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ABSTRACT
This article takes as its point of departure an incident in which Helen Keller was accused of plagiarising a short story while residing at the Perkins Institution for the Blind: the so-called “Frost King” incident. Keller’s guilt or innocence is not the subject of my inquiry. Rather, how did the culture of Perkins – as fostered by its first two directors, Samuel Gridley Howe and Michael Anagnos – help create the conditions for the incident to transpire? I consider this question in light of the visibility of Perkins as an institution in 1892. From its inception, Perkins courted the public, both to raise funds and to garner sympathy more generally for blind students. This meant that the directors were acutely sensitive to the power of public opinion to affect the health of the institution. Caught between Perkins’s administrators and the public were the students themselves. More broadly, this article seeks to historicise the Perkins Institution, as a product of nineteenth-century American progress, specifically the project of universal, secular education, tinged with Protestant perfectibility. At the same time, it both imbibed and trafficked in Romantic tropes of blind exceptionalism: that at least some blind individuals were possessed of prophetic, inner vision.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The Perkins Institution (sometimes Institute) for the Blind was renamed the Perkins School for the Blind in 1955.
2 B.L. McGinnity, J. Seymour-Ford, and K.J. Andries. 2004. “Laura Bridgman.” Perkins History Museum, Perkins School for the Blind (Watertown, MA).
3 Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from “The New England Primer” to “The Scarlet Letter” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5. Patricia Crain argues that alphabetisation represented a historic shift in education, supplanting “rhetorical training, not only as a mode of communication but as a primary structuring of subjectivity”.
4 Sari Altschuler, “Touching The Scarlet Letter : What Disability History Can Teach Us about Literature”, American Literature 92, no. 1 (2020): 93. Howe’s preference for raised-roman letter texts over “arbitrary systems” like braille elegantly illustrates his thinking. As Sari Altschuler puts it: “Embossed systems like Boston Line Type, conversely, strove towards something like what contemporary disability studies scholars would call universal design. The print form was meant to be accessible by touch and by sight and would thus link Howe’s students to the larger community. Howe hoped it would bring all readers into a shared imaginative space and intellectual society, diminishing the socially disabling features of blindness and expanding blind and low-vision participation in national and religious communities.” For more on this subject, see: Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (London: Routledge, 2016); and Vanessa Warne, “Between the Sheets: Contagion, Touch, and Text”, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19, no. 19 (2014): 1–9.
5 Cited in Ernest Freeberg, “The Meanings of Blindness in Nineteenth-Century America”, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 110, no. 1 (2000): 122.
6 Ibid., 124.
7 J. Laurence Cohen, “Shining Inward: The Blind Seer, Fanny Crosby, and Education for the Blind in the Nineteenth Century”, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 53.
8 Joanna L. Pearce, “‘To Give Light Where He Made All Dark’: Educating the Blind About the Natural World and God in Nineteenth-Century North America”, History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2020): 321. In an article on the role of the natural sciences in blind education, Joanna L. Pearce argues that: “Teaching blind children biology, zoology, and natural history was meant to ensure the blind were aware of the beauty of the world and the breadth of God’s creation, despite being unable to see any of it. This reflected the fear that the blind were particularly prone to falling into moral apathy and atheism”.
9 Freeberg, “Meanings of Blindness”, 138.
10 B.L. McGinnity, J. Seymour-Ford, and K.J. Andries. 2004. “Kindergarten”, Perkins History Museum, Perkins School for the Blind (Watertown, MA).
11 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1888), 79.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 82.
14 Ibid., 93.
15 For more on this subject, see: Edward Larrissy, The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); and David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
16 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1889), 27.
17 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Fifty-Eighth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1890), 114.
18 Ibid., 114.
19 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Sixtieth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1892), 24.
20 Ibid., 80.
21 Ibid., 81.
22 Ibid., 98.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 94.
25 Ibid., 99.
26 J. Hale and S. Coit. 2021. “The Frost King Incident”, Perkins Archives Blog, Perkins School for the Blind (Watertown MA).
27 In a luminous New Yorker article from 2003, Cynthia Ozick defends Keller not as a deaf-blind woman, but as a writer. In doing so, she draws from the same well of ideas around genius as Anagnos: “She saw, then, what she wished, or was blessed, to see, and rightly named it imagination. In this she belongs to a broader class than that narrow order of the deaf-blind. Her class, her tribe, hears what no healthy ear can catch and sees what no eye chart can quantify. Her common language was not with the man who crushed a child for memorizing what the fairies do, or with the carpers who scolded her for the crime of a literary vocabulary. She was a member of the race of poets, the Romantic kind; she was close cousin to those novelists who write not only what they do not know but what they cannot possibly know”. Ozick, Cynthia, “How Helen Keller Learned to Write”, The New Yorker (16 and 23 June 2003).
28 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation, 91.
29 Ibid., 94.
30 Ibid.
31 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation, 79.
32 Ibid., 86–7.
33 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Sixtieth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation, 57.
34 Ibid., 150.
35 David Wagner, The “Miracle Worker” and the Transcendentalist : Annie Sullivan, Franklin Sanborn, and the Education of Helen Keller (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 99. In a 1903 biography of Laura Brigham written by Howe’s daughters, Maud Howe Elliot and Florence Howe Hall, the director’s descendants laud Brigham as the ideal of New England propriety: feminine, temperate, and Protestant. As Wagner argues, this was almost certainly meant as an oblique attack on Keller and her Irish-Catholic teacher, Anne Sullivan.
36 Perkins Institution for the Blind, Sixtieth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation, 65.
37 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition (Modern Library, 2004), 54.
38 Marta L. Werner, “Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise”, Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 5, no. 1 (2010): 42. As Marta L. Werner writes: “Keller wrote her first autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), in response to the early charges of plagiarism made against her, and it is possible to see each act of autobiography as a new (however buried) response to the charge. A life, Sullivan, assured her, could not be plagiarized; the production of autobiography would give Keller immunity from the charges, would free her from them. Yet Keller’s obsessive and always ambivalent return to autobiography – a return both self-induced and induced by pressures from her readers – suggests that each act of self-assertion ultimately proved inadequate”.
39 Ibid., 51.
40 Ibid., 52.
41 Ibid., 55.
42 Georgina Kleege speaks eloquently to this experience in Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006).
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Kevin Daniel Goldstein
Kevin Daniel Goldstein received his PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. He is a Lecturer in Literature at Yale-NUS College and currently teaches at the University of Sydney. His main research interests include US and Latin American literature, disability studies, and global modernism.