’
faith in her innocence and of her belief in her own originality—was devastating. Keller
never afterward entirely trusted that her literary creations were truly her own.

Famous friends. At the age of ten, Helen Keller was one of the most famous people in
the world, and thanks to Keller’s own skill and intelligence and to the progressive
thinking of Anne Sullivan, Keller was able to travel, to meet new people, and to enter
into the thinking and concerns of the world around her. Partly because of her native
talents, but due also in part to her extraordinary status, Keller attracted the notice and
friendship of a number of other famous persons. Among her staunchest friends and
supporters were, most notably, Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone and
researcher into deaf communication) and Samuel Clemens (writer Mark Twain). Keller
was also befriended by writers Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, and
William Dean Howells. Later in life, Keller met and worked with dancer and
choreographer Martha Graham.

An ambassador. Keller had always demonstrated an interest in issues of social welfare

and was particularly concerned with the cause of blind education. In 1915,
approximately ten years after her graduation from Radcliffe, she began working with the
 29

Permanent Blind War Relief Fund, later called the American Braille Press and was a
member of its first board of directors. (The organization was later twice renamed, as the
American Foundation for Overseas Blind and later as Helen Keller International.)
Keller was also instrumental in the organization of the American Foundation for the
Blind (AFB), which was founded in 1921 and she was employed by the AFB until the
end of her life, spending much of her time working and travelling for the foundation and
promoting the formation of many state commissions for the blind. Between 1946 and
1957, Keller visited 35 countries on five continents, raising money for and championing
the idea of blind education. Eleanor Roosevelt called her “America’s goodwill
ambassador to the world.” And in 1969, Keller was praised by former President Nixon,
who noted that Keller served as “an American ambassador-at-large to the world because
she was unexcelled in interpreting the nation’s philosophy of respect for the unique
inherent qualities of each individual.” Keller continued to lecture and to travel widely to
publicize the needs and rights of blind people even into her senior years. At 77, Keller
traveled to Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark to survey facilities for the
blind. And many advances in the conditions of blind people worldwide may be
attributed directly to these “ambassadorial” visits.

Keller has been recognized world-wide for her important philanthropic work. In 1964,
she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award.
She was also awarded the French Legion of Honor, the Brazilian Order of the Southern
Cross, the Japanese Sacred Treasure, the Philippines Golden Heart, and the Lebanese
Gold Medal of Merit.

Keller’s work might be summed up in her own words: “The public must learn that the
blind man is neither a genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind which can be
educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to
realize…” But this quotation also points to one of the difficulties in interpreting Keller’s
philanthopy, for while she is internationally acclaimed both for her own
accomplishments and for her work on behalf of others, the work that she undertook and
the causes she espoused were often much more controversial than the public would have
wanted to believe. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party, a pacifist, and later, a
member of the Industrial Workers of the World. A book of her political essays was
burned by the Nazis and Keller was kept under surveillance by the FBI. In addition to
her activism on behalf of blind, deaf-blind, and disabled people everywhere, Keller
supported civil rights for black people (especially black disabled people), was a militant
supporter of women’s suffrage, protested the deportation of immigrants for political
reasons, lobbied for the availability of birth control, and was instrumental in founding
the American Civil Liberties Union. Importantly, Keller regarded her work as an activist
in all causes of social justice as being linked fundamentally with her advocacy of blind
and deaf-blind rights specifically. And so, in many respects, Keller ought not to be
considered a philanthropist at all, but should rather be seen as a radical political activist

The Disability Rights Movement Today

The social desire to assist and more particularly, to offer education and improved living
conditions for disabled people, and especially for deaf and blind persons, has existed for
30

centuries. Schools, institutions, hospices, and new technologies and pedagogies have
appeared as often as charitable hearts and industrious souls have thought to benefit the
“less fortunate.” With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, however,
the idea of an improved life for disabled people underwent a radical shift. Instead of
patrons, benefactors, and educators working to make life better for people with
disabilities, disabled people themselves began to rise up and insist on self-represention.
Rather than being benefited or “liberated” by outsiders, people with disabilities began
more and more to speak and act independently in the struggle for civil rights and civil
liberties. In fact, a frequent refrain of the global Disability Rights movement is:
“Nothing about us without us!” In addition, people with different types of disabilities
began to come together with a more unified political voice and in more united public
actions to call for social and political justice. Through the efforts of those active in the
Disability Rights movement, the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was
written and passed into law in 1990.

Perhaps the two most important issues that have been addressed by the movement are
the rights of people with disabilities to live independently (rather than in institutions or
under the authority of family members) and to have the same access to community
resources as any other citizens. The first of these issues was promoted perhaps most
famously by Ed Roberts, who with a small group of like-minded people at the University
of California at Berkeley, founded the worldwide movement toward Independent living.
The work of this group had an enormous impact on the lives of institutionalized disabled
people around the world and as a direct result of their planning and activism, many
Centers for Independent Living were opened in California, throughout the nation, and
internationally. (See appendix “A Chronology of the Disability Rights Movement” for
more details.) The issue of accessibility, while a less dramatic cause (since it doesn’t
involve the literal liberation of imprisoned individuals), is, nevertheless, an item of crucial
importance since it affects vast numbers of people. Activists involved in the fight for
accessibility have argued that it is not a person’s physical state which identifies him as
disabled or nondisabled, but the extent of the barriers erected against the individual by
the society. As a result, they use all possible means to press for a barrier-free culture:
Universal disability-friendly architectural design and remodifications, curb cuts, talking
signs, accessible public transportation, use of non-print media, etc.

