Page 397 - The Story of My Lif

In the years when she was growing out of childhood, her style lost its early

simplicity and became stiff and, as she says, “periwigged.” In these years the
fear came many times to Miss Sullivan lest the success of the child was to cease
with childhood. At times Miss Keller seemed to lack flexibility, her thoughts ran
in set phrases which she seemed to have no power to revise or turn over in new
ways.

Then came the work in college—original theme writing with new ideals of
composition or at least new methods of suggesting those ideals. Miss Keller
began to get the better of her old friendly taskmaster, the phrase. This book, her
first mature experiment in writing, settles the question of her ability to write.

The style of the Bible is everywhere in Miss Keller’s work, just as it is in the

style of most great English writers. Stevenson, whom Miss Sullivan likes and
used to read to her pupil, is another marked influence. In her autobiography are
many quotations, chiefly from the Bible and Stevenson, distinct from the context
or interwoven with it, the whole a fabric quite of her own design. Her vocabulary
has all the phrases that other people use, and the explanation of it, and the
reasonableness of it ought to be evident by this time. There is no reason why she
should strike from her vocabulary all words of sound and vision.

Writing for other people, she should in many cases be true to outer fact rather
than to her own experience. So long as she uses words correctly, she should be
granted the privilege of using them freely, and not be expected to confine herself
to a vocabulary true to her lack of sight and hearing. In her style, as in what she
writes about, we must concede to the artist what we deny to the autobiographer.
It should be explained, too, that LOOK and SEE are used by the blind, and
HEAR by the deaf, for PERCEIVE; they are simple and more convenient words.
Only a literal person could think of holding the blind to PERCEPTION or
APPERCEPTION, when SEEING and LOOKING are so much easier, and have,
moreover, in the speech of all men the meaning of intellectual recognition as
well as recognition through the sense of sight. When Miss Keller examines a
statue, she says in her natural idiom, as her fingers run over the marble, “It looks

like a head of Flora.”