The
Story of my life
Author: Helen
Keller
Genre: Autobiography
Stars:
4.5/5 (self rating)
About the author( in Brief): Helen
Adams Keller (June27,1880, Tuscumbia-June1,1968) was an American author,
political activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a
degree of Bachelor of Arts. Helen was born
with an ability to see and hear. At 19 months old, she
contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the
stomach and the brain", which might have been Scarlet fever or meningitis . The illness left
her both deaf and blind.
Review: The
non-fiction novel “the story of my life” is an autobiography by Hellen Keller.
The novel begins with the description of
the family and location of the author. The first chapter is all about that. As
a child, she was very naughty. Her companions were Martha(cook’s child), Belle(
pet dog).Her writing has very well described her childhood activities and her
way of storing some of the precious moments of her childhood days. She was very
close to her parents and the demise of her father in 1896 left her in a state
of great sorrow which she calls her “first personal experience with death”. She
also had a great time with her younger sister Mildred.
Being visually and hearing impaired, it
was not at all easy for Helen to learn things. Generally, children learn a
thing through observing which requires the sensation of hearing and seeing
which were not present in case of Helen. She always had an urge to express
herself and would sometimes become impatient.
In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman,Laura Bridgman, dispatched young
Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian Chisolm, an
eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working
with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins
Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated,
which was then located in South
Boston.
Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked former student 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, herself visually
impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long
relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller's governess and eventually her companion.
In 1888, Keller attended Perkins Institute for the Blind. It
was in 1892( at the age of 11), she wrote her first story entitled as the “The
Frost King” changed from “Autumn Leaves” as suggested by her teacher Mr.Anagnos
which got published in one of the Perkins Institution Reports. Unfortunately,
it got charged with plagiarism because of the striking similarity of her story
line with “The Frost Fairies” by Miss Margaret T. Canby. This disappointed her
very much.
After that tragic event which almost
shattered all the level of confidence in Helen, Miss Sullivan uplifted her
spirit by encouraging her to write a brief account of her life for Youth’s
magazine when she was just 12 year old. The passages showed Helen’s untiring
efforts in pronunciation the words, Due to her eagerness to learn new things,
she read French by herself and Latin under the tutelage of Mr. William Wade,
German from Miss Reamy, French from Madame Olivier.
In 1894, she attended a meeting
Chautauqua of the American Association for improving the speaking abilities. Before she moved to New York from Boston on
1896, a greatest sorrow of the demise of his father Mr. John P. Spaulding over
shadowed her happy moments at New York.
In 1896, she entered Cambridge School for Young Ladies, to be prepared for Radcliff. The
thought of going to college made her more determined to enter into a
competition for a degree with seeing and hearing girls. At Cambridge, her plan
was to make Miss Sullivan interpret the lectures but later it could not prove
to be helpful. Miss Sullivan did a task full of patience to read her the text
books which were not available in raised prints. The German instructor Frau Grote,
who knew finger alphabets, was comfortable in explaining the things to her. This
made her feel very comfortable. Everyone there was ready to help her.
At Radcliff
college, she studied many languages like German, French, Latin, English composition,
Philosophy, Economics, English Literature. There were a lot of problems at
college for her to keep herself in the race. That process did not give her
enough time to think and also made her aloof from the instructor. She even
could not take notes during the lecture as her hands used to be busy in hearing
the spelled words. In her words, “We should take our education as we would take
a walk in the country, leisurely; our minds hospitably open to impressions of
every sort. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to
feel the great heart throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does
not feel these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the
harmonies of life.” Through her description, it can be very well interpreted that
she had an enormous hunger for knowledge. She always let herself to be swept by
the beauty of nature and words.
She has ended the story with words, “Thus
it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they
have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk
serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.”
My experiences:
Thanks to my friend because of whom I felt tempted to download this one as
e-book. Generally, my eyes get strained after reading e-books for some minutes
but that day I was surprised to find that I had missed my lunch reading this
autobiography at a stretch of 1 hr and 30 minutes! This one was the second
autobiography read by me after Gandhiji’s Experiment with truth. I felt very
very connected to Keller’s writing as I found her way of presentation
resembling to (sort of) diary writing. She has narrated everything around her
so meticulously and vividly that it made me feel as if she suffered from no
physical deprivations. I was amazed at the depth of her vocabulary and clarity
of thoughts. She followed a sequence to narrate each event of her struggle with
life. From her writing it can be inferred that she was a person who stored an
abysmal gratitude for the persons of her life (her parents, sister, teachers
and friends). Had she not felt blessed
about her life, then she would have not enjoyed and lived it so successfully.
What a wonderful person she was!! I fell in love with her ideologies and
thoughts after I finished reading about her life.
It left me in the state of deep
contemplation about the idea of possession. Do happiness and satisfaction
reside in possessions? From possession, I mean both materialistic stuffs as
well as sensing abilities. What if we lose them accidentally (God forbids)?
Will our life come to a state of standstill or will we dare to challenge our
limits and transform our selves for good? If she could, why can’t we?
Sometimes, I feel knocked down by the challenges of life which are thousand
times less intense than those of Helen’s.
This is a must read inspirational book.
There is an adage that when God closes one door, he at the same time, opens up
many other alternatives. This adage is best proved in the case of Helen Keller.
Even though she was deprived of the senses of seeing and hearing, yet was
blessed with an unparallel skill of expressing herself through words. She had a
hunger for words. She was definitely not among those who could willingly
acknowledge her defeat.
In the end, I would like to mention some
of her lines from the book which captivated me.
“Each
individual has a subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters,
blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from the past generations.
This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense- a soul sense which sees, hears,
feels all in one.”
“For
after all, everyone who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill
Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to summit, I must zigzag it
in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I standstill, I run against the
edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it
better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and
climb higher and begin to see the widening Horizon. Every struggle is a
victory.”
Swati Sarangi
13.02.2014