But perhaps just as important to many activists is the movement to destigmatize

disability, inviting people to embrace disability as an identity of which they may be
proud, and teaching the culture at large that people with disabilities may be beautiful,
intelligent, productive, and capable despite a history of prejudice that informs us
otherwise. For many, it is the revulsion and the pity toward people with disabilities
which is the greatest challenge a person with a disability will ever face. Indeed, the idea
of pity as a disabling instrument is essential to Gibson and Penn’s representation of
Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. Among those activists who have most visibly
challenged the pity model of disability are “Jerry’s Orphans,” a group of formed of those
who were once represented by Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA),
which has been widely criticized for its demeaning and disempowering representations of
disabled children.
 31

In addition to challenging the notion that disabled people are necessarily un-able, many
disability rights activists maintain that all human life has value and is deserving of dignity
and respect, making the case that even the most severely disabled people—those who
cannot move, speak, or think—nevertheless merit thoughtful and compassionate care.
Those most active in this camp (the most visible group is Not Dead Yet) protest the
Right-to-Die and the physician-assisted suicide movements and argue against the use of
abortion as a tool of “genocide” against the disabled.

In the academic arena, the increasing stature of Disability Studies has lent depth and
authority to Disability Rights activism. Emerging as its own discipline in the 1970s,
Disability Studies is responsible for exploring the history of disability, the politics of
social access, literary representations of disability, the linguistics of ASL, the cognitive
processes of people with a variety of impairments. And Disability scholars are often
credited with more fully articulating the causes and consequences of injustices against
people with disabilities. (For an excellent introduction to this field, see the Disability
Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis. See bibliography in this study guide for
suggestions for additional reading.)
32

CREATOR’S BIOGRAPHIES
Arthur Penn (Director)
Director not only of The Miracle Worker (1962), but also of film classics Bonnie and Clyde
(1967) and Chinatown (1974), filmmaker and Broadway director Arthur Penn was born in
Phildelphia in 1922. Formally trained as a watchmaker, Penn was quick to abandon this
early work in favor of the theater. As an infantryman during World War II, he formed a
small drama circle and later studied acting in North Carolina, Italy, and at the Actors Studio’s
Los Angeles branch.
Penn’s career took a turn when, in 1951, he started a job at NBC TV where he was
responsible for writing and directing live television productions. His television success
earned him a chance at feature films but while Penn’s first movie, The Left-Handed Gun (1958)
starring Paul Newman as Billy-the-Kid, met with approval overseas, American audiences
didn’t care for it and Penn decided to pursue instead his stage directing career which had
already met with more unequivocal success. As the director of Broadway hits Two for the
Seesaw (which, like The Miracle Worker, was written by William Gibson), Toys in the Attic, All
the Way Home, and The Miracle Worker, Penn was acknowledged as a major talent and he
returned to feature films with The Miracle Worker, insisting that Anne Bancroft and Patty
Duke reprise their stage roles as Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller. As with the Broadway
rendition, Penn’s film version of the Gibson play met with great acclaim, earning an Oscar
nomination for Penn himself as well as Academy awards for its two principal actors.
Despite the screen success of The Miracle Worker, however, Penn’s film career had many ups
and downs and he frequently returned to stage or television direction when he felt
disenchanted with the world of feature films. In addition to the work cited above, Penn is
responsible for directing films such as Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975), Mickey One
(1965), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Four Friends (1981). His
television credits include The Portrait (1993) with Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall, and a
made-for-cable feature Inside (1996) dealing with South African apartheid. Most recently,
Penn signed on as an executive producer for the television drama Law & Order.

William Gibson (Screenwriter)

Born in 1914 and raised in the Bronx, William Gibson was a strangely precocious child. He
loved to read and his mother tutored him so that he would be able to skip grades in school.
But despite his abilities, the young Gibson did not do well in school. Apart from writing and
literature, he had little interest in academic subjects and he quickly fell behind his high school
classmates. Although his writing was published in the school newspaper after he won a
contest, Gibson’s other work was unexceptional. Outside of school, Gibson pursued his
interest in music and became an accomplished piano player who often played in public.
After high school, Gibson attended the CUNY’s City College but, dropped out after
attempting to concentrate in science. Although he quite school after only four semesters, the
interest and support of a literature professor encouraged Gibson to pursue a writing career.
Supported by his wife, playing the piano, and taking occasional part-time work brought
Gibson enough income to sustain him for the twenty years it took before he achieved
financial success.
In addition to his most popular (and most profitable) play, The Miracle Worker,
Gibson has written poetry, fiction, and an autobiographical family chronicle called A Mass for
the Dead. Gibson also wrote a play entitled Two for the Seesaw, which was successfully
 33

produced on Broadway under the direction of Arthur Penn. Two for the Seesaw was also
turned into a motion picture. Although Gibson was involved in the Broadway productions
of The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw, he was unhappy with script changes made
by the producer and director. In 1982, Gibson wrote a rather unpopular sequel to The
Miracle Worker; entitled Monday after the Miracle, this play delves further into Gibson’s
fascination with Anne Sullivan. It treats the psychological struggle between Keller and
Sullivan and suggests a kind of love triangle between Anne Sullivan, her husband John Macy,
and Helen Keller.
Gibson lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he co-founded the Berkshire
Theatre Festival.

