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The Miracle Worker is a play by William Gibson based upon Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of my Life. It tells the story of the relationship between the deaf, mute and blind Keller and Annie Sullivan, the teacher who brought the almost-feral girl into the world of education.
The play ran on Broadway for almost 2 years (October 19, 1959 to July 1, 1961) and starred Patty Duke as Helen Keller.
The play was made into a film in 1962, and starred Patty Duke (as Helen), Anne Bancroft (as Annie Sullivan), Victor Jory, Inga Swenson, Andrew Prine, and Kathleen Comegys. The movie was adapted by Gibson, and directed by Arthur Penn.
The film won Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Anne Bancroft) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Patty Duke, age 16). The film was also nominated for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
The Miracle Worker was produced for television in 1972. It starred Patty Duke (this time as Annie Sullivan), Diana Muldaur, Charles Siebert and Melissa Gilbert (as Helen). It was directed by Paul Aaron.
It was remade for television in 2000, starring Hallie Kate Eisenberg, Alison Elliott, David Strathairn, Lucas Black and Kate Greenhouse. It was adapted by Monte Merrick and directed by Nadia Tass.
The "Wa-wa" controversy
The "miracle" in The Miracle Worker occurs in this 1962 film when Sullivan and Keller are at the well refilling a pitcher of water. It is in this moment that the lightning of understanding strikes Helen Keller and she makes the intellectual connection between the word Sullivan spells into her hand and the concrete substance splashing from the pump. Keller demonstrates her epiphany, and we are only aware that it has arrived, when she miraculously bellows the word, "Wa-wa," the baby-talk equivalent of "water."
For hearing audiences this is the most satisfying moment in the film. But it was designed for hearing audiences since they could not be made aware of the moment by seeing Keller spell the word. It would require an understanding of the manual alphabet to realize the significance of the moment, a skill posssessed almost exclusively by deaf and deaf-blind people who make up less than one per cent of the world's population. Keller mimics the words Sullivan spells into her hand throughout the film by spelling them back in Sullivan's hand, so at this moment it would only seem that Keller was continuing to mimic without understanding the concept. To bridge that problem the film's writer and director had actress Patty Duke (and other's in subsequent remakes of the film), who portrayed Keller, speak the word "wa-wa" while she finger-spelled "water". The moment of revelation thus becomes clear for hearing audiences.
But what of deaf people? While experiencing a powerful sense of identity with Helen Keller's moment of understanding, an experience many deaf people recall well, the deaf were the first to question the reality of this depiction. It wasn't that Helen said, "wa-wa" that mattered. It was that she spoke - at all. How, for instance, does someone speak who was deaf and blind from the age of nineteen months and has no memory of speech? How would Keller know that such a thing as speech even existed since neither hearing nor deaf people make claims of having memories from that period in their lives? Do people, hearing or deaf, commonly recall memories from the period of up to six months from their mother's womb when everything afterward is blacked out? The probability of recalling such a memory exceeds the astronomical and there must be very few, if any, documented instances of doing so.
How does one who has not uttered so much as a syllable in the course of the film spontaneously speak while never attempting to do so in the previous seven years, the whole of a single lifetime? How, in a total of two weeks of time would Helen learn to speak in the absence of any instruction; a feat no pre-lingually deaf child has achieved before and since Helen Keller?
It is no trivial matter for generations of deaf children, including the most gifted among them, who struggle for years or even life-times to produce comprehendible speech; some with success and some with almost none, and who would, because of this film, be compared to this moment of fiction as a measure of their success or failure in real life.
While it is indisputable that Keller learned to speak, a skill she began to learn later at age nine at the Perkins Institute, her spontaneous utterance in this film served to embed an idea that a deaf child's learning to speak is simply a matter of intelligence or desire. It made the film a set-up for unattainable hope for the parents of, and the deafblind and deaf themselves.
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