Helen Keller Documentary Analysis

    This documentary was an interesting perspective that I have not seen before, Helen Keller’s childhood. I have read stories about her in other classes, but from the time when she was older and working toward activist movements. It must have been so different for her not being able to see or hear, it was a new perspective on life. She got very frustrated many times. I was in awe about the idea Anne, her educator, had to use the cold water from the pump to teach Helen how to put the letters she learned to use. As the narrator states when describing Anne’s actions to teach Helen, “[…] she presses into Helen’s hand the spelling of ‘water, and for the first time the finger game has meaning”. I think it must have been an amazing feeling to know that things have names and that helped her keep progressing to learn more. Before this happened, she probably felt lost and alone. She even was able to learn so much to be able to go to a school of the blind. She explained to her teacher that she was determined to learn to speak. Helen was different from her classmates because she was blind and deaf but was the most motivated and progressed fast. I am amazed at how determined she was, not frustrated and alone, but confident and eager to learn. She is able to participate in traditional activities that other young children are doing like learning other languages and being a part of athletics. It is truly astonishing that she was able to come so far and come so close to “normalcy” like going to college. Though I do not like the word normalcy because of what does that really means. Each individual in this world is unique and has unique experiences every day and in every part of the world. Even though her speech and writing were not perfect she was able to communicate with the world in her own way.

Word Count: 332

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nien Cheng Analysis

     Nien Cheng was imprisoned under the Communist rule of Mao Zedong who started the Cultural Revolution. The guards are constantly pushing and tormenting Nien to confess. It is not until reading further that I understood what they wanted her to confess. They wanted her to follow everything Mao Zedong’s rules and anything that he says is right. The Red Guards’ tormenting turns into torturing and punishing. She is put in restricting handcuffs and put in a small dusty solitude box with no windows. The guards told her as long as she does not confess the handcuffs stay on her. She is not able to eat or drink and would not confess because she feels that she has done nothing wrong. As portrayed throughout the reading Nien is stubborn and stuck strongly to her faith and beliefs. Nien’s hands swelled, oozed pus, and blood she wrote, “I prayed to God to help me recover the use of my hands” (p.124). Another example when she writes, “It seemed there was no alternative to relying on...
Read more

Introduction Analysis

From Norton Book of Women’s Lives, Introduction, Edited by Phyllis Rose: “It is a shock now to realize how much autobiographical work by women  The New Yorker  published in the fifties. […] It seems ungrateful to suggest that the context to some extent ‘emasculated’ its women writers” (15). “Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, perhaps the fullest and most candid biography of a woman writer up to its time, revealed astonishing details about Woolf’s asexual marriage, affairs, with other women, and insanity” (18).      In analyzing the introduction, I want to establish the definition of emasculate is to make someone or something weaker or less effective. As portrayed in these two quotes and throughout the introduction, numerous women are not able to share their personal parts of their lives with the world due to the fact that males had the power when it came to publishing. This in turn deprives women of their ability to share their experiences with other ...
Read more

The Prime Life: Simone De Beauvoir Analysis

       Ms. Beauvoir has not experienced freedom before she starts her writing at the days of her freedom. She was amused and in awe about the little things that she considers to be freedom. For example, she writes, “I was free to come and go as I pleased. I could get home with the milk, read in bed all night, sleep till midday, shut myself up for forty-eight hours at a stretch, or go out on the spur of the moment” (p. 54). She showed her excitement in all the little things in life that she had the freedoms to do now. It seemed as if she did not have any freedom before this so when she reached this point she would eat, dress, and have a relationship with whom she pleased. Ms. Beauvoir explains, “these duties did not even prove a burden to me since I felt that by performing them, I was involved in a new sort of game: I was playing at being a grownup” (p. 54). She was doing all these adult activities for the first time and was surprisingly excited to be doing them. Thes...
Read more