Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception

Introduction

Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) is shaped around a remarkably close, and for a time robust, relationship. This unites Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor, whose conversation, like that of their associates, characteristically dwells on the precise nature of their relation. On one such occasion, Verena tells Olive, "'You are my conscience,'" prompting the other to reply, "'I should like to be able to say that you are my form—my envelope.'"¹ On another, a friend reports that when Verena speaks, Olive "'vibrate[s]'" as if "'chords were strung across her own heart'" (224). As these exchanges suggest, each of the pair imagines the other (or are seen as so doing by observers) as either mentally or physically part of their own person. Here is James's summary of Olive's view: "To Olive it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds—each of them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets—made an organic whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly effective" (169). "Wholeness" thus emerges from a prior state of mutual incompletion. Two people, not fully adequate in their own right, become so joined together.

There are several ways in which one might begin contextualizing this idea, and this relationship. For a start, several biographers have noted the resemblance between Olive's alliance with Verena and that between James's sister, Alice, and her nurse-cum-companion Katharine Peabody Loring.² A more broadly "cultural" explanation offers itself when we compare Olive's musing to contemporaneous ideas concerning marriage: in William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), for example, a character declares that in wedlock, people similarly "supplement each other and form a pretty fair sort of human being together."³ Yet a third approach would see Olive and Verena's intimacy as an expression of James's long-standing interest in same-sex erotic friendship, as explored in such novels as Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Princess Casamassima (1886).⁴ But nobody, to my knowledge, has yet explored the connection between James's fictional alliance and the real-life relationship between Helen Keller (1880–1968), the famous autobiographer, socialist, and disability-rights activist, and her "teacher," Anne Sullivan Macy (1866–1936). To be sure, there may seem no immediately compelling reason why one should explore this connection—for a start, The Bostonians appeared almost two decades before Keller became famous, so there can be no question of the latter having "influenced" the former—but the wager of this essay is nonetheless that such exploration is worthwhile, and that in doing this, one illuminates not only James's oeuvre (including texts written after Keller's rise to fame), but also, conversely, Keller's hitherto underappreciated significance in American cultural and intellectual life.⁵ Deaf and blind from the age of nineteen months, Keller experienced a particularly extreme version of Olive and Verena's "incompletion"—the total devastation of at least two organic "facets." However, with the help of Sullivan, her close companion from the age of eight, Keller learned a range of communicative techniques—chief among them, a tactile mode of linguistic notation that enabled her to read, write, and "talk" with others—through which to compensate for such disadvantages. In a letter that effectively reprises The Bostonians, Mark Twain told her, "You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world—you and your other half together—Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole."⁶ Here, almost exactly as in James's novel, two people, mere "halves" in isolation, are made "whole" through social realignment.

Keller, as it happens, was quick to make such claims herself. In The Story of My Life (1903)—her first and most famous book—for instance, she writes: "My teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her."⁷ What Keller shares with James (and Twain), then, is an interest in what this article will call "social relations of perception," a rubric under which we...