Hello to all those Helen Keller aficionados out there! For this week’s look Inside the Helen Keller Digitization project, I am posting a newly photographed item (left hand image above) — it’s the receipt for an artificial eye for Helen Keller. On the right hand side is a photograph of Helen taken at the Perkins School for the Blind, circa 1888.
The receipt is a wonderfully quirky piece of ephemera that made me stop and think – how did Helen wish to be perceived by an adoring public? In photographs, such as the one posted here when Helen was about 8 years of age, the viewer sees an oddly-shaped left eye. Unlike this photograph, many early photographs avoid clear viewing of her eyes—and her left eye in particular. On a similar note, I have never seen a photograph of Helen Keller's teacher Anne Sullivan Macy wearing glasses, please let me know if you’ve seen one! Anne was legally blind until the age of 14 and had to wear glasses her entire life. Social convention may have deterred Helen and Anne from being viewed with either an oddly shaped eye or glasses. And as much as Anne instilled confidence in her pupil, teaching Helen that her physical disability did not define her, both she and her young student were perhaps still very much shaped by public perceptions of beauty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Would Helen and Anne’s actions have been any different today? Thoughts please!
Image: Receipt for an artificial eye for Helen Keller, September 1911
Image: Helen Keller making the shape of a letter with her right hand, while reading a book with her left. At the Perkins School for the Blind, circa 1888-1889
Transcription of receipt for an artificial eye:
ANDREW J. LLOYD COMPANY OPTICIANS FROM DOWN TOWN STORE 315 WASHINGTON STREET BOSTON, MASS.
OTHER STORES AT 310 BOYLSTON ST., BOSTON. 75 SUMMER ST., BOSTON. 1252 MASS. AVE., CAMBRIDGE.
DATE September 1911 SOLD TO Miss Helen Keller Wrentham Mass % Mrs Macey (sic.)
1 87180 1 Artificial Eye $10 00
[stamp: RECEIVED PAYMENT OCT 13 1911 ANDREW J. LLOYD CO.] [annotation: M. S. with thanks]