Helen Keller (Writer, autobiography)

Helen Keller was born in Alabama in 1880. A gifted child, Helen was apparently very active
and verbal before illness left her deaf and blind at nineteen months. In addition to
numerous essays, poems, and stories, Keller is the author of fourteen books, including the
highly acclaimed account of her early life and education entitled The Story of My Life. It is in
the first chapters of this seminal text that Keller recounts the tale of her first discovering
language, under the persevering tutelage of Anne Sullivan. It is this episode which stands as
the denouement of William Gibson’s renowned drama, The Miracle Worker. For more on
Keller’s life and work, see earlier sections of this study guide.

Anne Sullivan (Writer, letters/reports/essays on Keller’s education)

Best known as the educator, interpreter, and companion of the deaf-blind Helen Keller,
Anne Sullivan was born in Massachusetts in 1866, the daughter of Irish immigrants.
Sullivan’s mother died when she was eight and her drunken and abusive father left her and
her younger brother Jimmie to the cruelties of the poorhouse (the State Infirmary at
Tewksbury, Massachusetts) by the time she was ten. Despite the harshness of this
environment, blindness caused by trachoma, and the early death of her beloved brother,
Anne managed to escape Tewksbury, gaining for herself an excellent education at the
Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, where she graduated as valedictorian in 1886. It
was here that Anne acquired a knowledge of braille and of the manual alphabet which were
to be instrumental in her instruction of Helen Keller. In addition, Sullivan also underwent a
series of eye operations which partially restored her vision, but her eyes were to remain
delicate and sensitive throughout her life. Sullivan went directly from Perkins to her post as
Keller’s tutor and governess, where the memorable events depicted in Arthur Penn’s The
Miracle Worker occurred. While the script for the film depends upon Keller’s account of her
initiation into language by Sullivan, the teacher’s letters and reports also provided essential
substance to Gibson’s drama. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, but she remained
Keller’s principle friend and assistant, living with her and working with her constantly and
the Sullivan-Macy union was terminated by 1914. Always stubborn and outspoken, Sullivan
was a socialist and a life-long proponent of many liberal and radical causes, including her
pioneering work as a disability rights advocate. She died in 1936. For more on Sullivan’s life
and work, see earlier sections of this study guide.
34

Laurence Rosenthal (Composer)

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1926, Laurence Rosenthal studied piano and composition at
the Eastman School of Music. He has composed extensively for film and television and has
been nominated for two Academy awards. In addition to his work for The Miracle Worker,
Rosenthal wrote scores for A Raisin in the Sun and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He has also won
six Emmys for television miniseries.

Anne Bancroft (Actor, role of Annie Sullivan)

Perhaps most famous for her role as the aging seductress, Mrs. Robinson, in the film classic
The Graduate, the sultry beauty Anne Bancroft began her initially unremarkable film career in
the 1950s. Born in 1931 as Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, the Bronx native began acting and
dancing lessons before she was five, but despite early television appearances (as Anne
Marno), a contract with Fox, and steady work as a “B” movie actress, Bancroft didn’t
achieve any real critical success until she tested her mettle on Broadway, where she won
Tony awards for her performances in two plays, Two for the Seesaw and The Miracle Worker,
both written by William Gibson and directed by Arthur Penn. Returning to the screen with
Arthur Penn’s film version of The Miracle Worker, Bancroft was honored with an Academy
Award for Best Actress in her role as Annie Sullivan, but was unable to receive the Oscar in
person since she was performing on Broadway in Mother Courage. Following her marriage to
filmmaker and comedian Mel Brooks, Bancroft went on to perform in films such as The
Pumkin Eater (1964), The Turning Point (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Agnes of God (1985),
and How to Make an American Quilt (1995), among others, but despite many memorable
performances, she has never again reached the popularity she achieved with The Graduate and
The Miracle Worker.

Patty Duke (Actor, role of Helen Keller)

Best known for her screen performance as Helen Keller in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle
Worker, for which she won an Oscar, Patty Duke also starred as Annie Sullivan in a
television remake of the same film in 1979. Born in 1946, Duke studied at the Quintano
School for Young Professionals and earned her Equity card at age seven. As a child, she
appeared in numerous TV productions, including late-1950s quiz shows, as well as in
Hollywood films such as I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Goddess (1958), and Happy Anniversary
(1959). At twelve, Duke made her Broadway debut as Helen Keller in Arthur Penn’s
theatrical production of The Miracle Worker. But despite the acclaim she won as Helen
Keller, both on stage and screen, successes which helped her to earn her own television
program, The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), Duke was very unhappy. Her best-selling
autobiography, Call Me Anna, later revealed that she felt pressured into performing and into
suppressing her own emotions. Duke was married twice, first to director Harry Falk, Jr. and
later to actor John Astin. With Astin, Duke had two sons, Sean and Mackenzie, both of
whom also became actors. Despite her tenure as the first woman president of the Screen
Actors’ Guild (1985-88), Duke’s film acting career petered out as she entered adulthood.
Her performance in in Valley of the Dolls (1967) was panned and other films in which she
appeared were unsuccessful, but her work in television continued to thrive and she
eventually won three Emmys, including one for the remake of The Miracle Worker.
 35

Victor Jory (Actor, role of Captain Arthur Keller, Helen’s father)

