Radicalizing Reunion: Helen Keller's The Story of My Life and Reconciliation Romance

Abstract

The 1903 Doubleday, Page, and Co. edition of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life contains several photographs of Keller with prominent Americans. (1) The last photograph in book is a picture of Helen Keller and Mark Twain, arguably most famous of his time. This image reinforces Keller's status as a cultural icon, and it complements her efforts to fashion herself as a national hero in The Story of My Life (hereafter Story). In this narrative, Keller follows Franklinian pattern, portraying herself as a self-made individual who, through industry and self-reliance, conquered personal hardship and became a national celebrity. In so doing, she invites her readers to consider her work a distinctly American text, which exhibits models of selfhood established in nation's autobiographical traditions. Yet, while Story shows Keller to be a prototypical American, it also reveals her peculiarly southern roots, which Keller continually plays up. In first chapter, she claims that her paternal grandmother a granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early colonial governor of Virginia, and second cousin to Robert E. Lee (13). Here, Keller links herself not only to patrician class of antebellum Virginians but also to Confederacy. She sustains this connection by informing readers that her father was a captain in Confederate Army (13). If Keller wants her readers to recognize her as a paradigmatic American, then why does she associate herself with rebel South? It is no surprise that Keller provides information about her father's past; he figures prominently in her memories of growing up in Alabama. However, her inclusion of Lee, a distant relative, in Keller family genealogy seems a conscious and symbolic statement. (2) By observing conventions of autobiography while linking herself to Confederate South, Keller asks her readers to consider her a representative and a child of South. As and southerner, she has a powerful double identity, which affords her special insight into of conciliation that characterized North-South relationship in Gilded Age years (Silber 2). After 1865, many white northerners and southerners, eager to ease sectional tensions, wrote novels and plays that dramatized North-South reunion. Providing an imaginary space for negotiating the reunion process and redefining nationalism, these romances were important products of culture of conciliation (Silber 3). (3) Set in South during Reconstruction, romances featured marriages between Union veterans and southern women or between Confederate veterans and northern women that symbolized national reunion after Civil War. These texts also romanticized lifestyle of planter class and perpetuated much of sentimentality ... of old Southern myth, which portrayed antebellum South as a pastoral paradise destroyed by war and Yankee occupation (105). Although northern writers established conventions of genre in 1860s, some southerners tried their hands at writing romances after Reconstruction. In fact, during last two decades of nineteenth century, Virginia-born novelist Thomas Nelson Page became one of America's most celebrated authors of reunion fiction (110-113). Both northerners and southerners used this fiction to work through social problems of Gilded Age America, and romances often reflected dominant cultural values of time. According to Nina Silber, many of these texts promoted an ideology of reunion tailored to interests of propertied white males. Affirming traditional class, race, and gender hierarchies, novels and plays of reunion often endorsed social marginalization of poor, African Americans, and women. By idealizing antebellum plantation culture, writers of reunion fiction expressed their sympathy with aristocratic southern values, suggesting that reconciliation remained province of social elite (Silber 106). …