If you know anything about Helen Keller, you know this: A girl—wild hair, jerky mannerisms—is pulled to an old-timey water fountain by her teacher. The teacher pumps water on the girl’s hand, and yells a little, and repeats the letters W-A-T-E-R over and over, both with her mouth and her fingers, spelling the word into the girl’s hand with growing urgency. Suddenly, the kid gets it: She looks to the sky, clenches her face in concentration, speaks haltingly, pumps the fountain, and then, finally, spells W-A-T-E-R back into her teacher’s hand. The music swells.
What a peculiar thing it must be, to have your life become one of modern culture’s most enduring nuggets of intellectual property. The Miracle Worker is a Tony Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway play, a smash-hit 1962 film, and three made-for-TV movies, in addition to being a more tenuous inspiration for anime and Bollywood releases, hundreds of children’s books, a postage stamp, a state quarter, and a South Park episode. The film is shown in schools and on cable TV; it is so ubiquitous that its title has become a cliché. In it, and because of it, Keller is a perpetual child, cast in bronze and forever 7 years old, as she is in the statue of the water-fountain scene that now stands in the U.S. Capitol. According to the logic of the movie’s emotional arc, Keller begins as a problem to be solved, and then, by the end, she is an inspiration—all of which is to say she’s never really much of a person.
Helen Keller the person was funny, and grumpy, and flawed. She adored animals, especially dogs. She had a demanding sweet tooth. And she grew up: She had a serious boyfriend, fierce political beliefs, an intellectual life, and a taste for whiskey. “She died when she was 88, and most of what people remember her for happened when she was a child,” one of her biographers, Kim E. Nielsen, told me. “Not even an adolescent—a child. But she figured out relationships and goals and dreams and how to make money and express her ideas and have an impact. She did that while facing ableism, sexism, and people’s low assumptions about her. She did that in spite of the resistance to the idea that she could have a full life.” That she was anything more than just her story.