Born in 1902, actor Victor Jory enjoyed a life as exciting and ecclectic as his career. Raised
in Alaska until his high school years when he went to California and studied acting at the
Pasadena Playhouse, Jory joined the Coast Guard as a young man, during which time he was
lauded for his skill in contact sports. Muscualar, athletic, striking, Jory began his acting
career on the stage, but soon moved on to feature films. During a career that spanned
roughly fifty years, he played a wide variety of small but memorable roles; in addition to
playing Helen Keller in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, Jory also appeared in such
movies as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); Gone With
the Wind (1939); Man of Conquest (1940); The Fugitive Kind (1960); and Papillon (1973). Jory also
starred in a television detective series, Manhunt (1959-60), made guet appearances on
numerous other television shows, and even worked occasionally as a theatrical director and
playwright; most notably, he is responsible for having written the Broadway production Five
Who Were Mad. The long-time husband of actress Jean Innes, Jory died in 1982.

Inga Swenson (Actor, role of Kate Keller, Helen’s mother)

Born in 1932 and probably best-known for her performance as Helen’s mother in Arthur
Penn’s The Miracle Worker (1962), Inga Swenson played many supporting actress roles, mostly
in “B” movies and on television. She played the housekeeper in the TV sitcom Benson and
also appeared on Soap, Barnaby Jones, Newhart, The Golden Girls, and Bonanza.

Andrew Prine (Actor, role of James Keller, Helen’s brother)

Born in 1936, stage actor Andrew Prine was made his on-screen debut as James Keller in
Penn’s The Miracle Worker (1962). Tall and athletic, Prine later appeared in a number of
frontier adventures and military dramas including the made-for-cable epic Gettysburg (1993).
Pine has also performed for a number of television shows: Wide Country, The Road West
(1966), W.E.B. (1978), and Room for Two (1992).

Kathleen Comegys (Actor, role of Aunt Ev)

Born in 1893, Kathleen Comegys appeared as Aunt Ev in Arthur Penn’s 1962 film version
of The Miracle Worker. She also appeared in the following features: The First Time (1952), Mr.
Belvedere Rings The Bell (1951), and The Birth Of A Baby (1938). She died in 1984.
36

BIBLIOGRAPHY
On and by Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, Laura Bridgman
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. 1842. Ed. Angus Calder. London:
Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1985.
Foner, Phillip S., ed. Helen Keller:Her Socialist Years. New York: International Publishers, 1967.
Gitter, Elisabeth. “Deaf-Mutes and Heroines in the Victorian Era.” Victorian Literature and
Culture 20 (1992): 179-96.
Gitter, Elisabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind
Girl. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.
Henney, Nella Braddy. Introduction. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy. By Helen Keller. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955.
Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Keller, Helen. Midstream; My Later Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929.
Keller, Helen. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy, A Tribute by the Foster-Child of Her Mind. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955.
Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. (With Her Letters [1887-1901] and a Supplementary
Account of Her Education, Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her
Teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan). 1902. John Albert Macy, ed. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday & Company, 1954.
Lamson, Mary Swift. Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind
Girl. 1881. New York: Arno, 1975.
Lash, Joseph P. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. (Radcliffe
Biography Series). Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence: New York, 1980.
Sullivan, Anne Mansfield. Passages from the Reports and Letters. The Story of My Life. By
Helen Keller. 1902. John Albert Macy, ed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday &
Company, 1954.

Relating to The Miracle Worker

Duke, Patty, and Kenneth Turan. Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke. New York:
Bantam Books, 1987.
Gibson, William. Monday After the Miracle: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Atheneum,
1983.
Gibson, William. The Miracle Worker: A Play for Television. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1957.
reviews
Alpert, Hollis. “Miracle Films.” Saturday Review (26 May 1962): 23.
Crowther, Bosley. “The Miracle Worker.” New York Times (24 May 1962): 29:2.
Gill, Brendan. “Out of the Dark.” The New yorker (2 June 1962): 79.
Hartung, Philip T. “Darkness into Light.” The Commonweal (1 June 1962): 259.
Kauffmann, Stanley. “Exercises in Pathos and Politics.” The New Republic (4 June 1962): 28
& 30.
MacDonald, Dwight. “Best, Worst, and Current Films.” Esquire (January 1963): 110-14.
Scanlon, John. “It Wasn’t a Miracle.” Saturday Review (16 June 1962): 72.
Walsh, Moira. “Films.” America (9 June 1962): 389-90.
 37

On Deafness, the Deaf, Deaf Culture (Deaf Studies)

Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language.
Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1996.
Children of a Lesser God. Dr. Randa Haines. 1986.
Cohen, Leah Hager. Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Lane, Harlan L. The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. New York:
Knopf: Random House, 1992.
Lane, Harlan. The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Vintage Books, ????.
Medoff, Mark. Children of a Lesser God. Clifton, NJ: James T. White, 1980.
Nell. Dir. Michael Apted. 1994.
Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1989.

On Blindness
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Blindness.” Selected Non-fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Trans. Esther
Allen et al. New York: Viking, 1999. 473-83.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Dickens, Charles. “The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home.” 1845. Christmas
Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 183-278.
Kleege, Georgiana. Sight Unseen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Knipfel, Jim. Slackjaw: A Memoir. New York: Berkeley Books, 1999.
Kuusisto, Stephen. Planet of the Blind: A Memoir. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1998.
Paulson, William R. Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987.
Sacks, Oliver. “To See and Not See” An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New
York: Vintage, 1995. 108-52.
Sacks, Oliver. The Island of the Colorblind. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Disability Studies
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.
Davis, Lennard J., ed. The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. 1963. Trans. A.
M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Kemp, Evan (Jr.). “Aiding the Disabled: No Pity Please” The New York Times (3 Sept. 1981):
x.
Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Kleege, Georgiana. “Blind Rage: An Open Letter to Helen Keller.” Southwest Review 83.1
(1998):53-61.
Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University
Press, 1998.
Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of
Disability. Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Press, 1997.
38

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability. Rev. 1997. Trans. Wiliam Sayers.

