Helen Keller was an exceptional reader in an untraditional sense. Due to her lack of sight and hearing, she was unable to simply read books in the conventional fashion. Instead of her using her eyes, Helen developed an expert sense of touch, allowing her to read brail as well as understand sign language. Her achievements as a reader eventually led to writing, publishing and public speaking.
Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama (Keller 1954, 1). Contrary to popular belief, she was not born blind or deaf. She was around nineteen months old when she contracted an illness that left her disabled (Keller 1954, 2). After years of living in a dark and silent world, Keller met Anne Sullivan who became her teacher and companion. As William James discusses in his studies, the blind are often extremely “hand conscious” (James 41). Sullivan became famous for introducing Keller to finger spelling, wherein Keller would touch an object and Sullivan would spell out its name in the palm of her hand (Keller 1956, 57). Sullivan also introduced lip-reading, where Keller would place her fingers over Sullivan’s mouth when she spoke to understand her (Keller 1956, 62). These methods led to Keller becoming literate and then actually speaking.
Helen Keller’s ability to read is linked heavily to her heightened senses and the importance of touch in her life. Keller often said she could “hear with her feet” since “sound vibrations are not only registered by hearing but by touch” (Fuss 54). Using these senses, she began to realize her surroundings and open her imagination. She distinctly remembers as a child she would wander through the garden of her parents’ home, and “feel along the square still boxwood hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies” (Keller 1954, 2).
In the 19th century, much of society pitied the blind as intellectually poorer. Many assumed they were incapable of certain things and placed limitations on their abilities. Most political organizations often ignored their needs, something Keller would later address in an attempt to educate the public (Keller 2003, 5). Keller fought for the rights of the blind workforce and for the working class in general (Keller 1967, 2). Often the blind attended separate, special schools in an attempt to rejoin society and regain a sense of normalcy (Freeburg 24). Keller’s accomplishments allowed others similar to her to realize they could create a new “normal”. They did not have to read, write, or even communicate traditionally, nor lacked the intellect to do so. Her work revealed to those who could not experience being blind how remarkable their other senses were.
What makes Keller a distinct reader is her abstract process of piecing together ideas. Her strongest asset was her vivid imagination, as she could not simply see or even be described an image. She describes her mind as “full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them [she] constructs” (Keller 1908, 13). When Keller experienced the world around her, it was not necessarily a big picture, but a collage of different touches, smells and memories, which she could formulate into an image. “My fingers cannot, of course, get the impressions of a large whole at a glace; but I feel the parts, and my mind puts them together” (Keller 1908, 12), she explains. Her disabilities may have actually freed her from a more conservative way of life. Her “mind realize[d] itself in a world unstructured by the hierarchy of visual perspective, in and as a body unstructured by the hierarchy of sight” (Swan 323). She was free to imagine whatever she pleased because she had little to no guidelines for how things should look or sound.
Helen Keller’s accomplishments as a reader ultimately concluded that because a person is not born with all basic senses does not mean he or she lacks the ability to develop other ways to communicate or learn how to do so. Her writing “reveal[ed] not so much her differences in her disability but the sameness and connectedness of her life with that of the sighted and the hearing” (Einhorn xvii).

Works Cited

Einhorn, Lois J. Helen Keller, Public Speaker: Sightless but Seen, Deaf but Heard.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. Print.

Freeberg, Ernest. The Meanings of Blindness in Nineteenth-Century America.
Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 2002. Print.

Fuss, Diana. “Helen Keller’s Hand.” The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the
Rooms that Shaped Them. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 128-152.
Print.

James, William. Essays on Psychical Research (The Works of William James).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Keller, Helen. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy. New York: Doubleday & Company,
Inc., 1956

Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. Print.

Keller, Helen. The World I Live In. New York: Century, 1908. Print.

Keller, Helen, and John Davis. Rebel Lives: Helen Keller. Melbourne: Ocean, 2003.
Print.

Keller, Helen, and Philip Sheldon Foner. Helen Keller, Her Socialist Years: Writings
and Speeches. New York: International, 1967. Print.

Swan, Jim. “Touching Words: Helen Keller, Plagiarism, and Authorship.”
Cordoza Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10:2, pgs 321-364, 1992. Print.