The Imprisoned Guest
Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, The Original Deaf-Blind Girl
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The resurrected story of a deaf-blind girl and the man who brought her out of silence.
In 1837, Samuel Gridley Howe, director of Boston's Perkins Institution for the Blind, heard about a bright, deaf-blind seven-year-old, the daughter of New Hampshire farmers. At once he resolved to rescue her from the "darkness and silence of the tomb." And indeed, thanks to Howe and an extraordinary group of female teachers, Laura Bridgman learned to finger spell, to read raised letters, and to write legibly and even eloquently.
Philosophers, poets, educators, theologians, and early psychologists hailed Laura as a moral inspiration and a living laboratory for the most controversial ideas of the day. She quickly became a major tourist attraction, and many influential writers and reformers visited her or wrote about her. But as the Civil War loomed and her girlish appeal faded, the public began to lose interest. By the time Laura died in 1889, she had been wholly eclipsed by the prettier, more ingratiating Helen Keller.
The Imprisoned Guest retrieves Laura Bridgman's forgotten life, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century American social, intellectual, and cultural history. Her troubling, tumultuous relationship with Howe, who rode Laura's achievements to his own fame but could not cope with the intense, demanding adult she became, sheds light on the contradictory attitudes of a "progressive" era in which we can find some precursors of our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Samuel Howe, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, was caught up in the enlightenment fervor that swept Boston in the 1830s and '40s a period characterized by humanitarian and scientific zeal. Back in town after aiding in the 1820s Greek revolution, the restless, socially responsible Howe needed a daring and brilliant project to establish himself among respected intellectual circles. With the education of a blind and deaf child, who had no recollection of language but a quick wit and ability to learn, he donned the role of a philanthropic Pygmalion. Victorian studies scholar Gitter, an English professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College, skillfully evokes the social, intellectual and cultural context in which Howe and Bridgman transformed public perception of people with multiple disabilities. Thousands flocked from all over the world to observe this intelligent, communicative and well-adjusted girl among them Dickens and Darwin, both of whom wrote about her. Although Bridgman's fame was later eclipsed by Helen Keller's, Gitter argues with unsentimental feminist conviction that Bridgman's story forms an important piece of the history of Americans with disabilities, while also illuminating other cultural prejudices. The charming girl of seven was the perfect "victim-heroine," though she fell out of favor with Howe and the public when she grew into a plain-looking, intellectually demanding, determined and complicated young woman perhaps, Gitter opines, more threatening to contemporary mores. This highly absorbing and entertaining study will intrigue readers interested in 19th-century America and in biographies that bring female public figures out of history's woodwork. 12 photos and illus.