Corporealities Series. Eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American
Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997

Other Recommended Reading

McCaffrey, Ann. The Ship Who Sang.
Kata, Elizabeth. A Patch of Blue.
LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Wells, G. H. “The Country of the Blind.”
Varley, John. “The Persistence of Vision.”
 39

CURRICULUM MATERIALS

A Note for Teachers: It is tempting to use the experience of this film as an opportunity to
introduce “sensitivity” training for your students in the form of exercises that have them
perform tasks while blindfolded or with their hearing obstructed (or both), but consider
carefully before employing these techniques. Many people in the Disability community
frown upon such exercises, feeling that they belittle the experience of disability without
coming close to reproducing it.

Grades 3-6

Questions for before the Screening

What does it mean to be deaf? To be blind?
If a person can’t see or hear, how else can they find out about the world?
Did you ever hear of Helen Keller? What do you know about her?
Where is Alabama? What do you know about the history between North and South?

Questions for during the Screening

Who do you think is the “star” of this movie, Helen or Annie? Why?
Other than Helen, do you notice any other children in the movie? Who are they and
what is their part in the action of the story?
Who are Helen’s siblings? What kind of relationship does she have with them?
Do you notice any important differences between the black people and the white people
in this movie?
Pay close attention to the dreamy “flashback” sequences we experience as the teacher’s
thoughts or dreams. How do these scenes make you feel?

Questions for after the Screening

Why were Helen and Miss Sullivan hitting each other? How would you react if one of
your teachers hit you? Do you think the teacher was right to hit back in this case?
Why or why not?
Both the teacher and the student in this movie are very stubborn people; how did that
stubborness help them and how did it hurt them? Are there other stubborn
characters in the movie?

Class Exercises
Fingerspelling. Let each child learn how to fingerspell his or her own name and ask each
one demonstrate to the class.
Charades. Teach students the basic rules of Charades. Have them work in groups to
come up with ideas, concepts, or phrases to be communicated, then divide the class
into teams and play the game. Class discussion follows: How does using non-
spoken language to communicate change the way we think? How does it change the
way we work together?
Character Analysis. Go through each character in the play asking students to write down a
single word which they feel describes that person. Ask students to share their words
as the teacher compiles a list for each character on the board. Are these fair
evaluations of each character?
 40

Writing Assignments
Diary/journal. Miss Sullivan kept a regular journal describing the progress of her work
with Helen. Imagining that you are the teacher, write a journal entry that talks about
the scene in the dining room. Are you proud of the work you’ve done with your
student today? Do you feel she has learned something important? What are your
feelings after such a long and difficult morning?
Letter. The climax of this movie is the scene where Helen makes her big breakthrough,
understanding that the word “w-a-t-e-r” means the wet stuff that runs out of the
pump and over her hand. This moment created a huge change in Helen’s life. Try
to think of a major breakthrough or turning point in your own life and write a letter
to a friend explaining how you felt different after this experience.

Grades 7-9

Questions for before the Screening

Have you ever heard of Helen Keller? What do you know about her?
How do you think babies figure out how to talk?
Think about your favorite teacher. What made you like him/her? How about a teacher
you didn’t like?

Questions for during the Screening

How many times do you notice “water” appearing in the movie, either as a word or as an
image?
How would you describe the difference between the black people in the movie and the
whites?
Why do you think the filmmaker chose to make this movie in black-and-white rather
than color?
Throughout much of the movie, Helen is portrayed as being uncontrolled and
uncontrollable. What do you see her do specifically that makes her seem dangerous?
Pay close attention to the dreamy “flashback” sequences we experience as the teacher’s
thoughts or dreams. How do these scenes make you feel?
In one scene, Annie wakes the young black boy who is the servant in the little cottage
she shares with Helen. She uses him as a go-between to get Helen to “talk” to her
again. How does the teacher’s use of the servant make you feel? Is it fair to wake
him up? How is he rewarded? Is he really being included in the process of
education? Is his role as a servant important here? Why? Is his race significant?
How so?

Questions for after the Screening

Both the teacher and the student in this movie are very stubborn people; how did that
stubborness help them and how did it hurt them?
What did you think about Helen’s teacher hitting her and using physical force with her in
order to get her to learn?
At a certain point in the film, Helen is taken away from her parents to live alone with
Miss Sullivan. Why does the teacher want to take Helen away from her home? Do
you think this was a good idea?
 41

Who do you think is the stronger character, Annie or Helen? Why?

Why does the filmmaker use the dream-like “flashback” sequences? What do they teach
us about Annie’s character?
Describe the setting, the environment in which the action of this movie takes place.
Why is this peaceful garden-like setting significant as a backdrop for the dramatic
action?

