In researching after watching the movie, maybe fully for the first time last night--although this might be the biggest disability story that every American seems to know(even if they only know the half of it, and kind of want to keep Helen out at the pump understanding "WATER" for much of her life,) I found somepossible medical causes for Helen's condition. My mother, not in any way a doctor, subscribed to the scarlet fever theory, possibly as a means to get tween me to finish my antibiotics.(I heard about that about Mary Ingalls, too, since I grew up in the heyday of "Little House", although again, real life had more mixed messages than its pop-culture variant. Mary got to go to college and not bust her butt on the homestead, but I don't really think that meant she found a blind stud and a chance to be in loco parentis to a rotating cast of blind kids. Maybe in that case, it would be enough just to live and not have to worry about the crops as much as your mother...I don't know. The whole role-model thing with these ladies and me? Is kind of stretched thin, anyway, even if I'd had more pictures of their life to take off the playground
I really do like the "Miracle Worker" movie, even though I can see its influence in much lesser efforts in the genre of crusading mother or teacher figures trying to reach the promising disabled kid who's "still in there" and all that kind of stuff. The movie does attempt to reckon with both Helen's mother and Anne Sullivan working with Helen so hard out of their own trauma...Mrs. Keller from the guilt that a young mother might feel having a daughter almost die--her love and fear holds Helen back, though--and Anne Sullivan's amazing rise from the kind of poverty that shocks modern Americans.(Not sure if Anne was in the workhouse because of her disability or if she got it while she was there, but she really went through a lot.) I also think it was unique how much the movie tried to deal with the divisions in the country in Helen's post-Civil War childhood..
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