Beyond the Miracle Worker

Many iterations of “the Miracle Worker” have shaped the popular image of Anne Sullivan Macy and defined her significance. Macy is portrayed as a difficult young woman, tortured by her past and bothered by partial blindness, rescuing the unruly deaf-blind child Helen Keller from a life of ignorance and uselessness. There the story ends for Macy and begins for Keller, who would go on to become the most beloved disabled person in the United States. Kim E. Nielsen's richly textured biography provides a more interesting and complex narrative of Macy's early years and the later life that she and Keller shared. A consistent theme is Macy's struggle with recurrent blindness, pain, and depression. She hid these disabilities from everyone she could. Nielsen argues that Macy was ashamed of herself, but she also shows that Macy needed to maintain the public image of a nondisabled person. The contemporary “social definition of disability,” Nielson writes, “precluded the status of Teacher” (p. 165). Helen Keller was supposed to be the disabled one, not Macy, although ironically for most of her adult life Macy's disabilities were, Nielsen believes, more disabling than Keller’s

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Blindness · Friendship · Literature · Miracle · Narrative · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Theme (computing · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology

• Nothing about Us without Us

  John H Bickford, Dalani A Little•The Social Studies•2021

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