Class Exercises
Acting/Reading aloud. Act out a scene from Gibson’s The Miracle Worker in class.
Discussion: What is the difference between being a person and being a character?
Debate. Divide the class into groups, each of which has to come up with arguments in
favor of and against Anne Sullivan’s teaching methods. Divide the class again into
debating teams, one (set of) group(s) working with the lists in favor of Sullivan’s
methods, the other(s) with the lists against Sullivan’s methods. Ask students to sort
and organize the ideas, then stage a debate on the subject of Sullivan’s techniques.
Discussion/Performance. The end of the film shows Helen’s great breakthrough into the
understanding of language. Immediately, she wants to know the words for all the
objects around her. But what happens when Helen needs to learn words for abstract
concepts: Think, love, happy, good, etc.? How can the teacher come up with ways
to explain these ideas? Classroom discussion or group work. Come up with ideas
for teaching abstract concepts and try them out in pairs in front of the class. Are the
methods chosen effective? Why or why not?
Teaching/Learning/Writing. Think about something you might be able to teach one of
your peers—how to snap, a song, how to make something out of paper, how to
draw a favorite figure, a trick for remembering something important, etc. Write up
your teaching “plan,” then work with your partner to teach him or her your
“something.” After the teaching is over, write about how well you succeeded. Did
your “plan” work out? How did you feel while you were teaching? Were you
surprised by the way the “student” approached your lesson? Based on this
experience, how would you change your approach if you were going to try teaching
the same thing again? Learning partners: Write a short essay describing your own
experience in this teaching/learning process. What would you have done differently
if you were the partner?

Writing Assignments
Letter writing. Imagine that, like Helen Keller, you have been taken away from your home
and parents to live with a teacher you don’t like. Write a letter to your parents or to
a friend describing your experience and asking for help.
List-making. The Miracle Worker is necessarily a very visual film; since Helen can’t speak or
hear, the filmmaker has to show a lot of the action instead of offering information
through dialogue. Choose one scene from the movie and try to imagine and describe
the action in non-visual terms. If you were in the scene, what would you touch,
taste, and smell if you were part of the action. Make a list of your non-visual
experiences.
Story writing. Write a short story that continues where The Miracle Worker leaves off.
What happens with Helen’s education? Does she ever leave her parents’ home? Do
she and Annie remain teacher and student?
42

Grades 10-12

Questions for before the Screening

What is a “miracle” and what do you think the title of this film means?
What are the different ways in which people communicate with one another?
What are possible non-verbal forms of communication?
Is it possible to think, remember, or communicate without using language?

Questions for during the Screening

In what time period do you think the film is set? Why? What clues are offered within
the movie?
How are keys used as a symbol in this film?
Why do you think the filmmaker chose to make this movie in black-and-white rather
than color?
Many of the scenes in this film are disturbingly violent; how does that violence affect you
as a viewer and how does it influence your feelings about the characters involved?
The director uses many flashbacks or dream sequences to show Miss Sullivan’s internal
struggles and the background that shapes her identity and her personal goals. What
are you able to understand from these surreal fragments? Who is “Jimmy”? And
how does this background set the stage for Miss Sullivan’s experience with Helen?
Pay close attention to the dreamy “flashback” sequences we experience as the teacher’s
thoughts or dreams. How do these scenes make you feel?
In one scene, Annie wakes the young black boy who is the servant in the little cottage
she shares with Helen. She uses him as a go-between to get Helen to “talk’ to her
again. How does the teacher’s use of the servant make you feel? Is it fair to wake
him up? How is he rewarded? Is he really being included in the process of
education? Is his role as a servant important here? Why? Is his race significant?
How so?
Is there a relationship between race and disability? How might such a connection be
seen in the film?

Questions for after the Screening

In the film, there is a struggle over who Helen will “belong” to. How would you
describe this struggle? Who are the contestants? Who do you think she belongs to
in the end?
What role does discipline play in education? Patience?
In what way does the narrative of this film work as a metaphor for the American Civil
War?
Should people with disabilities be treated differently or with greater consideration than
nondisabled people?
Why does the filmmaker use the dream-like “flashback” sequences? What do they teach
us about Annie’s character?
Why do you think the real Helen Keller disliked Gibson’s dramatization of her life?
Describe the setting, the environment in which the action of this movie takes place.
Why is this peaceful garden-like setting significant as a backdrop for the dramatic
action?
H.G. Wells’ “The Country of the Blind” and John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision”
both describe societies where it is “normal” to be blind (or blind and deaf) and
 43

where a sighted (or sighted and hearing) person is the outsider, considered “strange”
or even “defective.” Thinking from this perspective, imagine what Helen might
teach Annie if there roles were reversed.

Class Exercises
Debate. Divide the class into groups, each of which has to come up with arguments in
favor of and against Anne Sullivan’s teaching methods. Divide the class again into
debating teams, one (set of) group(s) working with the lists in favor of Sullivan’s
methods, the other(s) with the lists against Sullivan’s methods. Ask students to sort
and organize the ideas, then stage a debate on the subject of Sullivan’s techniques.
Discussion/Performance. The end of the film shows Helen’s great breakthrough into the
understanding of language. Immediately, she wants to know the words for all the
objects around her. But what happens when Helen needs to learn words for abstract
concepts: Think, love, happy, good, etc.? How can the teacher come up with ways
to explain these ideas? Classroom discussion or group work. Come up with ideas
for teaching abstract concepts and try them out in pairs in front of the class. Are the
methods chosen effective? Why or why not?
Teaching/Learning/Writing. Think about something you might be able to teach one of
your peers—how to snap, a song, how to make something out of paper, how to
draw a favorite figure, a trick for remembering something important, etc. Write up
your teaching “plan,” then work with your partner to teach him or her your
“something.” After the teaching is over, write about how well you succeeded. Did
your “plan” work out? How did you feel while you were teaching? Were you
surprised by the way the “student” approached your lesson? Based on this
experience, how would you change your approach if you were going to try teaching
the same thing again? Learning partners: Write a short essay describing your own
experience in this teaching/learning process. What would you have done differently
if you were the partner?

