Education as spectacle: Helen Keller and the impossible performance of blindness at the Perkins Institution

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes as its point of departure an incident in which Helen Keller was accused of plagiarising a short story while residing at the Perkins Institution for the Blind: the so-called “Frost King” incident. Keller’s guilt or innocence is not the subject of my inquiry. Rather, how did the culture of Perkins – as fostered by its first two directors, Samuel Gridley Howe and Michael Anagnos – help create the conditions for the incident to transpire? I consider this question in light of the visibility of Perkins as an institution in 1892. From its inception, Perkins courted the public, both to raise funds and to garner sympathy more generally for blind students. This meant that the directors were acutely sensitive to the power of public opinion to affect the health of the institution. Caught between Perkins’s administrators and the public were the students themselves. More broadly, this article seeks to historicise the Perkins Institution, as a product of nineteenth-century American progress, specifically the project of universal, secular education, tinged with Protestant perfectibility. At the same time, it both imbibed and trafficked in Romantic tropes of blind exceptionalism: that at least some blind individuals were possessed of prophetic, inner vision.