Writing Assignments
List-making. The Miracle Worker is necessarily a very visual film; since Helen can’t speak or
hear, the filmmaker has to show a lot of the action instead of offering information
through dialogue. Choose one scene from the movie and try to imagine and describe
the action in non-visual terms. If you were in the scene, what would you touch,
taste, and smell if you were part of the action. Make a list of your non-visual
experiences.
Letter-writing. Pretend that you are Helen keller writing a letter to Anne Sullivan that she
will never read; include everything you feel about her and would like to say to her,
but without worrying about the consequences, how Sullivan would feel or what she
might do. What would this letter say? [Variation: Ask students to prepare this
writing as a monologue to be performed in front of the class.]
44

COMMENTATORS
James Berger

James Berger is an Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University. Before beginning

his academic career, he taught theater and poetry to children in New York City, and taught
third grade in a international school in Tanzania. Dr. Berger is the author of an article,
“Testing Literature; Helen Keller and Richard Powers’ Implementation of [H]elen” which
appeared last year in the Arizona Quarterly. He is also the editor of the Modern Library
special centennial edition of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (2003). In addition, Dr.
Berger is the author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Berger has been
awarded a Charles Phelps Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship by the University of Cincinnati and a
research fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is now working
on his next book, Those Who Can’t Speak.
 45

APPENDIX
The Manual Alphabet and Numbers One through Ten

Source: Center for Disability Information & Referral

http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/cedir/kidsweb/amachart.html
46

Numbers from 1 – 10

Source: Center for Disability Information & Referral

http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/cedir/kidsweb/amachart.html
(See more at: http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/cedir/kidsweb/disabilch.html)

The Braille Alphabet and Numbers

Source: National Braille Press <http://www.nbp.org/alphcard.pdf>

 47

A Chronology of the Disability Rights Movement

 1817- The American School for the Deaf is founded in Hartford, Connecticut. This
is the first school for disabled children anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
 1832- The Perkins School for the Blind in Boston admits its first two students, the
sisters Sophia and Abbey Carter.
 1848- The first residential institution for people with mental retardation is founded
by Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins Institution in Boston. During the next
century, hundreds of thousands of developmentally disabled children and adults will
be institutionalized, many for their entire lives.
 1860- Simon Pollak demonstrates the use of braille at the Missouri School for the
Blind.
 1861- Helen Adams Keller is born In Tuscumbia, Alabama.
 1869- The first wheelchair patent is registered with the U.S. Patent Office.
 1880- The International Congress of Educators of the Deaf, at a conference in
Milan, Italy, calls for the suppression of sign languages and the firing of all deaf
teachers at schools for the deaf. This triumph of oralism, is seen by deaf advocates as
a direct attack upon their culture.
 1883- Sir Francis Galton in England coins the term eugenics. The eugenics
movement, taken up by Americans, leads to passage in the United States of laws to
prevent people with various disabilities from moving to this country, marrying, or
having children. Eugenics campaigns against people of color lead to passage of “Jim
Crow” laws in the South.
 1887- Anne Sullivan meets Helen Keller for the first time in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
 1902- Helen Keller, the first deaf-blind person to matriculate at college, publishes her
autobiography, The Story of My Life, in Ladies' Home Journal in the latter part of 1902,
as a book in 1903.
 1909- The New York Public School System adopts Modified, or American Braille for
use in its classes for blind children.
 1921- The American Foundation for the Blind is founded. Helen Keller becomes its
principal fund raiser.
 1929- Seeing Eye establishes the first dog guide school for blind people in the United
States.
 1933- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first seriously physically disabled person ever
to be elected as a head of government, is sworn into office as president of the United
States.
 1935- Congress passes and President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act,
establishing federal assistance to blind individuals and disabled children.
 1938- Passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act leads to an enormous increase in the
number of sheltered workshop program for blind workers. Although intended to
48

provide training and job opportunities for blind and visually disabled workers, it
often leads to exploitation of workers at sub-minimum wages in poor conditions.
 1946- The National Mental Health Foundation is founded by conscientious
objectors who served as attendants at state mental institutions during World War II.
It works to expose the abusive conditions at these facilities and becomes an early
impetus in the push for deinstitutionalization.
 1947- Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) is founded at the Birmingham Hospital
in Van Nuys, California. The following year, the National Paraplegia Foundation is
founded as their civilian arm. Foundation chapters take a leading role in advocating
for disability rights.
 1949- Timothy Nugent founds the National Wheelchair Basketball Association. That
same year, the National Foundation for Cerebral Palsy is chartered by representatives
of various groups of parents of children with cerebral palsy. Renamed in 1950, it
becomes, together with the Association for Retarded Children, a major force in the
parents' movement of the 1950s and thereafter.
 1963- President Kennedy, in an address to Congress, calls for a reduction, “over a
number of years and by hundreds of thousands, (in the number) of persons
confined” to residential institutions, and he asks that methods be found “to retain in
and return to the community the mentally ill and mentally retarded, and there to
restore and revitalize their lives through better health programs and strengthened
educational and rehabilitation services.” Though not labeled such at the time, this is a
call for deinstitutionalization and increased community services.
 1965- William C. Stokoe, Carl Croneberg, and Dorothy Casterline publish A
Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, establishing the
legitimacy of American Sign Language and beginning the move away from oralism.
 1966- Christmas in Purgatory by Burton Blatt and Fred Kaplan, is published,
documenting the appalling conditions at state institutions for people with
developmental disabilities.
 1968- The Architectural Barriers Act is passed, mandating that federally constructed
buildings and facilities be accessible to people with physical disabilities. This act is
generally considered to be the first-ever federal disability rights legislation.
 1970- The Physically Disabled Students Program (PDSP) is founded by Ed Roberts,
John Hessler, Hale Zukas, and others at the University of California at Berkeley.
With its provisions for community living, political advocacy, and personal assistance
services, it becomes the nucleus for the first Center for Independent Living, founded
two years later, in turn sparking the worldwide independent living movement.
 1972- The parents of residents at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island,
New York, file suit (New York ARC v. Rockefeller) to end the appalling conditions
at that institution. A television broadcast from the facility outrages the general public,
which sees the inhumane treatment endured by people with developmental
disabilities. This press exposure, together with the lawsuit and other advocacy,
eventually moves thousands of people from the institution into community-based
living arrangements.
 49

 1973- Passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 marks the greatest achievement of
the disability rights movement . The act confronts discrimination against people with
disabilities and prohibits programs receiving federal funds from discriminating
against “otherwise qualified handicapped” individuals.
 1975- The first convention of American Association of the Deaf-Blind is held in
Cleveland.
 1979- The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) is founded in
Berkeley, California, becoming the nation's preeminent disability rights legal
advocacy center and participating in much of the landmark litigation and lobbying of
the 1980s and 1990s.
 1981- In an editorial in the New York Times, Evan Kemp, Jr. attacks the Jerry Lewis
National Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon, writing that “the very human
desire for cures can never justify a television show that reinforces a stigma against
disabled people.”
 1982- The parents of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington, Indiana, are advised by their
doctors to deny a surgical procedure to unblock their newborn's esophagus, because
the baby has Down Syndrome. Although disability rights activists try to intervene,
Baby Doe starves to death before legal action can be taken.
 1984- George Murray becomes the first wheelchair athlete to be featured on the
Wheaties cereal box.
 1987- Marlee Marlin wins an Oscar for her performance in Children of a Lesser God.
That same year, the US. Supreme Court, in School Board of Nassau County, Fla. v.
Arline, outlines the rights of people with contagious disease. It establishes that
people with infectious diseases cannot be fired from their jobs “because of
prejudiced attitude or ignorance of others.”
 1988- Students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., organize a week-long
shut-down and occupation of their campus to demand selection of a deaf president
after the Gallaudet Board of Trustees appoints a non-deaf person as president of the
university. On March 13, the Gallaudet administration announces that I. King Jordan
will be the university's first deaf president.
 1990- The Americans with Disabilities Act is signed by President George Bush on 26
July in a ceremony on the White House lawn witnessed by thousands of disability
rights activists. The law is the most sweeping disability rights legislation in history,
for the first time bringing full legal citizenship to Americans with disabilities.
 1996- Not Dead Yet is formed by disabled advocates to oppose Jack Kevorkian and
the proponents of assisted suicide for people with disabilities.
Education and Civil Rights

 1927- The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the forced sterilization of people with
disabilities is not a violation of their constitutional rights. By the 1970s, some 60,000
disabled people are sterilized without consent.
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 1954- The U.S. Supreme Court rules that separate schools for black and white
children are inherently unequal and unconstitutional. This pivotal decision becomes a
catalyst for the African-American civil rights movement, which in turn becomes a
major inspiration to the disability rights movement.
 1964- The Civil Rights Act is passed, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race in
public accommodations and employment, as well as in federally assisted programs. It
will become a model for subsequent disability rights legislation.
 1971- The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama hands down its
first decision ruling that people in residential state schools and institutions have a
constitutional right “to receive such individual treatment as (would) give them a
realistic opportunity to be cured or to improve his or her mental condition.”
Disabled people can no longer simply be locked away in “custodial institutions”
without treatment or education. This decision is a crucial victory in the struggle for
deinstitutionalization.
 1972- The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rules that disabled
children cannot be excluded from public schools. Similarly, the U.S. District Court
for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania strikes down various state laws used to
exclude disabled children from the public schools. These decisions will lead to
passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.
 1975- Congress enacts the Community Services Act, creating the Head Start
program, with the stipulation that at least 10 percent of program openings be served
for disabled children. That same year, the Education for All Handicapped Children
Act is passed, establishing the right of children with disabilities to a public school
education in an integrated environment. The act is a cornerstone of federal disability
rights legislation. In the next two decades, millions of disabled children will be
educated under its provisions, radically changing the lives of people in the disability
community. Also in 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that people cannot be
institutionalized against their will in a psychiatric hospital unless they are determined
to be a threat to themselves or to others.
 1993- A federal appeals court ruling affirms the right of disabled children to attend
public school classes with non-disabled children. The ruling is a major victory in the
ongoing effort to ensure enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/forceschool/Pathfinder12.html